A Humboldt State University professor has co-authored a Science magazine article finding that primitive stone tools found on California coastal islands are evidence of seafaring and island colonization 12,000 years ago by Paleoindian peoples.

Primitive artifacts, including barbed points and abraded bone tool fragments, were uncovered at archaeological sites on the Channel Islands, a shell mound on Santa Rosa Island and on San Miguel Island, according to an HSU news release. The findings herald prehistoric coastal migrations into the Americas from Asia.
The findings are summarized in the Science article, which is titled “Paleoindian Seafaring, Maritime Technologies, and Coastal Foraging on California's Channel Islands” and was co-authored by HSU anthropology professor Todd Braje.

”The lives of these early coastal foragers seem to have been those of shellfish gathering, bird hunting, fishing and the production of a unique set of maritime hunting equipment,” Braje said in the press release.

The findings indicate that these settlers' way of life was very different from that of the prehistoric big game hunter peoples previously thought to have been the first to enter the New World via the Bering Strait.

Braje and his colleagues uncovered a series of 12,000-year-old stone tool production and maritime hunting and foraging sites. The discoveries are crucial because they bridge an important chronological gap, according to the release.
Missing until now were subsistence and settlement Channel Island locations older than 11,500 years.

The artifacts Braje and his colleagues unearthed are evidence of an early coastal migration in the New World. Importantly, according to the release, they support a similar discovery in the 1990s, dated to 14,500 years ago, at Monte Verde on the southern tip of Chile.

Combined, the discoveries at Monte Verde and the Channel Islands refute the notion that it was big game hunters who were the first to cross the Bering Land Bridge, head from Siberia to North America, settle inland, and feed on mastodons, mammoths and the like, according to the release.
”What we found amazed us -- a series of 12,000-year-old stone tool production sites,” Braje said in the release. “Years of research had convinced us that the earliest chipped stone tools on the islands were crude, informal and expedient. But the tools at these Cardwell Bluffs sites were thin, delicate, and exquisitely made by expert flint-knappers.”

Baje has worked on archaeological projects all over North America, but his research has centered on the northern Channel Islands and along mainland coastal California and Oregon. He is the author of “Modern Oceans, Ancient Sites,” which examines 10,000 years of interactions with Channel Island marine and terrestrial ecosystems.