A team of researchers led by University of Oregon and Smithsonian Institution scholars reported the discovery of stemmed projectile points, crescent shaped arrow heads, and other artifacts made from chert that indicate a thriving seafaring and aquatic based culture existed in the area of today’s Channel Islands in California between 11,400 and 12,200 years ago according to a review of a March 4, 2011, article in the journal Science at the EurekaAlert web site.
The artifacts were found at three sites on Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands in caves and chert outcrops.
During the Pleistocene epoch the water levels would have been 160 to 200 feet lower than they are at present. The number and variety of artifacts found indicate the population migrated inland with rising ocean levels.
The workmanship of the crescent shaped arrow heads indicate a high degree of sophistication and specialization in the people who made them. The conclusions that the points were used for hunting fish and birds are a result of the thinness and shape of the points.
The stemmed projectile points are not Clovis type. They are extremely thin and heavily serrated and range in size from tiny to very large indicating they were used in hunting a variety of game. This may indicate a well-structured culture that had adapted to a coastal environment earlier than Clovis making peoples in the central and northern Americas.
The accumulated evidence leads credence to one of the researchers proposition that a pre-Clovis seafaring culture may have followed a "kelp highway" from what is present day Japan across the coast of Beringia and Alaska and south into northern California. The "kelp highway" would have been a rich source of seal, otter, shellfish, other fish, and birds that could have been exploited by a people with the sophisticated weaponry found by the research team.
The assumption that this group of people predated Clovis culture is substantiated by the dating of the artifacts and the yet to be explored underwater regions of the Channel Islands that could reveal artifacts older than Clovis points in the Americas.
The authors are Jon Erlandson, professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon (UO), Torben C. Rick, curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution, Todd J. Braje, professor of anthropology at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif.; UO anthropology professors Douglas J. Kennett and Madonna L. Moss; Brian Fulfrost of the geography department of San Francisco State University; Daniel A. Guthrie of the Joint Science Department, Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer Colleges of Claremont, Calif.; Leslie Reeder, anthropology department of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; Craig Skinner of the Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory in Corvallis, Ore.; Jack Watts of Kellogg College at Oxford University, United Kingdom; and UO graduate students Molly Casperson, Nicholas Jew, Brendan Culleton, Tracy Garcia and Lauren Willis.
Comments