From the Montreal Gazette: Beringia: humans were here.

Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology’s greatest Holy Grails – figuring out how humans first got to this continent.

This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia – a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia – in hopes of resolving a controversy he unleashed nearly 20 years ago when he chanced upon a curious-looking cave in the Yukon’s Keele Mountain Range, perched on a ridge high above the Bluefish River.

Here, at a site known as the Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars’s team discovered something that would turn archeology on its ear and has fuelled debate ever since – a chipped mammoth bone that appeared to have been fashioned into a small harpoon point. Radiocarbon dating showed the bone to be 28,000 years old.

The find stunned archeologists who had long presumed the first people to enter the Americas did so 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Siberia after the end of the last Ice Age. [continue]