Coming to America prehistoric style; scientists reconstruct the travels and lifestyles of the earliest Americans.

Scientists reconstruct the travels and lifestyles of the earliest Americans.

True or false: We are all immigrants to the New World.

True, says archaeologist Richard Reanier. "It's just a matter of when [you or] your ancestors came, and from where."

If you're not a recent arrival, just ask your parents or grandparents. Chances are they'll have stories, photos, or maybe even a diary describing your family's first steps on American soil.

But who can tell us about the very early Americans--the people who arrived not tens, nor hundreds, but thousands of years ago? That's where Reanier and his colleague Michael Kunz come in. For the past 15 years, they have been digging for clues about these ancient people on a mesa, a barren ridge, overlooking a deserted valley in northern Alaska. By piecing together their finds, Kunz and Reanier hope to help tell the story of when, how, and why some of America's earliest immigrants settled here.

HUNTING FOR CLUES

Kunz first discovered some ancient stone tools on the mesa in 1978, whilc conducting an archaelogical survey of the area prior to an oil exploration. "It was dumb luck," Kunz says.

Returning to the site many times, he and Reanier have found several stone tools such as projectile points and knives, and about 13,000 tiny stone flakes, apparently chipped off while the Mesa people, as they are now known, crafted their tools.

Perhaps more revealing were the charcoal remains of 11 campfires. Using a new carbon-14 technique to date the charcoal, Kunz and Reanier found that the oldest fire on the site was lit 11,700 years ago. That places the Mesa artifacts among the most ancient in Alaska.

TOOL TIME

What do all these historic heirlooms tell us about the Mesa people? To find out, Kunz and Reanier try to imagine what it would be like to be them. How would they have used the tools? What would they have done on the mesa?

The stone tools found on the mesa closely resemble 11,000-year-old hunting implements discovered in 1932 near the bones of extinct animals in Clovis, New Mexico. Kunz and Reanier speculate that the Mesa people, like the early Clovis inhabitants, were hunters who used the stone weapons to kill mammoths, giant bison, and other mammals that grazed in North Americans at the time.

In fact, many archaeologists now consider the Mesa people a newly discovered culture of Paleoindians, early American nomadic hunters.

Judging by the charcoal remains, the archaelogists might have thought the mesa was a campsite. But, says Kunz, no animal bones or remains of tools used for daily living (other than hunting) have turned up. In addition, the ridge is very windy and exposed.

"None of us would ever camp up there," Kunz says. Instead, like the archaelogists who follow their trail, the Mesa people probably camped in a sheltered spot below the ridge, though no site has been discovered.

Noting that all the Mesa tools are hunting-related, Kunz is convinced that the 60-meter-high mesa was a game-spotting station. He imagines the Mesa people sitting up top, "looking for game animals, working on their hunting tools, . . . telling stories about the big mammoth that got away."

This hunting lifestyle may explain how the Mesa people came to the New World in the first place. "It wasn't like they said, 'Hey, let's go from Asia to North America today,'" says Kunz. He and Reanier theorize that the Mesa hunters were following animals herds migrating east from Siberia. They probably walked across an exposed "land bridge" that linked Asia to North America during the last Ice Age.

That's a generally accepted theory about how the New World was first populated. Eventually, the Mesa people--among other early Americans--gave rise to numerous Indian tribes, who spread throughout North and South America, Kunz says.

THE SEQUEL

Despite all the work at ancient sites throughout the Americas, scientists still aren't sure exactly when the first Americans arrived. Kunz believes that the Mesa people were among the first. But other scientists say earlier groups may have arrived as far back as 30,000 years ago. These claims, however, are not generally accepted because of concerns over the dating techniques used.

To further understand the story of the first immigrants, Kunz and Reanier will continue excavating the mesa. Today this barren ridge, once a lookout for hunters, provides a window into the ancient past.