Some early Americans preferred to stay close to the sea, judging by discoveries on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. These ancient hunting grounds have yielded small stone tools as well as abundant remains of fish, seabirds and shellfish.
Jon Erlandson at the University of Oregon in Eugene and his team dated three sites to between about 12,000 and 11,000 years ago. They found bones from geese, cormorants, albatross, fish and marine mammals, along with the shells of mussels, crabs and abalone.
The hunters must have reached the islands by boat, but neither their boats nor human burials have been found. However, their projectile points (pictured) look different from the stone tools made by inland peoples from the Clovis culture, and so are unlikely to have derived from that source. The Channel Island sites support the idea that humans settled the Americas while skirting the Pacific coast.
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Stone Age home by the sea. Nature 471, 139 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/471139d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/471139d
