The Edge of the World, Then and Now

Alaska’s Seward Peninsula is the westernmost protrusion of mainland North America — a broad, roughly rectangular wedge of land that juts into the Bering Sea, pointing directly toward the Russian Far East across the narrow strait that separates them.

Today, at its westernmost point, Russia is visible in clear weather.

In geological terms — and in the human-prehistory terms that are relevant to this story — this geography marks the seam between the Old World and the New, the crossing point through which the ancestors of all Native Americans moved into the hemisphere.

The communities on the Seward Peninsula today include Nome, which occupies the southern coast and has been a regional center since the gold rush of the late nineteenth century; Deering, which sits on Kotzebue Sound to the north; and many smaller villages whose populations have maintained connections to the land and sea of this region across generations.

The peninsula is now part of the traditional territory of the Inupiaq people, whose ancestors have inhabited the Arctic coast of Alaska for thousands of years.

The Trail Creek Caves are located in this landscape, on the Seward Peninsula, in a region that falls within or near the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve — one of the most geographically significant protected areas in the United States, preserving what remains accessible of the land that was once the connection between two worlds.

The caves themselves are not a dramatic geological spectacle.

They are solution cavities in the limestone of the area — openings in the rock where water has worked its way through the stone over geological time, creating sheltered spaces that have served, at various points over thousands of years, as refuge for both animals and people.

Cave 2, the specific locus of the 1949 excavation, is the one that held the tooth.

To understand why archaeologists were working there in 1949, and what they were looking for, it helps to understand the broader context of what Beringia was and what it meant for the history of the people who came through it.

Beringia: The World That Existed Before the World We Know

The Bering Land Bridge — more properly called Beringia by geographers and paleoecologists who study it — is not simply a narrow strip of land that connected Asia to Alaska, the way an isthmus connects two landmasses.

At its maximum extent, during the glacial maximum of the last Ice Age when sea levels were dramatically lower than today, Beringia was a vast subcontinent.