Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Obsidian in Alberta and Human Dispersal into North America’s Ice-Free Corridor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We utilize pXRF to source the oldest obsidian artifacts in Alberta, Canada. The province lacks obsidian outcrops and hosts much of the late Pleistocene Ice-Free Corridor, the northern and southern ends of which are in proximity to obsidian outcrops in Yukon, Alaska, Idaho, and Wyoming. The early presence of these obsidians in Alberta informs models of human dispersion. Results point to an early establishment of relationships in the central Ice-Free Corridor that reached into Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. Alberta appears to have been entered by people from the south who had ties to the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West. After biotic viability of a full Corridor, limited evidence suggests that northern people from Beringia may have trickled south and admixed with southern populations in the central Corridor region. Upon deglaciation of access routes through the Rocky Mountains, obsidian from western sources in British Columbia arrived relatively quickly in northern Alberta.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".