13,000-year-old bones found near SoCal coast could rewrite human history

Findings from a mysterious remote chain of islands off the coast of California are rattling bones in the science community as bone-pickers find traces of a “vanished world.”

The Golden State’s Channel Islands, located several miles off the SoCal coast, are home to the remnants of revelational lost civilizations intriguing enough to make Indiana Jones blush.

A banner finding in the area has been the 13,000-year-old remains of the “Arlington Springs Man,” the earliest dated adult found on the continent.

A new documentary highlighted the extraordinary discovery, which has changed science’s thinking around where and when humans first migrated to North America. Because of the finding of the “Arlington Springs Man,” scientists believe humans could have been on the continent earlier than the Clovis culture recognized as landing in the area first.

The “Arlington Springs Man” was found on Santa Rosa Island among the four northern Channel Islands, which also include San Miguel, Santa Cruz and Anacapa. Other major islands in the archipelago include the Southern Channel Islands of Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara, San Clemente and San Nicolas.

Bones of the man were discovered 37 feet below sand, mud and gravel in 1959.

Evidence found on the Channel Islands suggests humans could have arrived via boat instead of crossing an inland ice corridor. If true, it would overturn the conventional thinking that Americans crossed a land bridge from modern-day Siberia and traveled south.

Instead, ancient humans could have used “kelp highways” to assist them in traveling by boat along the Pacific shoreline to settle in the Channel Islands.

“This connects with the whole idea of a coastal migration, an ancient coastal migration where people would have been using watercraft and going around glaciers when they encountered them and working their way down until they came to California,” UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor John Johnson said.

Johnson believes the people who arrived on the Channel Islands evolved into the Chumash tribe, native to California’s central and southern coast.

“People showed up on this island 13,000 years ago or thereabouts and evolved through time into the group we know as the Chumash,” he said.

Other findings from the Channel Islands include the bones of pygmy mammoths, a type of dwarf mammoth native to the northern Channel Islands. The tiny mammoths were much smaller than the popular woolly mammoth, coming in at around 4.5 to 7 feet high at the shoulders and weighing about 2,000 pounds.

Wooly mammoths were several times bigger, coming in at 14 feet tall and weighing about 20,000 pounds.

The mini mammoths are thought to have gone extinct around the time that humans arrived on the Channel Islands and when worldwide climates began changing. No exact cause has been determined for their disappearance.

Europeans arrived on the islands in 1542, with Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo making landfall. Cabrillo chose to winter on the islands after storms forced his ships to turn back before sighting the San Francisco Bay.

“This was the furthest projection of Europe into a world that they knew nothing about,” one historian said.

Cabrillo would die there after shattering a limb during a skirmish with indigenous tribes and dying from the complications of the injury in January 1543.

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