On Your Knees Cave
| On Your Knees Cave
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 Timothy Heaton next to the entrance of On Your Knees Cave (2000) |
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| Location: | Prince of Wales Island | |
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Geographic location: |
56 ° 20 '0 " N , 133 ° 35' 30" W | |
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| Cadastral number: | site 49-PET-408 | |
| Discovery: | 1993 | |
| Particularities: | Discovery of the oldest human remains in northern North America | |
The On Your Knees Cave is considered to be the most important archaeological and palaeontological site in all of Southeast Alaska . Bear bones that are over 40,000 years old and above all the oldest human remains in northern North America - they are around 9,800 years old - were unearthed in the course of a seven-year excavation campaign . Genetic studies suggest that the dead was not an ancestor of today's Alaskan people , but is more closely related to groups that now live between California and Tierra del Fuego .
The cave is located in the north of Prince of Wales Island , near the Sumner Strait. On the other side of this waterway is Kupreanof Island . The cave on a slope above a deep valley is around 125 m above sea level and around one kilometer from the coast.
It was discovered in 1993 in connection with logging. Ten to twenty people were constantly employed for seven years, many of them students from South Dakota and Colorado , members of the local Tlingit and Haida , plus employees of the Forest Service , visiting scientists and local volunteers from Port Protection and Point Baker .
Discovery and Interpretation
Today the cave has an entrance two meters in diameter, which was originally only one meter wide. It was partially blocked by fallen rocks from the wall above. The cave itself consists of two 30 m long creeping paths. The left passage, the so-called Bear Passage , consisted of two narrow rooms, which were connected by a narrow passage. A spring rises in the second room and drains through the lower section of Bear Passage. The right passage, the Seal Passage , winds to a second entrance called Ed's Dilemma . The Seal Passage was so narrow that it was not possible to turn around the entire route. This was only possible at the end of it and in places not even a helmet could be worn.
Timothy Heaton , Professor of Earth Science at the University of South Dakota , first visited the cave in 1994 with cave explorer Kevin Allred. They found few and fragmentary bones of brown bears , black bears , but also remains of otters and fish. The thigh bone of a brown bear could be dated to 35,365 radiocarbon years, the shin of a black bear even to 41,600 years. These were by far the oldest bear bones in the United States.
A second investigation took place in 1995, and in 1996 Heaton and paleontologist Fred Grady received material support from the National Geographic Society for an excavation. The Forest Service flew the archaeologists to a camp on Sumner Strait, a rough path to the cave was created. A grid system was installed, sediments removed and dragged to the camp. Numerous bones were discovered, and Grady found a projectile point in the first room , probably the stone point of a spear. On the last day of the excavation, July 4, 1996, Heaton found a human lower jaw, a pelvic bone and a bone tool in the second room.
Archaeologist Terry Fifield visited the local Tlingit groups and they allowed the remains to be examined and the excavation to continue on their traditional territory for the next year. The human remains have been dated to 9730 and 9880 BP . That made them the oldest in Alaska and Canada. The bone tool could be dated to an age of 10,300 years.
E. James Dixon, an early human history specialist in southeast Alaska and Curator of Archeology at the Denver Museum of Natural History in Denver from 1994 to 2001 , joined the project as Principal Investigator of Archeology and has received support from the National Science Foundation . With the support of the Forest Service , a platform for a tent was built, trees were felled for a dropping place that the helicopters needed, and the path to the beach was expanded. Part of the cave was illuminated. The excavation campaigns were carried out annually from 1997 to 2000, now also supported by the Sealaska Corporation , a joint venture of the indigenous peoples of Alaska.
At the boundary between inorganic and organic layers there were fire-blown stones, a multitude of stone tools and fragments. It turned out that the tools had been made in the cave. The missing base of the spearhead discovered at the beginning of the excavation was also found. The cave itself was larger at the time of its early inhabitants and visible from afar, as there was no forest yet. It was probably visited regularly for protection, to hunt overwintering bears or for other reasons.
Inside, the cave was expanded in places, especially the narrow passages. The organic deposits were less than ten centimeters thick and the layers were clearly disturbed. Underneath, in the inorganic sediments, there were bones of mammals, birds and fish from the time of the icing maximum, as well as from the interglacial in front of it . A total of 5,985 sacks of sediment were excavated, carried down the slope and washed, and more than 32,000 fossils have been identified so far, including, in addition to the bears mentioned, caribou , sea lions , seals , arctic foxes and red foxes , ice-gray marmots , lemmings of the species Lemmus sibiricus, voles, and birds such as diving ducks , Alks and puffins . The mammal bones were mainly brought in by foxes, the remains of birds and fish by otters.
As early as 1998 the camp was virtually inundated by camera teams and journalists. In March 1999, a feature on NOVA's Mystery of the First Americans program aired, National Geographic reported in Hunt for the First Americans and entitled The Dawn of Humans. Who were the First Americans? . This attention in the mass media is probably related to the fact that the find supported the thesis of an early migration along the coast. All the more so as genetic studies suggest a relationship with tribes in Ecuador ( Cayapa ), California ( Chumash ) and Illinois (Klunk Mound people), Mexico ( Tarahumara ), the Mapuche and Tierra del Fuego ( Yaghan ).
See also
literature
- Timothy H. Heaton: The Late Wisconsin vertebrate fauna of On Your Knees Cave, northern Prince of Wales Island, southeast Alaska , in: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 16/3 (1996) 4OA-41A.
Web links
- Timothy H. Heaton: On Your Knees Cave , University of South Dakota website, 2002
- On Your Knees Cave , US Forest Service website
- George Weber: On Your Knees cave (Alaska, USA) ( Memento from March 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
Remarks
- ^ As reported in the Anchorage Daily News: DNA tracks ancient Alaskan's descendants. 10,300 YEARS OLD: Tests of Southeast Natives challenge prior anthropological results , in: Anchorage Daily News, December 28, 2008 ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. and above all Nature : Caveman DNA hints at map of migration , in: Nature from July 14, 2005.
