People have lived in the Leech Lake Area for over 10,000 years, and artifacts there preserve evidence of their lives. A siltstone tool discovered by the Leech Lake Heritage Sites Program of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe on a hill south of Walker in 2006 is believed to have been used either to scrape frozen ground in search of berries or to separate an animal's skin from edible meat, with the skin also serving as protection against the bitter cold at the end of the Ice Age. The account connects this possible early inhabitant to ancestors who crossed Beringia, a land mass 1,000 miles wide between Asia and North America, where early people pursued woolly mammoths for food and clothing some 40,000 years ago, perhaps later resting on a hill south of Walker possibly 10,000 years ago. If the siltstone is proven authentic, the tool would be older than any other known prehistoric find in the Western Hemisphere.