Alaska was once the setting for an environmental shift so dramatic it forced people to evacuate the entire North Slope, according to Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management.
About 10,000 years ago, a group of hunting people lived on the North Slope, the swath of mostly treeless tundra extending north from the Brooks Range to the sea. These people, known as Paleoindians, used a chunky ridge of rock west of the Colville River as a hunting lookout. Michael Kunz first discovered stone spear tips at the site, known as the Mesa, in 1978.
The people of the Mesa lived at a time when the Arctic was undergoing a change similar to what Alaska is undergoing today. As the world emerged from the last ice age, grasslands covered much of the Bering Land Bridge, a swath of land as wide as the distance from Barrow to Homer.
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