The extraordinary discovery provides important clues to a critical yet mysterious period in human history -- the end of the last major ice age -- when nomadic people began populating the Americas but left little evidence about who they were or where they came from.
The woman's bones, subjected to recent re-examination after spending the better part of four decades in storage, join a growing group of ancient skeletal remains that challenge traditional theories that the first visitors came here from northern Asia by way of a land bridge to Alaska.
The new evidence suggests that the first settlers could have been Polynesians or southern Asians who arrived by boat. Some of the recent remains have features more typical of Europeans, scientists say.
"Bottom line is she may be the earliest inhabitant of North America we have discovered. It's a find of national significance," said John Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and part of the team involved in the research.
The skeletal remains consist of two thigh bones scooped from a gully at Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island 40 years ago. They were tested in the 1960s and kept in their original soil before being encased in plaster and stored in the basement of the Santa Barbara museum. Researchers at the museum and Channel Islands National Park recently decided to subject the bones to sophisticated DNA and radiocarbon testing methods that were not available when the bones were discovered.
The tests were performed by Stafford Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., one of the nation's pre-eminent carbon dating labs. The results showed that the bones are probably 13,000 years old, 1,400 years older than previously thought. That would make the "Arlington Springs woman" slightly older than the oldest known human skeletons in North America, which came from Montana, Idaho and Texas, scientists say.
Other members of the research team included scientists from the University of California, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the National Park Service.
The bones from Santa Rosa Island join an exclusive group of skeletons from the very earliest people to arrive in the Western Hemisphere. In those days, the colonizers would have seen continent-sized glaciers and woolly mammoths. The sea level was 360 feet lower than it is today. The northern Channel Islands near Ventura and Santa Barbara counties were joined in a mass that scientists refer to as Santa Rosae.
The bones were found in a canyon on the island that ancient peoples have inhabited on and off for thousands of years. Until a couple of years ago, most scientists thought the earliest people to reach the New World arrived about 11,500 years ago, probably by walking across a land bridge where the Bering Strait now separates Alaska from Siberia.
History books describe them and their descendants as the Clovis peoples, big-game hunters who left stylized spear points that enabled archeologists to track their migration south through parting glaciers along the Rocky Mountains into the present-day United States and Latin America.
But recent discoveries point to an earlier colonization of the Western Hemisphere. A campsite known as Monte Verde in southern Chile was occupied 12,500 years ago. At the Cactus Hill site in Virginia, scientists found stone tools and charcoal that may date back 15,500 years.
These discoveries challenge the theory that the first migrants slogged overland through passages in receding glaciers. Travel along that route would have been slow and perilous and does not account for widespread distribution of humans at such an early date, the experts said.
Scientists increasingly postulate that the original colonizers of the New World might have taken a coastal route. Where glaciers stopped at the water's edge, protein-rich seafood was abundant, and the visitors could travel by boat. The bones from the island woman bolster that hypothesis, said archeologist Rob Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of First Americans at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
"The broad significance is it puts humans in a maritime setting in western North America 13,000 years ago. It demonstrates the use of boats," Bonnichsen said. "This Arlington Springs find is really a significant find in terms of providing support for that larger theoretical idea."
[Source: Contra Costa Times / CA / by Gary Polakovic - LA Times - April 11 1999 ]
Remains may be 13,000 years old
LOS ANGELES -- In a discovery that sheds new light on the human conquest of the New World, a team of scientists says that bones from an ancient woman who lived on the Channel Islands off Ventura County in Southern California might be the oldest human remains ever found in North America.
• Woman's bones on Channel Islands may be
the oldest ever found in North America, scientists say
