Although history books have long taught that the Bering land bridge served as the key migratory route into North America several thousand years ago, research efforts led by University anthropologists suggest that people may have come to the continent by alternate means.
According to research conducted at three sites on California’s Channel Islands, evidence of a seafaring community has suggested that inhabitants were able to travel in and out of the area 12,200 to 11,400 years ago, when the land was still separated from the mainland coast of California by nearly seven to eight kilometers.
“To get to the Channel Islands at the time, you needed to have some sort of boat,” said Todd Braje, an anthropology professor at Humboldt State University. “These people on the islands certainly had boats and were capable of making their maritime voyages based on the technologies and subsistence remains that we are finding; they were engaged in a diverse sort of maritime way of bird hunting, shellfish hunting, and sea mammal hunting.”
The archeological expedition — spearheaded by the Smithsonian Institution and Jon Erlandson, an anthropology professor and director of the University’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History — is part of an ongoing study of the area to determine the plausibility of a transpacific migration to North America.
Torben Rick, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s North American archeology curator and co-author of the study, said archeological discoveries on the island seem to add support to this theory. Rick said remnants of shellfish such as red abalones and California mussels were discovered on
San Miguel Island, while the remains of birds, fish and 52 serrated stone points called Channel Island barbed points were also unearthed.
These discoveries suggest that the inhabitants of the Channel Island chain had a very diverse lifestyle and used it to their advantage.
“What’s interesting about that is, it shows us that (not) only were these people out there living a coastal life-way, but they were taking advantage of the full suite of resources available to them and that they had a very diversified maritime economy,” Rick said in an interview with Science magazine.
Dan A. Guthrie, a biology professor at Claremont College, said the diverse subsistence of Channel Island inhabitants seem to support research surrounding the extinction of a flightless goose on the islands that began to disappear around the same time that the recently discovered stone points and crescents were made. Guthrie said goose remains, egg shells and remnants of large nesting colonies suggest that the bird was a relatively common animal species on the island prior to human contact.
“My work seems to support the idea that humans got out there about 12,000 years ago, but I don’t have any idea of how they got there,” Guthrie said.
The artifacts that were recovered from three sites date back to the end of the Pleistocene epoch on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands, which were connected as one island off the California coast at the time.
Braje said sea levels at the time were about 150 feet above current levels; however, rising sea levels over the years have engulfed areas where many of the inhabitants would have lived.
“One of the very difficult things is that over the last 20,000 years we have had a significant rise in the world’s sea level,” Braje said.
Dennis Jenkins, director of the Northern Great Basin archeological field school through the University’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, said stemmed points recovered at the Paisley Caves in Eastern Oregon radiocarbon-dated to 14,300 years ago closely match those found on the Channel Islands, which suggests there may have been interaction between the two societies. While the points differ in certain respects to its size and durability, Jenkins said the stemmed points from the Channel Islands and the Great Basin have the same shape.
“Many archeologists and anthropologists agree that people had entered the New World some other way than the Bering land bridge or the ice-free corridor, and the challenge is then finding the archeological evidence of where that route was and when that migration took place,” Braje said. “These sites get us one step closer to establishing a Pacific Coast migration route, and the next challenge will be then to find sites that date back further than 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.”

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