Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

until after the rest of the Americas. As we have previously learned, though
people were living throughout Alaska around 14,000 years ago, they did not
reach the Aleutian Islands until 9,000 years ago, and the coastal and interior
regions of Canada and Greenland until about 5,000 years ago.
The Paleo-Inuit
The first peoples to live at the Nuvuk site introduced at the beginning of
this chapter belonged to what archaeologists categorize as a part of the
Paleo-Inuit tradition, which extended across the Arctic from Alaska to
Greenland (5). The Paleo-Inuit were highly mobile hunter-gatherers who
had adapted culturally and physically to the Arctic’s extreme environment.
Although they were not the first humans to live in Alaska, they were the
first to people the regions above the Arctic Circle.
The Paleo-Inuit might have migrated from Kamchatka, arriving in the
western Arctic about 5,500 years ago (approximately 3000 BCE or slightly
earlier), and reaching the eastern Arctic around 5,000 to 4,500 years ago.
By this point, the land connection between Alaska and Siberia no longer
existed. But the proximity of the continents meant that there was frequent
contact by peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait. iii Some hypothesize
that the Paleo-Inuit also moved southward through Alaska and peopled the
Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands. Others moved eastward across the
Arctic coast through Canada to Greenland. They left a very faint
archaeological “footprint” across the Arctic, probably due to their small
population sizes. We are fortunate that the Arctic environment is so
favorable for preservation, because it enables us to see the contours of this
footprint.
The Paleo-Inuit made kayaks and subsisted on a wide variety of marine
and terrestrial animals, including birds, fish, fox, caribou, musk oxen, and
seals, which they hunted with harpoons, spears, atlatls, and bow and arrows,
made with tiny stone blades inserted into shafts. They also made other tiny
stone tools—scrapers for working hides into clothing and burins for carving
bone—and added bifacially flaked knives, stone lamps, and tiny-eyed
needles for tailoring clothing to this toolkit. Arctic archaeologists refer to
the carefully crafted tools at Paleo-Inuit sites as belonging to the Arctic