Original headline: Stone drills support theory of early Asian seafarers
The discovery of 8,000-year-old boat-making tools on an island off California is adding weight to a controversial theory that the first people to reach North America could have been Asian seafarers who fished and hunted seals as they migrated south along the B.C. coast.
At a place called Eel Point on San Clemente Island, about 50 kilometres from San Diego, archeologists have unearthed three stone reamers -- primitive drills used in the making of boat hulls.
Animal remains also found at the site -- including the bones of seals, dolphins and sea lions -- suggest the ancient seafarers were adept at both deep-water travel and hunting the large marine mammals needed to sustain a healthy community.
Despite lingering doubt North American natives possessed "sophisticated seafaring capabilities" at such an early date, the researchers argue in the latest edition of American Antiquity that "such voyages were well within the technological grasp" of people on the Pacific Coast at least eight millenniums ago.
"Eel Point shows that island seafaring and intensively maritime economies were well developed," write U.S. archeologists Jim Cassidy and Mark Raab and their Russian colleague Nina Kononenko.
The finding isn't ironclad proof the first migrants to the New World were maritime people. The prevailing theory remains that the earliest residents were big-game hunters who crossed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska .
But other evidence suggests the Pacific Coast was not an ice-bound wasteland when Stone Age tribes first arrived.
Paleontologists throughout the Pacific Northwest -- including a team of Canadian scientists that recently excavated a bone-filled cave on Vancouver Island -- now argue the coast had rich and diverse ecosystems that could have supported early waves of migrants who hunted and fished their way south along the shoreline.
"It makes perfect sense theoretically that people could have come in that way, because boat-using and seafaring indisputably was around during in Late Pleistocene, Early Holocene times in east Asia," says Raab, who teaches anthropology at California State University. "The problem was there was never any direct evidence."
A book published last year by Canadian writer Tom Koppel, Lost World -- Rewriting Prehistory: How New Science is Tracing America's Ice Age Mariners, pulled together the threads of research projects being carried out along the Pacific Coast and wove a powerful argument in favour of coastal migration. It's a thesis, he insists, that could "revolutionize our most fundamental self-image" if proven correct.
"We have been accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a species in terrestrial terms -- evolving in the savanna of Africa; hunkering in caves in Europe," he writes, "but if the scientists on the Pacific coast were right, we also became bold seafarers at a very early date, maritime people who built boats and braved the stormy and icebound shores of the North Pacific."
