[Aztlan] LOOKING FOR PRE-CLOVIS OFF QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS

[michael ruggeri]


Tuesday » August 21 » 2007

Were seafarers living here 16,000 years ago?
Site off Queen Charlottes could revolutionize our understanding of  
New World colonization

Randy Boswell
CanWest News Service

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

In a Canadian archeological project that could revolutionize  
understanding of when and how humans first reached the New World,  
federal researchers in B.C. have begun probing an underwater site off  
the Queen Charlotte Islands for traces of a possible prehistoric camp  
on the shores of an ancient lake long since submerged by the Pacific  
Ocean.

The landmark investigation, led by Parks Canada scientist Daryl  
Fedje, is seeking evidence to support a contentious new theory about  
the peopling of the Americas that is gradually gaining support in  
scholarly circles. It holds that ancient Asian seafarers, drawn on by  
food-rich kelp beds ringing the Pacific coasts of present-day Russia,  
Alaska and British Columbia, began populating this hemisphere  
thousands of years before the migration of Siberian big-game hunters  
-- who are known to have travelled across the dried up Bering Strait  
and down an ice-free corridor east of the Rockies as the last  
glaciers began retreating about 13,000 years ago.

The earlier maritime migrants are thought to have plied the coastal  
waters of the North Pacific in sealskin boats, moving in small groups  
over many generations from their traditional homelands in the  
Japanese islands or elsewhere along Asia's eastern seaboard.

Interest in the theory -- which is profiled in the latest edition of  
New Scientist magazine by Canadian science writer Heather Pringle --  
has been stoked by recent DNA studies in the U.S. showing tell-tale  
links between a 10,000-year-old skeleton found in an Alaskan cave and  
genetic traits identified in modern Japanese and Tibetan populations,  
as well as in aboriginal groups along the west coasts of North and  
South America.

The rise of the "coastal migration" theory has also been spurred by a  
sprinkling of other ancient archeological finds throughout the  
Americas -- several of them, including the 14,850-year-old Chilean  
site of Monte Verde, too old to fit the traditional theory of an  
overland migration by the "first Americans" that didn't begin for  
another millennium or two.

Proponents of coastal migration argue that Ice Age migrants in boats  
might have island-hopped southward along North America's west coast  
as early as 16,000 years ago, taking advantage of small refuges of  
land that had escaped envelopment by glaciers.

The difficulty is that nearly all of the land that might contain  
traces of human settlement or activity -- the critical proof for  
archeologists -- is now under water.

Several significant finds have been made in raised caves along the  
B.C. coast that were not inundated by the rising Pacific in post- 
glacial Canada.

In 2003, Simon Fraser University scientists reported the discovery of  
16,000-year-old mountain goat bones in a cave near Port Eliza on  
Vancouver Island, and similar finds of prehistoric bear bones pre- 
dating the glacial retreat have been held up as proof of a shoreline  
ecosystem that could have sustained large mammals, as well as human  
hunters.

The new Parks Canada target is at a site in the Gwaii Haanas National  
Park Reserve just north of Burnaby Island, near the southern end of  
the Queen Charlottes.

According to the New Scientist, Fedje has discovered evidence of a  
prehistoric lake and streambed about 50 metres below the surface at a  
site called Section Cove, as well as signs that the river and lake  
were once rich sources of salmon -- an "irresistible" food source for  
ancient coastal migrants.

A book published in 2003 by Canadian author Tom Koppel summarized the  
research projects being carried out along the Pacific Coast while  
weaving a powerful argument in favour of coastal migration.

"We have been accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a species in  
terrestrial terms -- evolving in the savanna of Africa; hunkering in  
caves in Europe; gradually spreading overland through Asia; and  
finally trekking dry-shod across a land bridge at the Bering Strait  
into the Americas while preying upon big ice age animals,'' he wrote  
in Lost World -- Rewriting Prehistory: How New Science is Tracing  
America's Ice Age Mariners.

"But if the scientists on the Pacific coast were right, we also  
became bold seafarers at a very early date, maritime people who built  
boats and braved the stormy and icebound shores of the North Pacific."





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