B.C. coast was earliest gateway to Americas, scientists say, challenging
prevailing theory
Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
Published: Saturday, March 15, 2008
A team of U.S. researchers has proposed a new "working model" for when and
how humans came to the New World.
Their research adds credence to a controversial theory that ancient
seafarers, travelling by boat along the ice-fringed British Columbia coast,
launched the peopling of the Americas about 15,000 years ago.
The proposal, published yesterday in the journal Science, challenges a
long-held view that the earliest newcomers to North America were big-game
hunters who arrived about 12,000 years ago from Siberia, pursuing mammoths
and other ice age prey across the dried-up Bering Strait to Alaska and the
Yukon.
They then eventually spread south to warmer parts of North America through
an ice-free corridor in present-day Alberta.
It appears, the U.S. researchers conclude, that both streams of migration
occurred. But their study tilts the crucial matter of identifying the
"first" wave of North Americans toward the coastal migrants, and sets the
date of that arrival back by at least 2,000 years, to 13,000 BC or earlier.
"If this is the time of colonization, geological data from Western Canada
suggest that humans dispersed along the recently de-glaciated Pacific
coastline," the team, led by Texas A&M University anthropologist Ted Goebel,
asserts.
"The first Americans used boats, and the coastal corridor would have been
the likely route of passage, since the interior corridor appears to have
remained closed for at least another 1,000 years," the study adds.
"Once humans reached the Pacific Northwest, they could have continued their
spread southward along the coast to Chile, as well as eastward."
This entry route would help explain the growing number of archeological
sites dating from before 13,000 years ago, which the previous prevailing
theory of an overland migration couldn't account for.
Presumed archeological traces left by the New World pioneers along B.C.'s
coast would have been submerged by the rising Pacific Ocean about 10,000
years ago, after the final retreat of the glaciers. That's why Canadian
scientists have been scouring raised sea caves on Vancouver Island and
elsewhere in B.C., looking for direct proof that this earlier coastal
migration took place.
Those caves, it's believed, were among the earliest ice-free refuges after
the glaciers retreated, and later escaped flooding from the rising Pacific.
Researchers believe they harbour evidence of a prehistoric ecosystem -- and
potentially even human artifacts.
In another project funded by the Canadian government, federal scientists are
preparing this year to probe the shallow seafloor off the Queen Charlotte
Islands in search of possible abandoned campsites inundated by the ocean
millennia ago.
The investigation near Burnaby Island, led by Parks Canada scientist Daryl
Fedje, is seeking evidence that ancient Asian seafarers, drawn on by
food-rich kelp beds, began populating this hemisphere thousands of years
before the migrants of the continental interior tracked prey east of the
Rockies.
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.
In their study, the U.S. researchers also cite genetic evidence suggesting
"all modern Native Americans descended from a single-source population" in
ancient Asia.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
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