The Trail Creek Caves are a group of twelve caves found within the

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve The Bering Land Bridge National Preserve is one of the most remote Protected areas of the United States, located on the Seward Peninsula. The National Preserve protects a remnant of the Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia with North America m ...

on the Seward Peninsula of the U.S. state of

Alaska Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...

. This is a significant archeological site due to the discovery of several artifacts of ancient hunters. These included stone tools and bone fragments dated to 8,500 years or earlier. The caves were discovered in 1928 by Taylor Moto and Alfred Karmun, locals from Deering, Alaska. Geologist David Hopkins tested the site in 1948. This location was first excavated in from 1949-1950 by Danish archeologist . The caves are located along Trail Creek near its mouth at Cottonwood Creek in the Northwest Arctic Borough. In 2018, researchers sequenced the

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

to around .4

coverage Coverage may refer to: Filmmaking * Coverage (lens), the size of the image a lens can produce * Camera coverage, the amount of footage shot and different camera setups used in filming a scene * Script coverage, a short summary of a script, wri ...

from a tooth excavated from Trail Creek Cave 2 in 1949. The tooth, directly dated to around 9000 BP, belonged to a young child. The young child from Trail Creek Cave 2 was found to cluster genetically with ''USR1'' from the Upward Sun River site in a hypothesized ancient DNA population grouping referred to as Ancient Beringian. As with ''USR2'' from the Upward Sun River site, the child from Trail Creek Cave 2 was also found to carry a basal lineage of Haplogroup B2; this specific mtDNA lineage is different from the derived B2 lineage generally found in the Americas.

References

Archaeological sites in Alaska Caves of Alaska Landforms of Northwest Arctic Borough, Alaska Oldest human remains in the Americas {{NorthwestArcticAK-geo-stub