An American artifact in Siberia.

Prehistoric residents of North America chipped pieces of stone into distinctive "fluted points" as many as 11,200 years ago. Archaeologists now report the discovery of the first fluted point on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, where a land bridge once offered passage from Asia to North America (SN: 7/20/96, p. 41).

The artifact, broken into two pieces, comes from the Siberian site of Uptar, located 1,200 miles from the Bering Strait. Dating of volcanic ash and charcoal at Uptar provides an age estimate of at least 8,300 years for the stone point, although its precise age has not been established.

The find challenges the widespread assumption that the production of fluted points occurred only in North America, asserts Maureen King of the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas. On a trip to Russia, King noticed the stone implement among artifacts gathered by Sergei Slobodin of the Department of Education in Magadan, a city near Uptar.

If the point dates to more than 11,200 years old, it may represent a precursor of New World fluting techniques, King and Slobodin contend in the Aug. 3 Science. A younger date would suggest that knowledge about producing these points coexisted in Siberia and North America or moved back and forth from one continent to the other, they hold.

King and Slobodin will conduct further excavations and dating analyses at Uptar later this summer.