A female woolly mammoth's lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp.

Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region's first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death. DNA from the tusk and other local contemporaneous archaeological mammoth remains revealed that multiple mammoth herds congregated in this region. Early Alaskans seem to have structured their settlements partly based on mammoth prevalence and made use of mammoths for raw materials and likely food.

Response to comment on "Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands".

Hamley et al. previously presented multiple lines of evidence that people were present in the Falkland Islands before Europeans and may have brought the now-extinct canid, Dusicyon australis. Stable isotope data reported by Clark et al. indicate that D. australis had a high-trophic, marine diet that terrestrialized following European arrival. This is consistent with our hypothesis of a human mutualism.

Late date of human arrival to North America: Continental scale differences in stratigraphic integrity of pre-13,000 BP archaeological sites.

By 13,000 BP human populations were present across North America, but the exact date of arrival to the continent, especially areas south of the continental ice sheets, remains unclear. Here we examine patterns in the stratigraphic integrity of early North American sites to gain insight into the timing of first colonization. We begin by modeling stratigraphic mixing of multicomponent archaeological sites to identify signatures of stratigraphic integrity in vertical artifact distributions. From those simulations, we develop a statistic we call the Apparent Stratigraphic Integrity Index (ASI), which we apply to pre- and post-13,000 BP archaeological sites north and south of the continental ice sheets. We find that multiple early Beringian sites dating between 13,000 and 14,200 BP show excellent stratigraphic integrity. Clear signs of discrete and minimally disturbed archaeological components do not appear south of the ice sheets until the Clovis period. These results provide support for a relatively late date of human arrival to the Americas.

Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands.

When Darwin visited the Falkland Islands in 1833, he noted the puzzling occurrence of the islands' sole terrestrial mammal, Dusicyon australis (or "warrah"). The warrah's origins have been debated, and prehistoric human transport was previously rejected because of a lack of evidence of pre-European human activity in the Falkland Islands. We report several lines of evidence indicating that humans were present in the Falkland Islands centuries before Europeans, including (i) an abrupt increase in fire activity, (ii) deposits of mixed marine vertebrates that predate European exploration by centuries, and (iii) a surface-find projectile point made of local quartzite. Dietary evidence from D. australis remains further supports a potential mutualism with humans. The findings from our study are consistent with the culture of the Yaghan (Yámana) people from Tierra del Fuego. If people reached the Falkland Islands centuries before European colonization, this reopens the possibility of human introduction of the warrah.