The people who lived in pre-American Alaska had to learn how to survive in a harsh and
inhospitable landscape.
It was often cold, but it was also beautiful, abundant, and challenging.
Here's everything you didn't know about life in pre-American Alaska.
When you picture the Ice Age in your mind, you probably imagine a land choked by glaciers
and very little, if any, green.
How exactly does one survive in a land with nothing but ice?
It turns out that common perception is actually a misperception.
According to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, the interior of Alaska was actually green
during the last ice age.
While it's true that parts of the future state were locked up in ice, the interior was actually
something of a paradise.
That's because so much of the world's oceans were frozen that the sea level dropped by
around 400 feet, exposing the Bering land bridge and briefly connecting Alaska
and Siberia.
All that extra land actually helped to further isolate the Alaskan interior from ocean moisture,
which in turn led to warm summers and relatively mild winters.
"Unusual weather we're having, ain't it?"
More than 11,000 years ago, two mothers buried their babies in the cold ground of their fishing
camp in what is now modern Alaska.
The infants were placed on red ocher and surrounded by hunting darts made out of antlers.
The care with which they were buried reminds us that ancient people loved and grieved just
as we still do today, and they also gave archaeologists important insight into the genetic origins
of Native Americans.
One of the two babies was between six and twelve weeks old, and the other was likely
stillborn.
They were buried in the same ceremonial fashion, but they were from two very different genetic
lineages, neither of which are common in the modern population of Native Americans.
This means that the people who lived in Alaska 11,500 years ago were a lot more genetically
diverse than previously believed.
This finding seems to support the theory that the people who crossed the Bering land bridge
must've been isolated from their Siberian ancestors for a very long period of time.
The people who crossed the Bering land bridge during and soon after the Ice Age would've
seen animals that are familiar to today's Alaskans, like bighorn sheep and elk.
But as they moved into the interior they would've encountered creatures that would turn modern
humans into terrified piles of quivering bear food.
The early settlers likely shared territory with animals that we can only imagine, such
as woolly mammoths, American lions, and the giant short-faced bear.
That last one was about 12 feet tall when standing upright and therefore about four
to seven feet larger than a grizzly bear and probably not very afraid of humans.
“roar”
It turns out that early Alaskans actually hunted mammoth, mastodons, and other large
mammals, and some researchers think they even had a hand in those animals' eventual extinction.
The fossil record suggests that the decline of these species correlated with the migration
of humans from Beringia into North America.
Others, though, believe it was mostly climate change that was to blame.
As the region warmed, the scrub tundra spread to the steppe and outcompeted the vegetation
that larger herbivores depended on.
Whatever the reason for the extinction, it's still cool that human beings once looked out
across the land and saw massive herds of mammoths, and sad to know that no one will ever see
that again.
Most scholars of ancient history agree that agriculture was the key to human civilization.
Once people learned how to grow food and raise domesticated animals, they could build permanent
settlements because there would no longer be the need to follow migrating herds or move
on once all the roots had been gathered.
Estimates of the beginning of agriculture typically place it around 12,000 years ago.
But in Alaska, there's no significant tradition of farming.
Instead, there's evidence that people were setting up permanent villages around the same
time that they were harvesting very large amounts of food.
For example, evidence for things like plank house construction and permanent hearths starts
to appear in the archaeological record about 5,200 years ago.
By 3,200 years ago it's clear that people were skilled at building large wooden fish
weirs for the mass harvest of salmon.
According to the Alaskan Department of Natural Resources, these developments were followed
by things like fortification, which suggests that villages were sometimes targeted by other
clans.
Clearly, with civilization comes other people who are jealous of that civilization.
So the native Alaskans really weren't so different from any other human civilization anywhere
ever.
"Alaska: a place where you can't be too fat or too drunk, where no one says things like,
'Let's see your high school equivalency certificate.'"
Whaling today has a very bad reputation, mostly because large commercial whaling operations
have been responsible for driving many species to the brink of extinction.
But for a lot of native Alaskan people, whales were an important resource, and the history
of whaling in the area goes back at least 2,500 years, when the tribes of the Bering
Sea were hunting whales in small kayaks or boats made of walrus hide.
The hunters would wound their prey with a harpoon and then sometimes follow it for days
until it finally died.
If that sounds awful, just try to remember how harsh the living conditions were for these
ancient hunters and how many meals one whale could represent.
Nowadays whales are still a major source of food for the Inuit people, and for some cultures,
the hunt is more about tradition than about subsistence.
Either way, the practice is now controversial, and like so much of what made pre-American
Alaska special, it may one day become nothing more than a memory of the past.
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