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Ancient site hints at first US settlers 15:03 02 January 04 NewScientist.com news service Stone-age people lived in the lands north of the Arctic Circle before the last Ice Age - much earlier than had been thought, suggests new findings. The discovery of the site in eastern Siberia also hints that people might have moved from the Old World into the Americas at a much earlier date than believed. The site along the Yanu River, carbon-dated as 30,000 years old, is twice the age of the oldest previously known Arctic settlement, report Vladimir Pitulko of the Institute for the History...

Russian archaeologists have discovered the remains of the world's oldest known Arctic settlement - a Siberian riverfront site that they say could help determine when humans first arrived in the Americas. The 30,000-year-old site - twice as old as any previous Arctic dig - includes a rhinoceros bone shaped into a spear that shows a "striking resemblance" to spear points found by archaeologists in Clovis, N.M.

Artifacts dated to 30,000 years ago tell of human resilience in an unforgiving environment, and they may provide new clues to the peopling of the Americas Primates are simply not primed for Arctic survival. A person lost on the tundra in winter will quickly perish, and even the sturdiest shelter atop the permafrost provides scant refuge without a supply of fuel. Yet somehow, at the height of the last Ice Age, humans endured a similarly unforgiving environment in northern Siberia, in the Yana River valley 500 kilometers above the Arctic Circle. That's the surprising conclusion from a trove of artifacts...

<p>Washington — A people who may have been ancestors of the first Americans lived in Arctic Siberia, enduring one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth at the height of the Ice Age, according to researchers who discovered the oldest evidence yet of humans living near the frigid gateway to the New World. Russian scientists uncovered a 30,000-year-old site where ancient hunters lived on the Yana River in Siberia, some 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and not far from the Bering land bridge that then connected Asia with North America.</p>