Archaeologist whose research in Yukon made waves in science world remembered

The archaeologist best known for his work in Yukon's Bluefish Caves where he found that human beings set foot in North America much earlier than originally thought, died Nov. 27. He was 79.

Jacques Cinq-Mars discovered that humans were in the Yukon 24,000 years ago instead of the scientifically accepted notion for a long time that it had only been 13,000 years.

It made him an unpopular figure in the research community for a time.

Cinq-Mars worked for the Canadian Museum of History, where he began many of his research trips in the Old Crow area, beginning in the early 1970s.

That's when Elder William Josie of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow, Yukon, first met him. Josie was around 12 or 13 years old at the time.

Josie said Cinq-Mars got along well with the locals he met, and that his research helped with his community's land claim negotiations.

"It really helped us, you know," he said. "Our people, we took less money for more land that means a lot to us. And, you know, the elders that time said, we won't regret it. And we definitely don't today."

Josie described him as a "very passionate guy."

"He sort of took us under his wing and he taught us a lot," he said. "I really appreciate that."

"I will remember him as a good teacher and mentor."

A colleague of Cinq-Mars, Yukon archaeologist Ruth Gotthardt, said she first met Cinq-Mars in 1975, while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto.

Cinq-Mars and Bill Irving had just started up the northern Yukon research program and were looking for students to help them catalog collections.

At the time, Gotthard was a second-year archaeology student and was "desperate" to get her hands on some real archaeology, so she volunteered.

"He was very gruff," she remembers with a laugh.