The first Americans lived alongside giant mammoths, as evidenced by findings from 14,000 years ago.

Campsites of the first Americans, who inhabited Alaska 14,000 years ago, were located in proximity to herds of mammoths. These animals were not only a highly caloric source of food.

[Photo: Geoff Peters from Vancouver, BC, Canada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

For decades, archaeologists have been intrigued by the arrival of humans in the American continent, and this moment keeps pushing further back in time. It is now accepted that the first migrants from Asia reached the New World tens of thousands of years ago.

Research by scientists from Alaska and Canada sheds new light on this intriguing period. They published their analyses in the prestigious scientific journal “Science Advances.”

First Americans alongside mammoths

Scientists determined that the locations of woolly mammoth habitats overlapped with a network of human camps in Alaska around 14,000 years ago for about a thousand years. The prolonged and predictable presence of woolly mammoths may have attracted people to this area.

This conclusion was facilitated by the isotopic analysis of a mammoth female’s tusk by the Healy Lake village council named…