Interesting
news today of archaeological discoveries on California's Channel Islands. A team led by Jon Erlandson has identified camp sites on Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands that are 12,200 to 11,400 years old. That would put them within a thousand years of the first certain human habitation of the Americas, around 13,300 years ago. The finds include stemmed spear points and these strange, crescent shaped blades (below), which they think were used in hunting birds with darts. Numerous shells and animal bones were found, all of marine species: abalone, seals, fish, and sea birds, including an extinct flightless duck. The finds show that the people of the west coast had effective boats and were quite at home on the ocean from an early time. These archaeologists want to argue that their sites are evidence of a coastal migration route to the Americas, a "kelp highway" from Japan around the southern edge of Beringia and so down to southern California. But a thousand years is plenty of time for people who came via the conventional land route to develop a coastal adaptation, so the case is hardly proved, and meanwhile the genetic evidence is pointing more strongly every month to a single small group of a few hundred settlers. Since sea levels along the west coast have risen more than 50 meters (160 feet) in the past 12,000 years, most of the evidence is now underwater, and resolving these disputes seems quite far away.
Interesting news today of archaeological discoveries on California's Channel Islands. A team led by Jon Erlandson has identified camp sites on Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands that are 12,200 to 11,400 years old. That would put them within a thousand years of the first certain human habitation of the Americas, around 13,300 years ago. The finds include stemmed spear points and these strange, crescent shaped blades (below), which they think were used in hunting birds with darts. Numerous shells and animal bones were found, all of marine species: abalone, seals, fish, and sea birds, including an extinct flightless duck. The finds show that the people of the west coast had effective boats and were quite at home on the ocean from an early time. These archaeologists want to argue that their sites are evidence of a coastal migration route to the Americas, a "kelp highway" from Japan around the southern edge of Beringia and so down to southern California. But a thousand years is plenty of time for people who came via the conventional land route to develop a coastal adaptation, so the case is hardly proved, and meanwhile the genetic evidence is pointing more strongly every month to a single small group of a few hundred settlers. Since sea levels along the west coast have risen more than 50 meters (160 feet) in the past 12,000 years, most of the evidence is now underwater, and resolving these disputes seems quite far away.
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