Ancient stone tools trace Paleolithic Pacific migration
Oregon State University
CORVALLIS, Ore – A new analysis of stone tools offers strong evidence for the theory that ancient people from the Pacific Rim traveled a coastal route from East Asia during the last ice age to become North America’s First Peoples, according to a paper published this week in the journal Science Advances.
“This study puts the First Americans back into the global story of the Paleolithic – not as outliers – but as participants in a shared technological legacy,” said Loren Davis, professor of anthropology at Oregon State University and one of the study’s lead authors.
“This marks a paradigm shift. For the first time, we can say the First Americans belonged to a broader Paleolithic world—one that connects North America to Northeast Asia,” he said.
For decades, experts have debated whether people migrated across the Siberian land bridge known as Beringia around 13,000 years ago as the last ice age waned or if they followed a Pacific coastal route at a much earlier time, possibly around 20,000 years ago.
The archaeological evidence presented in this study supports the earlier coastal scenario, indicating that early seafarers gradually moved into the Americas from the northwestern Pacific Rim during the last glacial period, from regions that now include Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s islands.
Recent genetics research also supports the narrative that Indigenous Peoples in areas that became the United States and Canada are linked to East Asian and Northern Eurasian ancestry.
Davis and his collaborators analyzed stone tool technologies from North American sites dating between about 20,000 and 13,500 years ago, linked to a period they call the American Upper Paleolithic. They showed that the earliest of this style of projectile points first appear around 20,000 years ago in Hokkaido.
Called bifaces, the projectile tips are flaked on both sides to create a durable, razor-sharp penetrating hunting weapon, which represents a major leap in hunting technology. The study demonstrates that this advanced weapon system was carried into the Americas, where these tools display strong continuity with each other and with artifacts from many Late Upper Paleolithic sites across East Asia.
“The discovery of this archaeological connection rewrites the opening chapter of human history in the Americas,” Davis said. “It shows that the First Americans were not cultural isolates, but participants in the same Paleolithic traditions that connected people across Eurasia and Asia.”
The earlier stone tools that Davis and his team studied are smaller and lighter than later Paleoindian technologies and were made using distinctly different methods. This dual system of core-and-blade production combined with bifacial point manufacture forms the technological foundation from which later Paleoindian and subsequent American traditions evolved.
This system serves as the technological fingerprint linking the American Upper Paleolithic to its roots in Northeast Asia. Prior papers have suggested this pattern, but this deep dive provides the strongest evidence that’s been assembled to date, Davis said.
Researchers have long known of American Upper Paleolithic sites, but if people had traveled at higher latitudes across Beringia, these earliest sites should be in Alaska and Yukon in Canada. Instead, the five primary sites that Davis and his team studied were in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas and Idaho.
And while tools found at similarly aged sites in Oregon, Wisconsin and Florida follow the pattern, they contain too few artifacts to include in the recent analysis, Davis said. Additional archaeological evidence that could support this model is likely submerged along the eastern Pacific Rim due to rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age, he added.
Many prior papers about human settlement sites of the same era focused on evidence from a single location. This study is the first to connect multiple research sites globally, presenting a coherent model for the initial human occupants of the Americas.
“We can now explain not only that the First Americans came from Northeast Asia, but also how they traveled, what they carried, and what ideas they brought with them,” Davis said. “It’s a powerful reminder that migration, innovation, and cultural sharing have always been part of what it means to be human.”
Co-authors of the study include David B. Madsen of University of Nevada, Reno; Thomas J. Williams of the Spokane Tribe of Indians Preservation Program; Masami Izuho of Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan and Fumie Iizuka of University of Wisconsin, Madison and Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan.
Journal
Science Advances
Method of Research
Imaging analysis
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Characterizing the American Upper Paleolithic
Article Publication Date
22-Oct-2025
Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gathereres lit the fire: Humans shaped European landscapes long before agriculture
New research shows that humans left their mark on the landscape through hunting and the use of fire tens of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. The research paints a new picture of the past, say co-authors of the new study.
Aarhus University
Imagine Europe tens of thousands of years ago: dense forests, large herds of elephants, bison and aurochs – and small groups of people armed with fire and spears. A new study shows that these people left a much clearer mark on the landscape than previously assumed.
Using advanced computer simulations, an international research team, which includes researchers from Aarhus University, has investigated how climate, large animals, fire and humans affected Europe’s vegetation during two warm periods in the past. By comparing the results with extensive pollen analyses from the same periods, the researchers have calculated how the different factors shaped vegetation cover.
The conclusion is clear: both Neanderthals and the later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had a strong impact on vegetation patterns in Europe – long before the advent of agriculture.
“The study paints a new picture of the past,” says Jens-Christian Svenning, professor of biology at Aarhus University and one of the researchers behind the study, which was undertaken in collaboration with colleagues in archaeology, geology and ecology from The Netherlands, Denmark, France, and UK.
“It became clear to us that climate change, large herbivores and natural fires alone could not explain the pollen data results. Factoring humans into the equation – and the effects of human-induced fires and hunting – resulted in a much better match”, says Jens-Christian Svenning.
The results have just been published in PLOS One.
Humans displaced large animals
The researchers have focused on two warm periods in the past.
One is the Last Interglacial period around 125,000-116,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe. The second period is the time just after the last ice age, the Early Holocene, 12,000-8,000 years ago, at which time Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of our own species, Homo sapiens, lived here.
During the Last Interglacial period, Europe was home to a rich and varied megafauna, with elephants and rhinoceroses living side by side with bison, aurochs, horses and deer.
In the Mesolithic, the picture was different: The largest species had disappeared or their populations had been greatly reduced in size – due to the general loss of megafauna that followed in the wake of the spread of Homo sapiens across the globe.
New view of prehistoric man
“Our simulations show that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers could have influenced up to 47% of the distribution of plant types. The Neanderthal effect was smaller, but still measurable – approximately 6% for plant type distribution and 14% for vegetation openness,” says Anastasia Nikulina .
The human-induced effects on vegetation included both fire effects – burning of trees and shrubs – and a previously overlooked factor: the hunting of large herbivores.
“The Neanderthals did not hold back from hunting and killing even giant elephants. And here we’re talking about animals weighing up to 13 tonnes. Hunting also had a strong indirect effect: fewer grazing animals meant more overgrowth and thus more closed vegetation. However, the effect was limited, because the Neanderthals were so few that they did not do eliminate the large animals or their ecological role – unlike Homo sapiens in later times,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
Anastasia Nikulina and Jens-Christian Svenning both believe that the results offer a new perspective on the role of our ancestors in the natural landscape. In fact, it challenges the notion of an ‘untouched landscape’ in Europe before agriculture came along:
“The Neanderthals and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active co-creators of Europe’s ecosystems”, says Jens-Christian Svenning. “The study is consistent with both ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers and archaeological finds, but goes a step further by documenting how extensive human influence may have been tens of thousands of years ago – that is, before humans started farming the land,” elaborates Anastasia Nikulina .
Interdisciplinary knowledge behind study
She highlights the interdisciplinary collaboration – between ecology, archaeology palynology (knowledge about pollen) – and the development of advanced computer models for simulating past ecosystems as strengths of the study.
“This is the first simulation to quantify how Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers may have shaped European landscapes. Our approach has two key strengths: it brings together an unusually large set of new spatial data spanning the whole continent over thousands of years, and it couples the simulation with an optimisation algorithm from AI. That let us run a large number of scenarios and identify the most possible outcomes”, says Anastasia Nikulina .
Jens-Christian Svenning adds:
“The computer modelling made it clear to us that climate change, the large herbivores such as elephants, bison and deer, and natural wildfires alone cannot explain the changes seen in ancient pollen data. To understand the vegetation at that time, we must also take human impacts into account – both direct and indirect. Even without fire, hunter-gatherers changed the landscape simply because their hunting of large animals made the vegetation denser,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
Despite the new study, there are still gaps in our understanding of the early impact of humans on the landscape, says Jens-Christian Svenning.
Anastasia Anastasia Nikulina and Jens-Christian Svenning emphasise that it would be interesting to do computer simulations of other time periods and parts of the world. North and South America and Australia are particularly interesting because they were never populated by earlier hominin species before Homo sapiens, and you are therefore able to compare landscapes in the recent past with and without human influence.
“And although the large models paint a broad picture, detailed local studies are absolutely essential to improve our understanding of the way humans shaped the landscape in prehistoric times,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
Journal
PLOS One
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
On the ecological impact of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Europe: Early Holocene (Mesolithic) and Last Interglacial (Neanderthal) foragers compared
Article Publication Date
22-Oct-2025
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