Stone Memories: How Ancient Toolmakers Carried the Pacific into the Americas

The Forgotten Chapter of the Paleolithic World

For much of the twentieth century, the story of how the Americas were peopled began with a single crossing: bands of hunters trudging across the Bering Land Bridge around 13,000 years ago, armed with fluted Clovis points and following Ice Age megafauna southward. It was a clean, linear narrative—the kind that fits neatly into textbooks.

Stone tools from a site in Idaho help tell the story of North America’s First Peoples. Credit: Oregon State University

But nature and history are rarely that tidy. A new study published in Science Advances (Madsen et al., 2025)¹ redraws that migration map, tracing a deeper, older connection between North America and the Pacific Rim. Using a comparative analysis of stone tool technologies, the researchers argue that the First Peoples of the Americas belonged to a wider Paleolithic world that stretched from Japan to Idaho.

“The First Americans were not cultural isolates, but heirs to a technological tradition that linked them to the hunter-engineers of East Asia,” said Dr. Loren Davis, an anthropologist at Oregon State University and co-author of the study. “Their stone tools speak a language that was once global.”