Marc Verha
Fri, Mar-21-08, 06:18
Ancient seafarers may have been first settlers
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 http://www.canada.com/victoriatimesc-
olonist/news/story.html?id=7715ca13-0a49
-4cb6-b0bd-9af973884e20&k=30338
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 http://www.canada.com/victoriatimesc-
olonist/news/story.html?id=7715ca13-0a49
-4cb6-b0bd-9af973884e20&k=30338