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. 2023 Jun 2;9(22):eadg6802.
doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6802. Epub 2023 Jun 2.

Freshwater and anadromous fishing in Ice Age Beringia

Ben A Potter  1 , Carrin M Halffman  1 , Holly J McKinney  1 , Joshua D Reuther  1   2 , Bruce P Finney  3 , François B Lanoë  2   4 , J Andrés López  5   6 , Charles E Holmes  1 , Erica Palmer  7 , Marie Capps  7 , Brian M Kemp  7   8
Affiliations

Freshwater and anadromous fishing in Ice Age Beringia

Ben A Potter et al. Sci Adv. .

Abstract

While freshwater and anadromous fish have been critical economic resources for late prehistoric and modern Native Americans, the origin and development of fishing is not well understood. We document the earliest known human use of freshwater and anadromous fish in North America by 13,000 and 11,800 years ago, respectively, from primary anthropogenic contexts in central Alaska (eastern Beringia). Fish use appears conditioned by broad climatic factors, as all occurrences but one are within the Younger Dryas chronozone. Earlier Bølling-Allerød and later early Holocene components, while exhibiting similar organic preservation, did not yield evidence of fishing, suggesting that this was a response to changing environmental factors, perhaps reductions in higher ranked resources such as large terrestrial mammals. Late Pleistocene and recent Indigenous peoples harvested similar fish taxa in the region (salmon, burbot, whitefish, and pike). We characterize late Pleistocene fishing in interior Beringia as an important element of broad-spectrum foraging rather than the intensive communal fishing and storage common among recent peoples.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.. Site locations in Eastern Beringia, middle Tanana River valley.
Fish-bearing sites are shown as circles, and other sites mentioned in the text are shown as diamonds.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.. Fish taxa, human population, climate, and vegetation proxies for central Alaska.
Yellow dots represent midpoints of two sigma age ranges for fish occurrences within archaeological sites in this study (see the Supplementary Materials and table S2). Temperature from (94). Central Alaska radiocarbon distribution is a summed 14C distribution of dated components for the region (95). Pollen zone data from (61). HTM, Holocene thermal maximum; YD, Younger Dryas); B/A, Bølling-Allerød.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.. Comparison of combined late Pleistocene fish NISP with recent fish harvest (percent by taxon) from lower and upper Tanana Indigenous communities.
Modern subsistence harvest data are from (48). Anadromous salmon are present in the lower Tanana but not the upper Tanana. The lower Tanana includes the 1984 harvest from Minto; the upper Tanana includes the combined 1987 harvest from Northway, Tetlin, and Tanacross. Trout (including stocked species) are harvested in the modern communities but at <0.5%; pike are present in the Pleistocene but at <0.5%.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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