Rediscovering America
The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought
But the origins of these coastal people remain a mystery. It seems unlikely that Clovis hunters could have scampered west along the ice sheet's southern edge, transformed themselves into a seagoing, salmon-catching, seal-spearing culture, and occupied Haida Gwaii within a few centuries of arrival. Hence the favorite hypothesis, first proposed more than 20 years ago but now supported by the Smithsonian's Stanford, Harvard's Mandryk, Fedje, and many others, is that many people migrated to the New World along the coast instead of overland. Travel may have been in small boats, perhaps covered in skin like traditional Eskimo and Aleut kayaks. If, as seems likely, people migrated during the height of the last Ice Age, between about 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, they would have avoided glaciers calving into the sea. "There was boat use in Japan 20,000 years ago," says Jon Erlandson, a University of Oregon anthropologist. "The Kurile Islands [north of Japan] are like steppingstones to Beringia," the then continuous land bridging the Bering Strait. Migrants, he said, could have then skirted the tidewater glaciers in Canada right on down the coast.
Evidence of other maritime cultures along the West Coast is coming in fast. Erlandson has uncovered remains of seagoing peoples who lived more than 10,000 years ago in the Channel Islands off Southern California. And last month, other scientists reported that two sites in Peru reveal people were living along its coast, subsisting almost entirely on seafood, nearly 11,000 years ago, too long ago for the Clovis migration to have gotten there and spawned a maritime way of life.
The Americas are big continents. Perhaps the earliest people just weren't very numerous and left little mark of their passing. Or, maybe most of them lived out on the then exposed continental shelf, retreating inland only when the end of the Ice Age raised the sea. Perhaps these people, driven inland, gave rise to the Clovis hunters. Well below the waves and under millenniums' worth of cold sediment, may lie the footprints, remains of meals, and discarded tools and campfire pits of a lost world. It is, indeed, a whole new ballgame in the search for the first Americans.
New paths to the Americas Many archaeologists now believe that people arrived in the New World much earlier than previously thought-perhaps as long ago as 30,000 years.
[Map is not available.] Orange line: Early migrations. Prior to 22,000 years ago Yellow line: Later migrations. Less than 12,000 years ago White line: Migrations from Europe. More than 10,000 years ago Tan areas: Previous shape of land mass. 21,000 years ago
Paths of progress. Seafaring settlers may have worked their way along the North Pacific Rim in small boats more than 22,000 years ago, then gradually migrated to the interior.
European crossing? There is even speculation based on genetic evidence in a small percentage of contemporary Native Americans, that prehistoric Europeans may have traveled to the Americas across North Atlantic ice sheets long before Columbus's voyages.
[Illustration labels]: Ice sheets 21,000 years ago; McKenzie corridor; Ice sheets 12,000 years ago; Sea ice
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