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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT size=4>California islands give up evidence of
early seafaring</FONT></DIV></DIV>
<DIV>Evidence for a diversified sea-based economy among North American
inhabitants dating from 12,200 to 11,400 years ago is emerging from three sites
on California's Channel Islands. </DIV>
<DIV><SMALL><FONT size=2>March 3, 2011 </FONT></SMALL></DIV>
<DIV><SMALL><A
href="http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-california-islands-evidence-early-seafaring.html"><FONT
size=2>http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-california-islands-evidence-early-seafaring.html</FONT></A></SMALL></DIV>
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title="A three-view look at a chert crescent dating to ancient seafarers on San Miguel Island. Credit: Courtesy of Jon Erlandson"
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<P class=desc>Reporting in the March 4 issue of <I>Science</I>, a 15-member team
led by University of Oregon and Smithsonian Institution scholars describes the
discovery of scores of stemmed projectile points and crescents dating to that
time period. The artifacts are associated with the remains of shellfish, seals,
geese, cormorants and fish.</P></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>A three-view look at a chert crescent dating </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>to ancient seafarers on San Miguel Island. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=1>Credit: Courtesy of Jon Erlandson</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>
<P>Funded primarily by grants from the National Science Foundation, the team
also found thousands of artifacts made from chert, a flint-like rock used to
make projectile points and other <A class=textTag
href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/stone+tools/" rel=tag><FONT
color=#0e3266>stone tools</FONT></A>.</P>
<P>Some of the intact projectiles are so delicate that their only practical use
would have been for hunting on the water, said Jon Erlandson, professor of
anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the
University of Oregon. He has been conducting research on the islands for more
than 30 years.</P>
<P>"This is among the earliest evidence of seafaring and maritime adaptations in
the Americas, and another extension of the diversity of Paleoindian economies,"
Erlandson said. "The points we are finding are extraordinary, the workmanship
amazing. They are ultra thin, serrated and have incredible barbs on them. It's a
very sophisticated chipped-stone technology." He also noted that the stemmed
points are much different than the iconic fluted points left throughout North
America by Clovis and Folsom peoples who hunted big game on land.</P>
<P>The artifacts were recovered from three sites that date to the end of the <A
class=textTag href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/pleistocene+epoch/"
rel=tag><FONT color=#0e3266>Pleistocene epoch</FONT></A> on <STRONG>Santa
Rosa</STRONG> and <STRONG>San Miguel</STRONG> islands, which in those days were
connected as one island off the California coast. Sea levels then were 50 to 60
meters (about 160-200 feet) below modern levels. Rising seas have since flooded
the shorelines and coastal lowlands where early populations would have spent
most of their time.</P>
<P>Erlandson and his colleagues have focused their search on upland features
such as springs, caves, and chert outcrops that would have drawn early maritime
peoples into the interior. Rising seas also may have submerged evidence of even
older human habitation of the islands. <!-- inj G3 --><BR><!-- Google FISRT Adsense block -->
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<P><FONT color=#808080 size=4></FONT></P>The newly released study focuses on the
artifacts and animal remains recovered, but the implications for understanding
the peopling of the Americas may run deeper.</DIV>
<P>The technologies involved suggest that these early islanders were not members
of the land-based Clovis culture, Erlandson said. No fluted points have been
found on the islands. Instead, the points and crescents are similar to artifacts
found in the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau areas, including pre-Clovis levels
at Paisley Caves in eastern Oregon that are being studied by another UO
archaeologist, Dennis Jenkins.</P>
<P>Last year, Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones, archaeologists at New York's
Hamilton College who study sites in the Great Basin, argued that stemmed and
Clovis point technologies were separate, with the stemmed points originating
from Pacific Coast populations and not, as conventional wisdom holds, from the
Clovis people who moved westward from the Great Plains. Erlandson and colleagues
noted that the Channel Island points are also broadly similar to stemmed points
found early sites around the Pacific Rim, from Japan to South America.</P>
<P>Six years ago, Erlandson proposed that Late Pleistocene sea-going people may
have followed a "kelp highway" stretching from Japan to Kamchatka, along the
south coast of Beringia and Alaska, then southward down the Northwest Coast to
California. Kelp forests are rich in seals, sea otters, fish, seabirds, and
shellfish such as abalones and sea urchins.</P>
<P>"The technology and seafaring implications of what we've found on the <A
class=textTag href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/channel+islands/" rel=tag><FONT
color=#0e3266>Channel Islands</FONT></A> are magnificent," said study co-author
Torben C. Rick, curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian
Institution. "Some of the paleo-ecological and subsistence implications are also
very important. These sites indicate very early and distinct coastal and island
subsistence strategies, including harvest of red abalones and other shellfish
and fish dependent on kelp forests, but also the exploitation of larger
pinnipeds and waterfowl, including an extinct flightless duck.</P>
<P>"This combination of unique hunting technologies found with marine mammal and
migratory waterfowl bones provides a very different picture of the Channel
Islands than what we know today, and indicates very early and diverse maritime
life ways and foraging practices," Rick said. "What is so interesting is that
not only do the data we have document some of the earliest marine mammal and
bird exploitation in North America, but they show that very early on New World
coastal peoples were hunting such animals and birds with sophisticated
technologies that appear to have been refined for life in coastal and aquatic
habitats."</P>
<P>The stemmed points found on the Channel Islands range from tiny to large,
probably indicating that they were used for hunting a variety of animals.</P>
<P>"We think the crescents were used as transverse projectile points, probably
for hunting birds. Their broad stone tips, when attached to a dart shaft
provided a stone age shotgun-approach to hunting birds in flight," Erlandson
said. "These are very distinctive artifacts, hundreds of which have been found
on the Channel Islands over the years, but rarely in a stratified context, he
added. Often considered to be between 8,000 and 10,000 years old in California,
"we now have crescents between 11,000 and 12,000 years old, some of them
associated with thousands of bird bones."</P>
<P>The next challenge, Erlandson and Rick noted, is to find even older
archaeological sites on the Channel Islands, which might prove that a coastal
migration contributed to the initial peopling of the Americas, now thought to
have occurred two to three millennia
earlier.<BR></P></DIV></SPAN></FONT><BR></BODY></HTML>