The Thule Migrations as an Analog for the Early Peopling of the Americas: Evaluating Scenarios of Overkill, Trade, Climate Forcing, and Scalar Stress

Abstract

ABSTRACT Coastal migration is linear and transport-reliant so that pre-Clovis coastal migration should be anticipated from its origin, as in the Thule migration, not its destination. Thule historiography, like Clovis, implicated a rapid, climate-forced migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers venturing into unoccupied high arctic landscapes—a model now insupportable. Thule datasets, from middens and numerous burials, include wood, ivory, and bone technologies that convey the factors promoting emigration: status striving, social inequality, and local overpopulation, but not an iron trade with Norse or Dorset. The emerging chronology situates the Thule migrations during a cooler thirteenth century while political ethnogeography records that ancestral Thule societies, Birnirk or Punuk, arose within a Bering Strait still dominated by Old Bering Sea culture. Data from the several Thule migrations, including lithic technology and ancient DNA, foster the re-examination of the coastal Beringian Standstill and Kelp highway scenarios, with a redirected focus on Sakhalin and Japan.