Discovery of Mammoth Ivory Tools Resets Human Timeline in North AmericaNEWS | 06 February 2026Human-made ivory and stone tools have been found in a 14,000-year-old layer of Alaskan earth, providing evidence of some of the first people to inhabit the Americas.
The tools resemble those made by people of the Clovis culture, which is widely recognized as one of the earliest cultures to leave behind archaeological evidence in North America. But strong evidence for the Clovis culture only goes back around 13,000 years.
This means the middle Tanana Valley site in Alaska, where the 14,000-year-old tools were discovered, is one of the earliest archaeological sites on the American continents.
"The site reveals evidence of stone and mammoth ivory tool production, food preparation, and human dispersals dating back to 14,000 years," a US research team from Adelphi University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks explains in a published paper.
For most of the 20th century, archaeologists believed the Clovis people were the first people to inhabit North America, arriving in the Great Plains via the Bering land bridge, which once connected the regions we now call Siberia and Alaska.
However, more recent evidence has overturned the notion that the Clovis were America's first people. Footprints at White Sands in New Mexico date to more than 20,000 years (though the method of dating these is also controversial), and a 'coastal kelp highway' is now thought to have brought the first wave of humans to the continent at a time when the Bering was frozen over.
But the Alaskan ivory tools provide a 'missing link' between Beringian hunters and the Clovis, further evidence of their migration across the ice-age land bridge.
These finds suggest these ancestors of the Clovis people settled in less-frozen areas like the Tanana Valley, before continuing their migration south through a passage between the receding ice sheets.
Mammoth ivory is a signature of the Clovis culture's technology, and the methods used to create the ivory tools in the Tanana Valley site suggest a lineage spanning from Siberia to the Great Plains. This, the archeologists argue, is proof of the 'First Alaskans' (if not the First Americans).
"The Holzman archaeological site in the middle Tanana Valley, Alaska, provides significant insights into the behaviors of the First Alaskans and their interactions with Ice Age megafauna, particularly woolly mammoths," the authors write.
The oldest layer of the site contained a female mammoth tusk, almost entirely intact, along with some flake tools, a hammer stone, animal remains, red ocher, and material evidence of burning and knapping.
In a slightly younger, 13,700-year-old layer, the team discovered a large workshop complete with quartz – essential in creating the mammoth ivory tools – the by-products of mammoth tool production, and the earliest-known ivory rod tools found in the Americas.
"Mammoth ivory and lithic material appear to factor prominently in resource circulation throughout eastern Beringia and the eventual dispersal of people further south into the Rocky Mountains and Northern High Plains of North America," the researchers write.
Related: The Very First American Settlers Arrived Much Earlier Than We Thought
The authors themselves state that while the tools are good evidence that the Clovis's immediate ancestors did, in fact, migrate from Alaska, they don't rule out the possibility that pre-Clovis humans inhabited the continent much earlier.
While the tools provide strong evidence for culture and technology, we will need more evidence from ancient DNA and climate data to be sure of this migration wave.
The research was published in Quaternary International.Author: Jess Cockerill. Source
