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Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region’s first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death. DNA from the tusk and other local contemporaneous archaeological mammoth remains revealed that multiple mammoth herds congregated in this region. Early Alaskans seem to have structured their settlements partly based on mammoth prevalence and made use of mammoths for raw materials and likely food. 

Abstract Stable hydrogen and oxygen isotopic compositions (δ²H and δ¹⁸O, respectively) of animal tissues have been used to infer geographical origin or mobility based on the premise that the isotopic composition of tissue is systematically related to that of local water sources. Isotopic data for known‐origin samples are required to quantify these tissue–environment relationships. Although many of such data have been published and could be reused by researchers, differences in the standards used for calibration and analytical procedures for different datasets limit the comparability of these data.We develop an algorithm that uses results from comparative analysis of secondary standards to transform data among reference scales and estimate the uncertainty inherent in these transformations. We apply the algorithm to a compilation of known‐origin keratin data published over the past ~20 years.We show that transformation improves the comparability of data from different laboratories, and that the transformed data suggest ecophysiologically meaningful differences in keratin–water relationships among different animal groups and taxa.The compiled data and algorithms are freely available in the ASSIGNRr‐package to support geographical provenance research, and more generally offer a methodology overcoming several challenges in geochemical data integration and reuse.