Three Roads to the South—with One Detour
Once in Alaska, man—early or not so early—had a number of routes to
choose from. If he was of maritime habits, and crossed by water, he
would have tended to stick to his boats, and sail or paddle southward
and southeastward down the coast and on through the inland passages of
lower Alaska and Canada which protect boats from ocean storms. When
Frank C. Hibben found a certain early kind of spear point in a curio
shop in Ketchikan, Alaska, and on the far-away shore of Cook Inlet, he
called attention to a route—whether overland or by sea—which hardly
anyone had stressed except Hrdlička.[12] Hrdlička stressed it because he
brought man over after the glaciers and in boats. But even in the Great
Ice Age this route was not impossible for men without boats. Migrants
who had crossed by a land-bridge might have turned south along the
Pacific shore, climbing and crossing the ice barriers of the glacial
rivers that still slide slowly down from the inland mountains. Philip S.
Smith points out that “ice surfaces allow fully as easy travel by sled
and on foot as do the ordinary land surfaces.”[13] But was there game,
as well as fish, along the coast to lure the migrant on and to sustain
him upon the journey?
Other men seem to have chosen to tramp and hunt eastward and
northeastward from the strait. In this direction there were two main
routes open to men and game. One route led up the narrow lowlands of the
northwest coast to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and then south up
its long valley. The other, and much more likely path for early man, was
up the ice-free Yukon and its tributaries. These would have taken him
eastward to the Mackenzie or southward through the plateau between the
northern Rockies and the Coastal Range. Hrdlička thought the Yukon
valley a most unpromising route because of the turbulent rivers and the
noxious insects; but most students disagree with him and stress the
abundance of fish and game. There can be no question that some parts of
this route were used by early man—and extinct mammals, too. His ancient
spear points have been found in the muck beds of Fairbanks mingled with
the fossilized bones of elephant, bison, camel, horse, and an extinct
jaguar once called the Alaskan lion.[14] Other early points have been
discovered in western Canada in the area of the mountain plateau. In
1944 Frederick Johnson located fifteen camp sites in early soil levels
along the route of the plateau corridor and found many varieties of
artifacts. Among these were a few points, most of them fragmentary, the
butts of which resembled those of an early type.[15] Following Johnson
in 1945, Douglas Leechman found other sites and artifacts along this
route in soils formed perhaps 9,000 years ago.[16]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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