Deck 7: Expanding Geographical Horizons: New Worlds

Question 1

The earliest settlement of Australia occurred how long ago:

A) after 12,000 years
B) after 20,000 years
C) before 50,000 and as much as 70,000 years
D) before 100,000 years

Answer 1

C

Question 2

The oldest archaeological evidence for the human occupation of Australia now dates to:

A) 40,000 years ago
B) 60,000 years ago
C) 100,000 years ago
D) 1 million years ago

Answer 2

B

Question 3

An analysis of the DNA of a sample of modern Native people of Australia suggests that their most ancient ancestors split from the people of Southeast Asia about how long ago?

A) 40,000 years ago
B) more than 50,000 years ago
C) 100,000 years ago
D) 1 million years ago

Answer 3

B

Question 4

The first settlers of Australia likely got there:

A) across a land bridge connecting southeast Asia and New Guinea
B) via boat from New Zealand
C) via boat from southeast Asia
D) when the islands of Micronesia were part of a vast Pacific continent called Lemuria

Question 5

During glacial maxima, sea level was depressed by at least 100 m (325 feet) and as much as 150 m (500 feet). When this occurred:

A) Australia was connected to southeast Asia by a vast stretch of dry land called Sunda
B) Australia was still separated from Asia by the deep sea Wallace Trench
C) Australia was a part of Sunda
D) Australia was part of a vast Pacific continent called Lemuria

Question 6

During glacial maxima, Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania were a single land mass called:

A) Sahul
B) Sunda
C) Lemuria
D) Pangaea

Question 7

The unique marsupial fauna of Australia is directly attributable to that continent's:

A) extremely hot and dry climate
B) location far south of the equator
C) isolation
D) lack of any large predator species

Question 8

During glacial maxima and attendant lowered sea level, human groups could have migrated to Australia:

A) by walking across the land bridge connecting Sunda and Sahul
B) via dry or only partially wet land by waiting for the tide to go out and walking from island to island across the Wallace sea
C) only by crossing a sea barrier of a minimum of several hundred miles wide across the Wallace Sea
D) by a series of hops from island to island across the Wallace Sea

Question 9

Anthropologist Joseph Birdsell has calculated that during glacial maxima, Southeast Asians could have migrated to Australia by island hopping. The mean distance of the eight gaps between islands in Birdsell's view was:

A) a bit more than 100 miles
B) a bit less than 50 miles
C) about 30 miles
D) fewer than 20 miles

Question 10

The earliest evidence for occupation of the islands of Sunda has been found on:

A) Flores and dates to 900,000 years ago
B) New Guinea and dates to 40,000 years ago
C) Timor and dates to 15,000 years ago
D) Borneo and dates to 40,000 years ago

Question 11

The oldest evidence for the human occupation of the island of Borneo, at likely stepping-stone from southeast Asia to Australia, dates to:

A) 150,000 years ago
B) 95,000 years ago
C) 46,000 years ago
D) 12,500 years ago

Question 12

The earliest settlement of New Guinea dates to:

A) 10,000 years ago
B) 25,000 years ago
C) 39,000 years ago
D) 50,000 years ago

Question 13

The oldest broadly accepted human settlement of Australia has been found at which of the following sites:

A) Malakunanja II
B) Lake Mungo
C) Madjedbebe Rock Shelter
D) Panaramitee North

Question 14

Located in northern Australia, cultural material excavated in the Madjedbebe Rockshelter has produced a date of:

A) 100,500 years
B) at least 59,000 years
C) 39,500 years
D) 20,500 years

Question 15

The Willandra Lakes in southeastern Australia are:

A) a series of spring-fed lakes in the dry desert of southeastern Australia that attracted settlement into modern times
B) a series of now-dry fossil lakes that are known for their rich archaeological record
C) in the first area settled when Australia was populated from New Zealand
D) located in the only part of Australia inhabited prehistorically

Question 16

The Mungo I skeleton dates to about what period:

A) 26,000 years ago
B) 18,000 years ago
C) 10,000 years ago
D) 4,000 years ago

Question 17

The Mungo I skeleton differs from the skeletons of modern Australian Aborigines in that:

A) the Mungo I skeleton is of an archaic variety of humanity, whereas all modern Australian natives are anatomically modern
B) the Mungo I skeleton is lightly constructed, while modern Australian natives are far more robust
C) the Mungo I skeleton shows extensive evidence of malnutrition, while modern Australian natives are better adapted culturally and rarely suffer from malnutrition
D) all of the above

Question 18

The Willandra Lakes 50 cranium is:

A) delicately constructed
B) nearly identical in form to modern Native Americans
C) extremely robust, like modern native Australians
D) very similar in form to that of the Mungo I skeleton

Question 19

After the initial settlement of Australia, people next spread throughout the country:

A) from north to south, in waves across the interior
B) along the coast and later into the interior
C) following the kangaroo herds
D) by following sources of obsidian

Question 20

The harsh, dry interior of Australia was first inhabited:

A) after 5,000 years ago
B) between 10,000 and12,000 years ago
C) between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago
D) before 40,000 years ago

Question 21

Wareen, ORS7, and Nunamira Caves are among the earliest sites in:

A) Australia
B) Tasmania
C) New Zealand
D) New Guinea

Question 22

The earliest settlement of Tasmania is dated to:

A) 35,000 years ago
B) 25,000 years ago
C) 15,000 years ago
D) after 10,000 years ago

Question 23

Panaramitee North and Wharton Hill in Australia are known for:

A) their remarkable preservation of the faunal remains recovered at the sites
B) the recovery of extremely robust crania with large brow ridges reminiscent of those of archaic Homo sapiens
C) rich burial sites with finely crafted grave goods
D) some of the earliest artwork seen anywhere in the world

Question 24

We know that at least some of the exploration of the Pacific conducted by people hundreds and even thousands of years before the Europeans explored it had been intentional because:

A) these people left a written record of their exploits
B) oral traditions examined in the late nineteenth century documented their early explorations
C) the islands of the Pacific are so small and far apart
D) the settlers brought with them the people and materials necessary for a successful colonization of new territories

Question 25

Lapita is:

A) a stone tool technology from northeast Asia quite similar to that seen at Denali sites in the American Arctic
B) the name given to the oldest pottery in Australia
C) the name given to the pottery style seen on the inhabited islands of Polynesia
D) the art style of the earliest artists of Australia

Question 26

The more than 1,400 radiocarbon dates examined by Janet Wilmshurst and her colleagues showed that the islands of central and eastern Polynesia, including Hawaii, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Marquesas, and New Zealand were settled:

A) no earlier than A.D. 1200
B) no later than A.D. 500
C) after A.D. 1500
D) by about 100 B.C.

Question 27

Jesuit Missionary Joseph de Acosta deduced that the native people of the New World must have come from:

A) the lost continent of Atlantis
B) ancient Egypt because the Egyptians, the Aztecs, and Maya built pyramids
C) northeast Asia via some sort of land connection
D) from Asia by boat

Question 28

Today the water in the Bering Strait is about how deep:

A) 200-250 meters
B) 150-200 meters
C) 50-100 meters
D) 30-50 meters

Question 29

The land mass connecting northeast Asia and northwest North America exposed when the sea level was lowered during the Pleistocene is called:

A) the Bering Strait
B) Beringia
C) Sundaland
D) The McKenzie Corridor

Question 30

During the height of the Pleistocene, the Beringia was about how wide?

A) 100 km
B) 500 km
C) 1000 km
D) 1500 km

Question 31

At its peak , the area of Beringia was comparable to that of:

A) the state of Rhode Island
B) the nation of Australia
C) twice that of the state of Texas
D) the nation of Panama

Question 32

The Bering Land Bridge was exposed several times during the Pleistocene. The key time interval relative to its availability to Asian migration into the New World was:

A) 75,000-50,000 years ago
B) 35,000-11,000 years ago
C) 14,000-12,000 years ago
D) 12,000-9,000 years ago

Question 33

Beringia was located in which climatic zone or zones:

A) subtropics and tropics
B) temperate
C) arctic and subarctic
D) Mediterranean

Question 34

The habitat of Beringia is best described as:

A) an arctic waste
B) a rich shrub tundra
C) a boreal forest
D) a boreal savannah

Question 35

Sea level was at a low point and Beringia was at its most extensive during which time period:

A) 9,000-12,000 years ago
B) 12,000-12,500 years ago
C) 19,000-22,000 years ago
D) 30,000-33,000 years ago

Question 36

The SK Mammoth site in north-central Siberia is about how old:

A) 34,000 years
B) 45,000 years
C) 87,000 years
D) 200,000 years

Question 37

About how old are the oldest archaeological sites in eastern Siberia, the most likely source area for the first Americans:

A) 73,000-75,000 years old
B) 32,000-34,000 years old
C) 18,000-20,000 years old
D) 8,000-9,500 years old

Question 38

Of the five mitochondrial haplogroups seen in Native Americans, how many can be traced to east-central Asia:

A) one
B) three
C) all five
D) none of the five mtDNA haplogroups in the New World can be traced to east-central Asia

Question 39

The Yana RHS site provides the oldest evidence for the human occupation of:

A) North America
B) South America
C) the Levantine Corridor
D) eastern Siberia

Question 40

What is the diagnostic artifact type from Dyuktai Cave in central Siberia?

A) wedge-shaped cores
B) bifacial spear points
C) fluted points
D) bone harpoons

Question 41

About how old is the occupation of Dyuktai Cave:

A) 40,000 years
B) 23,000 years
C) 18,000 years
D) 11,000 years

Question 42

What artifact type does the Denali sites of the American Arctic and Dyuktai have in common?

A) fluted points
B) bone harpoons
C) Solutrean points
D) wedge-shaped cores

Question 43

What is the diagnostic artifact type from the Ushki Lake sites in Kamchatka?

A) wedge-shaped cores
B) bifacial spear points
C) fluted points
D) bone harpoons

Question 44

What kinds of tools do the Nenana industry in North America and the Ushki Lake industry (component 7) of Kamchatka have in common:

A) bone harpoons
B) bifacially worked points and knives
C) wedge-shaped cores
D) microblades

Question 45

The oldest of the Ushki Lake sites is about how old:

A) 40,500 years
B) 23,500 years
C) 18,300 years
D) 11,300 years

Question 46

Two likely routes humans took into the New World at the end of the Pleistocene are:

A) across the frozen tundra of Antarctica
B) across a land bridge linking Scandinavia with Greenland
C) along the coast of Beringia and through the Beringian interior
D) all of the above

Question 47

Which site may represent a very early habitation of settlers who traveled through the interior of Beringia into the New World as much as 24,000 years ago:

A) Bluefish Caves
B) Monte Verde
C) Quebrada Tacahuay
D) Koster

Question 48

About how long ago were Paisley 5 Mile Point Caves in Oregon occupied:

A) 50,000 years ago
B) 26,500 years ago
C) 14,300 years ago
D) 12,800 years ago

Question 49

What material provided the radiocarbon date for Paisley 5 Mile Point Caves:

A) woolly mammoth bone with butchering marks
B) basketry fragments
C) charcoal in a fireplace
D) human coprolites

Question 50

The Debra L. Friedkin site in central Texas dates to about how many years ago:

A) 12,500
B) 15,500
C) 20,000
D) 35,000

Question 51

About how long ago was the Gault site, in Texas, occupied:

A) 12,500
B) 16,000
C) 20,000
D) 35,000

Question 52

What kind of animals did the residents of the Schaefer and Hebior sites hunt:

A) woolly mammoth
B) bison
C) horse
D) dinosaur

Question 53

The Schaefer and Hebior sites in Wisconsin are about how old:

A) 25,000 years
B) 18,750 years
C) more than 14,000 years
D) fewer than 12,000 years

Question 54

How do we know that the mastodon found at the Manis site in Washington State had been killed by human hunters:

A) pieces of undigested meat were found in human coprolites at the site
B) the bones were found in a fireplace
C) there were extensive butchering marks on the bone, all made by stone tools
D) a bone projectile point was found embedded in one of the animal's ribs

Question 55

Which site may represent a very early habitation of the descendants of settlers who traveled along the coast of Beringia into the New World more than 12,000 and as much as 18,500 years ago:

A) Bluefish Caves
B) Monte Verde
C) Quebrada Tacahuay
D) Koster

Question 56

Early settlers of the interior of northwestern North America would have been faced with what challenge if they attempted to migrate south:

A) active volcanoes along the Rocky Mountains
B) the coalesced Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets
C) massive animal extinctions
D) a 1,000-year-long drought

Question 57

When the McKenzie Corridor was available:

A) it must have been a veritable highway for travel into North America from Scandinavia
B) ancient hunters could have traveled easily between Alaska and eastern North America
C) the movement of people from North America to South America would have been feasible
D) people could have moved from northwestern North America into the American Midwest.

Question 58

About how long ago did the ice free McKenzie Corridor become available for human travel south:

A) 30,000 years ago
B) 20,000 years ago
C) 13,000 years ago
D) 10,000 years ago

Question 59

The oldest human occupation of Meadowcroft Rockshelter has been put at about:

A) 13,400 years ago
B) 11,800 years ago
C) 10,000 years ago
D) more than 19,000 years ago

Question 60

The location of Meadowcroft Rockshelter poses a problem for those studying the earliest human migration into the New World because:

A) it is in South America, far from the Beringian entry point
B) it is right where the Cordilleran and Laurentide glaciers are thought to have coalesced
C) there is no trail of successively older sites leading back to the Beringian entry point
D) it was situated in the glacial tundra and it is thought that no human group has ever successfully adapted to such a harsh environment

Question 61

The occupation of Monte Verde has been dated to as much as about how long ago:

A) 9,000 years ago
B) 10,000 years ago
C) 12,000 years ago
D) 18,500 years ago

Question 62

About how far is Monte Verde from the Beringian entry point for human migrants:

A) 16,000 km
B) 10,000 km
C) 5,000 km
D) 1,000 km

Question 63

The ancestors of the people who lived at Monte Verde likely arrived there from Beringia by:

A) an interior route
B) a coastal route
C) the Amazon
D) helicopter

Question 64

According to archaeologist David Meltzer, with Monte Verde's age in mind, about when must the ancestors of this site have entered the New World via Beringia:

A) 1 million years ago
B) 50,000 years ago
C) 20,000 years ago
D) 12,500 years ago

Question 65

Quebrada Tacahuay and Quebrada Jaguay are two:

A) Clovis sites in South America
B) Folsom sites in New Mexico
C) coastal sites in South America dating to about 11,000 years ago
D) coastal sites in Australia dating to the earliest settlement of that continent

Question 66

About how old is the El Fin del Mundo site in Mexico:

A) 10,000 years
B) 11,500 years
C) 13,400 years
D) 18,500 years

Question 67

About how old are the Denali sites?

A) 8,000 years
B) 10,000 years
C) 20,000 years
D) 70,000 years

Question 68

About how old are the Nenana sites of Alaska?

A) 25,000-20,000 years
B) 18,000-14,000 years
C) 14,000-13,000 years
D) 12,000-11,000 years

Question 69

What is the only thing present in the Clovis stone tool assemblage but not present in Nenana?

A) bifacial projectile points
B) wedge-shaped cores
C) fluted points
D) bone harpoons

Question 70

The oldest human skeletal remains in the New World have been dated to:

A) more than 20,000 years ago
B) 16,000 years ago
C) 13,000 years ago
D) after 10,000 years ago

Question 71

When genetic material has been extracted from the oldest human skeletons found in the New World, their nuclear and mitochondrial genomes are most similar to which Old World people:

A) Northeast Asians
B) Polynesians
C) South Asians
D) they are not similar to any Old World group

Question 72

The ice-free corridor was:

A) a thin strip of land along the west coast of North America that allowed people to journey south at the end of the Pleistocene
B) a corridor of land between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets through which people may have journeyed south at the end of the Pleistocene
C) a corridor of land between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that was free of glacial ice as a result of the "ice shadow" present on the eastern flank of the mountains through which people may have journeyed south at the end of the Pleistocene
D) a strip of ice-free territory in western Pennsylvania that allowed the inhabitants of Meadowcroft Rockshelter to migrate there a few thousand years before the Paleoindians

Question 73

A fluted point is a:

A) projectile point with a channel or groove flaked off from both faces
B) projectile point with holes drilled into the base to allow for hafting, thus giving it the appearance of a "flute"
C) specialized variety of the Solutrean blades of the Upper Paleolithic
D) diagnostic artifact of the Nenana complex of sites in Alaska

Question 74

Clovis represents the technology of:

A) the first human inhabitants of the New World
B) the first broadly successful-in a geographic sense-human inhabitants of the New World
C) Siberians before they migrated into the New World at the end of the Pleistocene
D) people who relied solely on big game hunting for their subsistence

Question 75

The two fluted point traditions of North America listed in the order of their appearance (from older to younger) are:

A) Monte Verde and Meadowcroft
B) Scottsbluff and Hell Gap
C) Clovis and Folsom
D) Folsom and Clovis

Question 76

Woolly mammoths killed by paleo-hunters in the New World are usually associated (and were killed with) which kind of weapon:

A) Folsom points
B) Clovis points
C) microblades
D) wedge-shaped cores

Question 77

Bison (of an extinct form, Bison antiquus) killed by paleo-hunters in the New World are almost always associated (and were killed with) which kind of weapon:

A) Folsom points
B) Clovis points
C) microblades
D) wedge-shaped cores

Question 78

Paleoindian subsistence can be best characterized as:

A) big game hunting
B) marine mammal hunting
C) horticulture
D) broad spectrum

Question 79

The skeleton of Kennewick Man is about how old:

A) 15,000 years
B) 12,000 years
C) 9,000 years
D) 7,500 years

Question 80

The genome of Kennewick Man is most similar to which group of modern human beings:

A) East Asians
B) Polynesians
C) the Norse
D) Native Americans in living in northwest North America