Climate Change And The People Of The Mesa
Author:
First published in Sanctuary Asia,
Vol. 31
No. 6,
June 2011
About 10,000 years ago, a group of hunting people lived on Alaska's North Slope, the broad band of treeless tundra that extends north from the Brooks Range to the sea.
These people, known as Paleoindians, used a thick backbone of rock west of the Colville River as a hunting lookout.
Michael Kunz first discovered stone spear tips at the site, known as the Mesa, in 1978.
The people of the Mesa lived at a time when the Arctic was undergoing a change not unlike the changes some scientists are documenting today.
As the world emerged from the last ice age about 15,000 years ago, grasslands covered much of the Bering Land Bridge, a chunk of land as wide as the distance from Barrow to Homer that mated Siberia with Alaska. Read the full report here.
Source: Ned Rozell, Alaska Science, Anchorage Daily News.
