The American Upper Paleolithic and Its Origins

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A number of North American sites predating ~14.5 ka, well before an ice-free corridor became available, have relatively large stone tool assemblages that allow some assessment of the underlying characteristics of the lithic tradition they share. These assemblages have a broad technological similarity involving the use of dual core-and-blade and biface technologies similar to dual core-and-blade and biface technologies found in Late Upper Paleolithic (LUP) assemblages in northern Japan dating to ~20 ka. We suggest a pre-Jomon population became isolated somewhere in the vicinity of the Japan/Paleo-Sahkalin, Hokkaido, Kuril (PSHK) region of northeast Asia, developing genetically into an ancestral ancient Native American population. Between ~22-18 ka a subset of this population bearing LUP technological knowledge began migrating by foot and boat along the southern Beringian coast and down the Alaskan and Canadian coastline into the Americas. By ~16-15 ka they had become widely dispersed across North America south of the continental ice sheets. Here, we share preliminary 3D scanning of these Japanese assemblages that demonstrate clear technological similarities to the North American assemblages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51661