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National Geographic : 1979 Sep
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(Continuedfrom page 335) strength, came man, unknowingly crossing the threshold of a new world. Oceans replenished by the long-melted ice washed over the land bridge when I walked its Alaska abutment at the Bering Strait. Yet a sense of the affinity between Old World and New was overwhelming. Only 55 miles away glinted the snowy peaks of Siberia-the other end of the land bridge. Halfway across, the date line passed invisi bly, so that technically I looked into to morrow. But for me those ermine peaks beckoned back into yesterday, to the origins of the first Americans. From eastern Asia to westernmost Eu rope, hundreds of Old World archaeological excavations contribute clues to the life-style of the ancestors of the first Americans. Chronologically they offer no tidy step-by step progression across the great Eurasian landmass toward Alaska. But they tell much about a people honing their skills as big game hunters and showing an early adapta tion to cold climate (map, pages 337-8). By half a million years ago, long before the appearance of modern man, his sloping browed predecessor Homo erectus had pen etrated to wintry northern China and was preying on elephants and deer. Some Ameri can archaeologists, pointing to suggestive skulls found in the New World, speculate that these early men may have crossed the land bridge of a previous ice age. Neanderthals, a subspecies of Homo sapi ens, appeared about a hundred thousand years ago in Europe and western Asia. Soon they pushed to within a hundred miles of the Arctic Circle, hunting mammoths along the Soviet Union's Pechora River. "This is the time," notes Washington State University prehistorian Dr. Robert E. Ackerman, a specialist in Arctic archaeol ogy, "when man occupied Asia on a broad front, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacif ic. One advance spread across central Asia to southern Siberia and Mongolia and came to be known as the Mal'ta-Afontova culture. A second wave penetrated eastern Siberia. Excavations along the Aldan River by Sovi et archaeologist Yuri A. Mochanov show these people, of the Diuktai culture, hunting mammoths, musk-oxen, bison, and giant woolly rhinoceroses about 35,000 years ago. 342 One of these cultures may have produced the first emigrants to cross the land bridge into Alaska." Suppose that we could join a band of these "Proto-Americanoids" encamped on the grassy land bridge ... W ENUMBER fifty men, women, and children-a group large enough to be relatively self contained, yet small enough not to quickly exhaust the game within hunting range. We are not a beautiful people. Our faces are pocked with grime and blackened by soot of our campfires. But we enjoy extraor dinary health. The frigid region in which we live serves as a germ filter, and we know nothing of such Old World diseases as pneu monia, influenza, and measles. Next to fire our most important tool is the sewing awl. Without sewn shoes we would suffer crippling frostbite, which we nomads fear above all else. Nor could we survive without tailored trousers and shirts that trap body heat despite clawing arctic winds. In this monotonous, grassy steppe we will pass our lives without seeing trees or even knowing they exist. Virtually all our materi al needs are met by a single resource-the animals we kill. Meat and marrow provide most of our food. Hides make our clothes and sleeping mats and cover our shelters; small bones and dung fuel our fires. Hunt ers' spears are carved from mammoth leg bones and straightened by boiling in water until soft. Perhaps our camp has several huskylike dogs, to serve as beasts of burden, as hunt ers, or as mobile sources of food. Every few days the hunters radiate out in search of game, staying away until they snare and spear as much as they can carry back to camp. Eventually animals grow scarce, and the nomads search for promising new game lands. One evening they return with news of abundant animals a few camps away to the eastward. Now our entire band picks up and moves toward the rising sun. Burdened by our fur nishings, slowed by the old and the very young, we make faltering headway. Finally we pass over a low mountain range near the easternmost end of Beringia, in what is now the northern Yukon. Ahead NationalGeographic, September 1979
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