Late Pleistocene site in Alaska yields evidence of a trans-Beringian cultural connection
Summary author: Becky Ham
New archaeological discoveries at Shég’ Xdaltth’í’, a 13,800-year-old base camp site in interior Alaska, may provide evidence for a trans-Beringian cultural link with other sites to the west, according to Kelly Graf and colleagues. Their research helps to clarify how and when people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to the Americas, as New World archeologists continue to debate the details of this dispersal. Graf et al. provide a first description of the stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, animal and plant remains, and more than 80,000 artifacts from the oldest layer at Shég’ Xdaltth’í, a name that means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan. The evidence demonstrates how the site became a settled base camp that saw more than two centuries of sustained use. Its tools, including a distinct hafted-biface form, resemble those from Beringian sites further to the west, possibly suggesting a trans-Beringian cultural connection. Other artifacts at Shég’ Xdaltth’í resemble those found at pre-Clovis, Clovis, Folsom, and Late Paleoindian sites further south in temperate North America. In a related Focus, Spencer Pelton discusses why sites like Shég’ Xdaltth’í are bringing back an old idea in New World archaeology: that Beringian explorers who entered the North American continent between 20,000-15,000 years ago were halted until the retreat of the ice sheets allowed them to continue journeying to the south.
Journal
Science Advances
Article Title
Late Pleistocene site in Alaska yields evidence of a trans-Beringian cultural connection
Article Publication Date
14-Oct-2026
Bering Land Bridge base camp reveals what life was like nearly 14,000 years ago
image:
The view from the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site shows the Alaska Range in the distance.
view moreCredit: Kelly Graf
LAWRENCE — The area of water between Russia and North America and the Pacific and Arctic oceans is now known as the Bering Strait. Yet it was once what we call the Bering Land Bridge, an exposed land and maritime region that connected Asia to North America.
The Bering Land Bridge formed 35,000 years ago, eventually disappearing under rising sea levels around 12,000 years ago. But the humans and creatures who inhabited the territory have left behind plenty of archaeological evidence of their presence.
“It’s fascinating to me how people have evolved and how our meager beginnings as hunter-gatherers have led to where we are now,” said Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.
Graf is part of a team of researchers who have spent years studying this region, leading to a new article titled “Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of Alaska.” This site in Alaska contains three early archaeological components dating to 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 thousand years ago, revealing important information about late-glacial peopling and settling-in behavior in this far northern setting. The article appears in Science Advances.
The name Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ (pronounced shehg xuh-tuhl-th’ee) means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan.
“The site is on a small ridge that overlooks the Tanana River, which is a major river system of the region. Today there are spruce trees all around. During the last part of the Pleistocene — the Ice Age — it was covered by shrub-tundra vegetation,” said Graf, who co-wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, KU professor of anthropology and department chair; KU doctoral student Mia Harbort and KU undergraduate Mason Sewing, along with other academics from the U.S. and Europe.
Graf said Beringia is full of evidence showcasing the hunting of megafauna.
“Like at Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, they hunted mammoth, bison and horse. Those three particular sorts of animals are extinct now. But then they also hunted caribou, which is extant today. Indigenous people in Alaska today hunt caribou. It’s a really important resource for them, and it always has been,” she said.
Beringian archeological occupations are concentrated in an area slightly larger than the U.S. state of Maryland. The professor began making the lengthy trek to the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site in 2013, visiting every year until the COVID-19 pandemic. She has since been back in 2021, 2023 and 2025. In addition to being the director of the excavation project, she also secured several National Science Foundation grants totaling $400,000.
More than 80,000 archeological specimens were found during her excavations. These yielded an array of cultural remains, including a unique hafted-biface form, osseous tools, diverse fauna and well-preserved activity areas.
Among her favorite items found was a large stone anvil.
“It was sitting within a dwelling feature, and all around it were really bashed-up bison bones. And there were a lot of quartz and quartzite-rock hammerstones — which were the hammers they used to break the bones. So we think they were using these stones to fully process the bones to extract marrow and likely to render grease. This was all happening near a large earth oven,” Graf said.
Other key finds include bird bones used to fashion needles and numerous diamond-shaped bifacial points, which she said were perhaps the sharpened tips of weapons.
“It’s the only site in Alaska that features this clear diamond shape. And the only other places at this time that have such points in a northern context are on the Russian side of the land bridge. It suggests people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to and possibly from this location,” she said.
The professor has been at KU since 2022. Her expertise is in Ice Age archaeology, environmental archaeology and the peopling of the Americas.
“I remember taking North American archaeology during undergrad. I fell in love with the Bering Land Bridge concept: People hunting megafauna and traveling from one massive continent to another across exposed continental shelf. Studying extinct animals and the tools hunters used to take these animals. I just got caught up in the ‘wow’ of that,” she said.
Graf noted the importance of studying the evolution of humans and their environment. What started as a mere handful of individuals in a small region expanded to over 8 billion in just a fraction of geological time.
“The past informs us on how humans have adapted and responded to life’s exigencies,” she said. “The more we learn about the evolution of the Homo sapiens species, the more we can understand ourselves today.”
Journal
Science Advances
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Bering Land Bridge base camp reveals what life was like nearly 14,000 years ago
Article Publication Date
14-Oct-2026
Kelly Graf holds a steppe bison bone recovered at Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ with a hearth oven feature being excavated in the background.
Credit
Kelly Graf
The stubby legs of ancient sled dogs helped people traverse the Arctic for the past 9,000 years
Cell Press
For centuries, dogs have helped people travel across the Arctic, hauling supplies, equipment, and other goods through snowy landscapes where other domesticated animals struggled to venture. Now, a new study publishing October 14 in the Cell Press journal iScience finds that sled dogs might have evolved shorter legs that helped them pull loads more efficiently. By examining the ancient remains of ritually buried dogs, the team found that both current sled dogs and dogs that were alive 2,000 ago had 6% shorter leg bones than other similar species—a finding that could help researchers trace the origins of sled dogs and better understand how dog-powered transportation spread across the cold regions of the world over the past 9,000 years.
“Sled dogs have played an indispensable role in communities in the Arctic,” says first author Mitya Kletzerman of the University of Haifa in Israel. “Without dogs, people couldn’t move as efficiently to hunt, relocate as conditions changed, or travel between communities to exchange knowledge and share new ideas. Understanding how the practice evolved could give us new insights into how people adapted to life in the Arctic.”
The earliest archaeological evidence associated with dog sledding dates back to the early Holocene, about 9,000 years ago, on Zhokhov Island in modern-day Russia, where researchers found sled parts alongside dog remains. But because sledding equipment is rarely found in the archaeological record, it has remained difficult to determine when and where the practice first emerged or spread.
Previous research has shown that human-associated work can leave traces in an animal’s skeleton. For example, reindeer used for racing, carrying loads, and pulling have limb bone differences compared to their non-working counterparts. Kletzerman’s team wondered whether sled dogs also developed certain skeletal traits that helped them adapt to the physical demands of pulling a sled.
To investigate, the team developed a biomechanical model to understand how a dog’s body handles the work of pulling a sled. Their model showed that one effective way to pull a loaded sled is for a dog to lower its center of gravity, thereby increasing its ability to generate pulling force.
“When people or animals pull a load, it tends to tip them backward. A lower or more forward position of the center of mass counteracts this effect, allowing greater pulling force,” Kletzerman says.
The researchers then tested whether modern sled dogs have skeletal proportions that lower their center of mass. They analyzed bones in 60 canids, including sled dogs, wolves, mongrels, and spitzes. They compared the lengths of five long bones: the humerus, radius, and ulna in their forelegs, and the femur and tibia in the hind legs.
After accounting for overall skeletal size, the researchers found that sled dogs had relatively shorter radius, ulna, and tibia bones than non-sled canids, with these bones measuring about 6% shorter on average.
“It’s unclear how this trait developed, but selective pressure may have preserved it, because it gave sled dogs an advantage over other dogs,” Kletzerman says.
To understand whether this characteristic already existed in ancient dogs, the team examined 82 ancient dog bones and three skeletons of ritually buried dogs from three archaeological sites associated with ancestral Inuit populations in present-day Chukotka, Russia, dating from about 2,000 to 500 years ago.
About 89% of the bones were classified as consistent with the modern sled-dog pattern of shorter leg bones, as were all three ritually buried dogs. The findings suggest that this skeletal pattern could be an effective way to identify possible sled dogs even when archaeological remains are incomplete or lack direct evidence of sled equipment.
“Dogs have been working alongside humans for thousands of years, but we’re only beginning to understand how that partnership shaped them,” Kletzerman says.
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iScience, Kletzerman et al., “Ancient Inuit dogs conform to a short-legged phenotype biomechanically advantageous for sledding” https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(26)02983-4
iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, health, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit: http://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Journal
iScience
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Ancient Inuit dogs conform to a short-legged phenotype biomechanically advantageous for sledding
Article Publication Date
14-Oct-2026
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