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ago. It has also since been discovered that certain other bone
     ‘tools’ found at Old Crow were actually naturally occurring artefacts as
     more became known about how predators break the bones of animals they are in the process
     of killing.
    The Bluefish Caves sites, about forty miles south-west of Old Crow, provided
     butchered animals, dated by associated pollen to between 15,550 and 12,950 years ago,
     together with stone tools at much the same date – stone tools moreover that, as
     Fagan says, would not be out of place in Dyukhtai. 15 Later, similar finds were
     made at Trail Creek, Tangle Lakes, Donnelly Ridge, Fairbanks, Onion Portage and Denali,
     with most dates in the 11,000 to 8,000 years ago range. At first, this tradition was
     known either as the Dyukhtai or Denali or Nenana complex, but Palaeo-Arctic is now the
     preferred term for these and slightly later artefacts. The diminutive size of the stone
     work is its most striking feature, and may stem from the fact that pollen analysis in
     the area shows that there was a rapid vegetational change beginning about 14,000 years
     ago, when the herbaceous tundra (grasses, mosses) gave way to a shrub tundra (woody
     thickets), which would have caused the mammal population to dwindle and may well have
     forced early man out of Beringia. As he moved on, smaller tools would have been
     preferable.
    Not all the sites in eastern Beringia contained microblades. Others contain
     large core and flake tools, including simple projectile points and large blades. And at
     Anangula, on the coast out along the Aleutian island chain, blade tools were made, but
     not the diminutive microblades as at Denali. So there was quite a bit of cultural
     diversity in Beringia around 11,000 years ago. We simply to not know if this represents
     distinct cultural traditions that existed side-by-side, or alternative adaptation
     strategies designed to cope with different forms of wildlife.
    The evidence, such as it is, suggests that there was no
     ‘crossing’ of the Bering Strait, in any modern sense. The early peoples
     spread into eastern Siberia, which then extended as far east as what is now the Yukon
     and Alaska. Then, when the seas rose, after ~14,000 years ago, the peoples of
     eastern Beringia were forced even further east, where the huge glaciers were themselves
     melting, allowing passage south, as we shall see. The seas rose behind them and they
     were isolated in the New World.
    An alternative view, supported by some of the genetic evidence already
     reported, is that early man penetrated the New World along the coast. This makes sense,
     not only in view of the genetics, but – it will be recalled – because
     early mankind, after he and she left Africa, is considered to have followed a
     ‘beachcombing’ route (though as we have seen there is as yet no direct
     evidence for this). It also finds support in the discovery that, at Monte Verde, an
     early site in southern Chile, the remains of several kinds of seaweed were found in
     ancient hearths, while other remains appear to represent ancient clumps of kelp which
     had been chewed into ‘cuds’, according to Tom Dillehay, one of the
     archaeologists involved in the excavation. 16 Several other scientists have pointed
     out that there are virtually uninterrupted beds of seaweed right around the northern rim
     of the Pacific Ocean and have proposed that, with seaweed being so useful as a source of
     nutrition and for its medicinal properties, it would make sense for early coastal
     peoples to have followed this distribution (see map 5).
     
    M OTHER T ONGUES , L UMPERS AND S PLITTERS
    In the genetic study considered earlier, carried out by Sijia Wang
     and his team, it was observed that there was an overlap between genetics and linguistic
     similarity. A second study, by Nelson Fagundes and colleagues, also showed a strong link
     between genetics and language among the Tupian-speakers of Brazil. Such results have to