HUMAN BONES FOUND IN ALASKA SUPPORT MIGRATION THEORY.

Byline: Karen Freeman The New York Times

Human bones found in an island cave along southern Alaska appear to be the oldest ever found in the state, and they lend weight to the idea that North America's earliest people might have traveled by boat along the Alaskan coast instead of taking an overland route south.

A jawbone, three vertebrae and a pelvic bone, which showed signs of a carnivore's gnawing, were found on Prince of Wales Island, part of the Alexander Archipelago, on July 4.

Radiocarbon dating, by Dr. Thomas Stafford of the University of Colorado in Boulder and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, showed the bones to be about 9,730 years old, according to a recent announcement by the researchers, two local Indian councils and the National Geographic Society, which financed the excavation.

But the Alaska discovery is not as old as the 11,500-year-old human bones from what is called the Clovis culture, which ranged between Wyoming and New Mexico.

The paleontologist who found the Alaska bones, Dr. Timothy H. Heaton, a professor of earth science at the University of South Dakota at Vermillion, said scientists would like to find bones 13,000 or 14,000 years old in Alaska to help support the hypothesis that humans migrated from Asia to North and South America.

But the human and animal bones in the cave show that it was possible for humans and other mammals to live along the Alaskan coast in the last Ice Age, Heaton said. Seal bones from the cave were dated at 17,565 years old, at the peak of the last Ice Age.

``If the area had been overridden with ice,'' Heaton said, ``no mammals would have survived there. Some archaeologists are proposing that if there were ice-free areas along the coast, that would have been a logical route for the first Americans.''

The early people would presumably have traveled by sea because it is difficult even today to travel along the coast by land, said Terry Fifield, the archaeologist for the Thorne Bay and Craig Ranger Districts of the National Forest Service.

Dr. Alan L. Bryan, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta, said the coastal theory was looking more attractive because of evidence that argued against inland migration.

The theory has been that an ice-free corridor opened up east of the Rocky Mountains about 13,000 years ago, allowing the first Americans to migrate south. But Bryan said newly found geological evidence showed that the northern end of the corridor was not passable until 11,000 years ago, or even later.

``If the corridor was closed until 11,000 years ago or afterward,'' he said, ``there is no way the Clovis people could have come through.''

It is possible that the migration could have been much earlier, perhaps 30,000 years ago, before the ice sheets formed, Bryan said. But even at that point, the coast, with its ample food supply, ``would have been a much nicer place to live,'' he said, adding, ``There's no reason people couldn't have had oceangoing watercraft at that time.''

The Alaskan bones were found in a cave in rough, forested terrain on Prince of Wales Island, which is pockmarked by low, muddy caves. A survey of the caves by volunteer spelunkers led to the discoveries, Fifield said. When the cavers spotted what appeared to be ancient bones in one cave, the Forest Service notified Heaton, who was already working in the area.

The caves have been ``protected by their remoteness,'' Fifield said, and the Forest Service is keeping secret the exact location of the cave with the bones.

Heaton started working in the cave in 1994 and excavated a grizzly femur that the cave explorers had noticed. It turned out to be more than 35,000 years old. A team of four to six people continued to make significant finds in the cave, including the excavation of bear bones more than 41,000 years old. But the human bones were found only on the last day of this year's excavation.

Heaton was in the cave alone, he said; the cramped quarters and three-foot ceilings make it hard for more than a few people to be in the cave at once. It was cold and wet, with water trickling down the passages and seeping up from below.

In a very wet spot, he found the human bones, which appear to be from one individual.

As soon as it was clear that the bones were human, the excavation stopped, and nearby Indian tribal councils were consulted, in accord with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The councils allowed the bones to be sent to Dr. James Dixon, curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum of Natural History, for study.