Bison bones bolster idea Ice Age seafarers first to Americas

Bison bones bolster idea Ice Age seafarers first to Americas


Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service Published: Monday, March 24,
2008


A series of discoveries of ancient bison bones on Vancouver Island and
nearby Orcas Island in Washington state is fuelling excitement among
researchers that the Pacific coast offered a food-rich ecosystem for
Ice Age hunters some 14,000 years ago -- much earlier than the
prevailing scientific theory pegs the arrival of humans to the New
World.


Fourteen separate finds of remains of the extinct species bison
antiquus -- an ancestor of the plains buffalo that would become a
staple much later for Midwest natives -- show the islands were once
part of a coastal grassland refuge from the glaciers that enveloped
the rest of Canada and the northern U.S. at that time.


And among the relics found in areas including the Saanich Peninsula is
a particularly tantalizing piece of evidence: a leg bone from Orcas
Island that appears to have been butchered by a human -- hundreds of
years before humans were thought to have migrated to North America.


The bison-bone bonanza is to be highlighted at a major international
archeological conference this week in Vancouver. The event follows the
publication of a U.S. study earlier this month in the journal Science
that proposed a new "working model" for when and how ancient humans
first spread from northeast Asia to the northwest corner of the
Americas.


That study -- along with the bison finds and a growing number of other
archeological sites suggesting an earlier arrival for humans to this
hemisphere -- adds credence to a controversial theory that ancient
seafarers, travelling by boat along the ice-fringed B.C. coast,
launched the peopling of the New World about 15,000 years ago.


The Vancouver and Orcas islands discoveries also indicate that these
pioneering hunters could have relied on much more than seafood to
subsist in their new North American home, argues Michael Wilson, an
archeologist at B.C.'s Douglas College.


He is the co-author with U.S. archeologists Steve Kenady and Randall
Schalk of several new studies detailing the bison-bone sites.


Wilson says the "breakage patterns" on the bison leg bone from Orcas
Island are "certainly consistent with documented human butchering
patterns but are not by themselves 'proof'" that humans killed and ate
the animal.


"The Orcas and Vancouver Island finds are evidence for the existence
of a land-based mammal dispersal corridor from the mainland to the
islands at that time," he told Canwest News Service. "We provide a
reasonable alternative to the model that suggested a coastal
adaptation and use of sea mammal, mollusk and fish resources."


Mr. Wilson describes a Pacific shore much different than it is today,
with Vancouver Island nearly attached to the mainland because of lower
sea levels.


"People coming down the coast could have been doing the coastal
equivalent of island-hopping," he says. "We are not envisioning a
coastline bordered by towering walls of well-established ice.
Conditions were highly variable along the coast and I think that there
were some significant open areas. Early travellers were familiar with
such environments in areas to the north, so this was nothing new."


Whether based on seafood or bison meat, the picture of shoreline
hunters sketched out in the emergent "coastal migration" theory
challenges a long-held view that the earliest newcomers to North
America were big-game hunters who arrived about 12,500 years ago from
Siberia, pursuing mammoths and other ice age prey across the dried-up
Bering Strait to Alaska and Yukon, and eventually into the warmer
continental interior through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky
Mountains.


These hunters used a distinctive spear-tip known as a Clovis point to
kill their prey, and Clovis archeological finds throughout North
America show there was a rapid spread of these people and their
hunting technology once the glaciers began disappearing around 10,000
B.C.


But the "Clovis First" theory has increasingly come under fire from
critics who point to numerous archeological sites in both North and
South America that appear to have human artifacts from well before
13,000 years ago.


The U.S. team writing in Science, headed by Texas A&M University
anthropologist Ted Goebel, concluded that both the coastal and ice-
free corridor migrations probably 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
about 2,000 years before the Clovis hunters reached this continent.


"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 asserted in its Science study. "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."

National Post

LATE PLEISTOCENE BISON ANTIQUUS FROM ORCAS ISLAND, WASHINGTON, AND
EVIDENCE FOR AN EARLY POSTGLACIAL LAND MAMMAL DISPERSAL CORRIDOR FROM
THE MAINLAND TO VANCOUVER ISLAND
WILSON, Michael C., Department of Geology, Douglas College, PO Box
2503, New Westminster, BC V3L 5B2, Canada, wilso...@douglas.bc.ca,
KENADY, Stephen M., Cultural Resource Management, 5319 Cedar Ridge
Place, Sedro-Woolley, WA 98284, and SCHALK, Randall F., Cascadia
Archaelogy, P.O. Box 51058, Seattle, WA 98115-1058


We report a skull and partial skeleton of Bison antiquus from the base
of a peat bog, Ayer Pond, on Orcas Island, Puget Sound, Washington.
The specimen, dated to 11 760±70 14C yr BP (Beta-216160), lay in
lacustrine sands above an unconformity marking the emergent Everson
Glaciomarine Drift surface (>12.0 ka). Other Orcas Island and
Vancouver Island bison finds in similar bog settings indicate an
established population and suggest a late-glacial land mammal
dispersal corridor between the mainland, San Juan Islands, and
Vancouver Island, partly involving a briefly emergent glaciomarine
landscape, with smaller water barriers than today. Relative sea level
curves indicate the onset of emergent conditions by about 12.0 14C ka,
lasting for at most a few millennia. Rich in marine-derived organic
material, this landscape was colonized rapidly by terrestrial plants
and animals. An early unstable tundra-like or herbaceous meadow
community and succeeding open pine woodland, documented in nearby
pollen sequences predating 11.0 ka, would have been favorable, though
not optimal, for bison. However, expansion of closed mixed-conifer
forests after 11.0 ka likely contributed to their extirpation.
Interpretation of vegetation chronosequences for these islands must
take into account the probable role of large mammals in importing
seeds and in impacting succession through grazing, browsing, and
trampling. Evidence for possible butchering by humans adds interest to
the Ayer Pond discovery in view of its pre-Clovis age.
Cordilleran Section - 103rd Annual Meeting (4-6 May 2007)
General Information for this Meeting
Session No. 9
Quaternary and Tertiary Records of Past Environments, Pacific
Northwest I: In Honor of Calvin Heusser
WWU-Communications Facility: CF110
8:00 AM-12:00 PM, Saturday, 5 May 2007

Official Report

Bison bones bolster idea Ice Age seafarers first to Americas