Russian archaeologists have discovered the remains of the world's oldest known Arctic settlement - a Siberian riverfront site that they say could help determine when humans first arrived in the Americas. The 30,000-year-old site - twice as old as any previous Arctic dig - includes a rhinoceros bone shaped into a spear that shows a "striking resemblance" to spear points found by archaeologists in Clovis, N.M. The findings by the Russia Academy of Sciences may prompt a re-examination of popular theories about when humans first came to the Americas. Expert opinions vary, but most think the immigrants first crossed the Bering Strait land bridge about 15,000 years ago. The Russian findings may change that, experts say. "We'll have to come up with a whole new way of looking at things," said Michael L. Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks, Alaska, who reviewed the study. The Russian team's findings show the Americas may have been settled much earlier than previously thought - possibly 25,000 years ago - by the same tribal groups that inhabited their Yana River site. "In theory, the Yana people may have crossed over the land bridge," the researchers wrote. Their findings were published today in Science. Human migration to the Americas remains one of archaeology's biggest mysteries. Until now, the oldest place in the Bering region with evidence of human habitation was Broken Mammoth, a 14,000-year-old site in central Alaska.

"It pushes back, by 10,000 years or more, evidence of human habitation of an Arctic region in that part of the world," said William W. Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Studies Center. Fitzhugh, who has traveled to the Yana River site, said the area was never covered with the glaciers that swept over much of North America during the last ice age, making it a better candidate for an archaeological dig. The stone tools and bones unearthed there were preserved in tundra soils, rather then being swept away by glaciers that melted 10,000 years ago.

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