Two years ago, American archaeologists reexamined the site. They brought back charcoal found with primitive tools in an ancient fire pit. In July they published a surprise: Based on radiocarbon dating, the charcoal is only about 11,000 years old, contemporary with Clovis. “This probably eliminates the people of Ushki Lake as the progenitors of Clovis,” says Michael Waters, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University in College Station who participated in the study.
The strength of the land bridge story was further undermined by an analysis of skeletal remains found in Baja California that was published in September. Rolando González-José, an anthropologist at the University of Barcelona, and his team had minutely measured 33 skulls that were between 300 and 2,700 years old, only to discover that they resembled neither prehistoric northeastern Asians—those who presumably would have crossed the land bridge—nor modern American Indians; the fossils looked more like the progenitors of Southeast Asian peoples.
Some anthropologists, including González-José, say the Baja skulls suggest that Southeast Asians traveled to the Americas by boat before the Clovis era. But others disagree. Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at the University of Kentucky, says morphological anomalies don’t necessarily prove there were earlier migrations: “They may indicate some genetic drift, or they could link to some parallel adaptations, or perhaps they resulted from interbreeding with other local populations.”
Despite the Ushki and Baja challenges, the land bridge theory is not dead. Waters, for one, still has faith in the hypothesis because there is so much territory left to excavate. “Siberia is a big place,” he says, “and very few archaeologists are working there.”
—Michael W. Robbins and Jeffrey Winters
Ötzi’s Boots Were Made for Walking
So you spend five millennia shopping for comfortable shoes, and you still can’t find a pair that fit. Then this chap from the Czech Republic hikes up a mountain in a pair of bark-net, straw-stuffed, bearskin-soled boots modeled on the footwear of a 5,300-year-old frozen mummy—and he doesn’t develop a single blister. In fact, he makes the extraordinary claim that the makeshift shoes are better insulated and better cushioned than modern-day hiking boots and provide superior traction. Petr Hlavácek, a professor of shoe technology at Tomas Bata University in the Czech city of Zlín, created five pairs of shoes replicating those worn by the celebrated Stone Age ice man Ötzi on his prehistoric trek in the Ötztal Alps in northern Italy. Then he and three bold friends put the shoes on—sans socks—and retraced the ice man’s final footsteps to the glacier where his body was found in 1991, a distance of some 12 miles. Even when they stepped into icy streams, they felt no discomfort. “The shoes were full of water, but after three seconds it was a very comfortable, warm feeling,” says Hlavácek, who displayed the shoes in Offenbach, Germany, in July. “This is because the layer of hay is full of airholes, and air is the best warm insulator.” Furthermore, the linden-bark-net uppers were loose enough to even out the overall pressure of the boots, so that blisters did not form. And the bearskin soles of Ötzi’s shoes—tanned with bear brains and liver—provided an excellent grip upon the rocky mountain paths.
Ötzi may have been well shod, but that apparently did not enable him to outrun his enemies. The latest findings, announced in August, show that he stood his ground and may have fought off several foes before dying of an arrow shot to his left shoulder. Molecular archaeologist Tom Loy of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, analyzed blood from Ötzi’s arrows, knife, and coat and found DNA from four separate people—not including the ice man himself. Although their identities can never be known, the absence of an arrow shaft in his shoulder—only the arrowhead remains—suggests that one was a companion who pulled out the shaft. As for the others, they were probably rival hunters. According to Loy, Ötzi’s long, lightweight arrows indicate that he was a specialist hunter of ibex, long-horned goats that live high above the tree line; such arrows would not have worked well in the forest, where they would readily have become tangled in the branches of trees. Loy speculates that the ice man’s trade may have taken him into mountain passes whose boundaries were disputed: “He could easily have run across someone from another valley who took umbrage at finding Ötzi hunting in territory he considered his own.”
—Josie Glausiusz
