Scientists Found Something On A California Island That Doesn’t Match History

[00:00:00]I once asked Croc how the first Americans got here.

[00:00:03]The answer was simple. They walked down out of Siberia across a land bridge and through a gap that opened in the ice on foot the whole way into an empty continent. Then an island off the coast of California gave up its dead. In a canyon wall on Santa Rosa Island 37 feet down an archaeologist found two human thigh bones. They turned out to be 13,000 years old some of the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas. And they were sitting on an island no human being should have been able to reach on foot because it had never once been connected to the land.

[00:00:37]Santa Rosa Island sits about 40 miles off the coast of Southern California.

[00:00:41]It's one of the Channel Islands a chain of wind scoured hills rising out of the Pacific across the water from Santa Barbara. Today you get there by boat or small plane. There's no bridge, no causeway, nothing but open channel between the island and the shore. And here's the thing that matters most about this place. There never was. During the last ice age when so much of the planet's water was locked up in glaciers that the sea sat hundreds of feet lower than today the four northern Channel Islands were joined into one long super island. Geologist call it Santa Rosae.

[00:01:14]It was maybe four times the size of the islands today a single land mass running about 75 miles end to end. But even then even at the lowest the ocean has been in a hundred thousand years Santa Rosae stood apart. Deep open water always separated it from the mainland.

[00:01:30]The island was never at any point something you could walk to which makes anything you find on it a real problem.

[00:01:35]The man who found the bones spent 20 years looking for something else. Phil Orr curator of anthropology and paleontology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History had been working the steep canyons of Santa Rosa since the 1940s mostly hunting the fossils of pygmy mammoths the strange dwarf elephants that once lived on the island.

[00:01:54]In 1959 at a place called Arlington Springs, he spotted a human thigh bone eroding out of the side of a canyon wall. It was deep, 37 ft below the surface in old water-laid sediment from the end of the ice age. Orr recovered two femurs, wrapped the whole block of earth around them in plaster, and brought it back to the museum. He was sure the bones were ancient.

[00:02:17]The dating tools of 1959 couldn't prove how ancient, so his find got a headline, a rough date of around 10,000 years, and then a long quiet. The plaster block went into storage, where it sat mostly forgotten for 30 years.

[00:02:33]What Orr had pulled out of that canyon wall was a person who died at the very end of the ice age on a green super island that doesn't exist anymore in a world already sinking under a rising sea. He just didn't have the means to prove what that meant. Because the island itself was carrying an argument [music] if you knew how to read it. Nothing gets onto an ocean island by accident. The pygmy mammoths were the proof of it.

[00:02:55]Their giant ancestors, Columbian mammoths, had reached Santa Rosae by swimming miles of open water, drawn by the smell of vegetation, and over thousands of generations of island life they shrank, dwarfed by the limits of the place, until they were about the size of a large horse.

[00:03:11]An animal stuck on an island changes.

[00:03:14]That's the signature of true isolation, and Santa Rosae had it. So, the island was a sealed room. Everything living there had crossed water to arrive. That was fine for a mammoth that could swim for miles. It was a very different thing for a human being. And when Orr found those human bones in the canyon, he'd put a person inside the sealed room. The only question left was how old that person really was, because the age was the whole case. And in 1959, the age was exactly the thing nobody could pin down.

[00:03:43]Radiocarbon dating was barely a decade old back then. The methods of the day needed large amounts of material, and still came back with wide soft numbers.

[00:03:51]And dating human bone directly, the collagen inside it was right at the edge of what was possible. So, Orr did the honest thing. He dated the charcoal in the same layer, got a rough figure of around 10,000 years, and admitted the bones themselves hadn't been measured.

[00:04:06]That left a gap a critic could drive right through.

[00:04:08]Maybe the bones were younger than the layer and had settled down into it.

[00:04:12]Maybe the charcoal and the person weren't the same age at all. 10,000 years was old, but it wasn't impossible, and it sat comfortably inside the story everyone already believed. To break that story, you needed a date taken straight from the person at a precision that didn't exist yet. So, the bones waited in their plaster for a machine that hadn't been invented, and the story those bones were waiting to challenge was the most settled idea in American archaeology. For most of the 20th century, there was one accepted way the first people reached the Americas, and it was a walk. Hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia on foot, then came south through a narrow corridor that opened up between two great ice sheets as the glaciers melted, an inland passage down the spine of the continent. It got tied to the Clovis culture, named for their distinctive stone spear points, and dated to around 13,000 years ago. Clovis First, they called the model, and for decades, it was less a theory than a rule. Every piece of it was built on land, walking, ice, an inland corridor, big game hunters chasing herds across open country. In that picture, the Pacific Coast was an edge, not a road, and nobody was picturing boats. The idea that the first Americans might have been a seafaring people working their way down the coastline by water wasn't just unproven. It ran against the whole shape of the accepted story, where the ocean was a wall, and an island you could only reach by boat sat completely outside that model, which is exactly why the bones on Santa Rosa mattered so much, and exactly why their real age had to wait.

[00:05:41]>> [music] >> The wait ended in the late 1980s when the museum decided to open that plaster block back up. Orr had retired by then.

[00:05:49]His successor, an anthropologist named John Johnson, working with the Channel Islands National Park archaeologist Don Morris, went back to the bones with tools Orr never had. By that point, a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry could date the collagen protein inside a bone directly.

[00:06:07]No charcoal, no guessing about layers, a date read straight from the person themselves. The catch was that the bones were so old barely any protein was left.

[00:06:16]It took a specialist, the geochemist Thomas Stafford, using a filtration method he'd pioneered, to pull a clean datable sample of amino acids out of a single fragment of the femur. The assumption going in was the ordinary one.

[00:06:29]If this island fell in line with everything else, the person should date to Clovis time or a little after, and probably younger, something a walking people could account for once the coast got figured out. The date came back at 13,000 years, not younger, not safely inside the story, right at the leading edge of it, which meant Arlington Springs man was among the oldest securely dated human beings ever found anywhere in the Americas, and he was standing on an island. The oldest American wasn't out on the plains chasing mammoths through a gap in the ice.

[00:06:59]He was 40 mi out in the Pacific in a place you could only reach one way. This person, or [music] his parents, or their parents before them, had crossed open ocean in a boat 13,000 years ago, at the very moment the first Americans were supposedly still walking in. And that forces you to go looking for something almost entirely gone. The road these people came by, if the first Americans moved down the Pacific coast by boat, they'd have followed a very particular kind of highway, one made of food.

[00:07:27]Researchers call it the kelp highway. It was a nearly unbroken ribbon of underwater kelp forest that once ran from Japan along the southern edge of the ice age land bridge and all the way down the western coast of the Americas.

[00:07:39]Kelp forests are packed with fish, seals, shellfish, birds. And people with boats could have traveled that green corridor for thousands of miles, never far from a meal, slipping down the outer edge of a continent whose inland doors were still frozen shut. But that road is a ghost now.

[00:07:55]When the ice age ended and the glaciers gave their water back to the sea, the ocean rose more than 300 feet and drowned the whole coastline those first travelers would have used. Santa Rosae alone lost about 70% of its land. The beaches they landed on, the camps they built, the shore they walked, all of it is now far out to sea and deep underwater. A lost country you can only survey with sonar and coring rigs.

[00:08:17]Arlington Springs man survived only because he died high up inland on ground that stayed above the waterline.

[00:08:24]Almost everything around his story sank.

[00:08:27]So here's the strange shape of this whole discovery.

[00:08:30]The single most important thing about Arlington Springs man is something that isn't there. There's no boat, no paddle, no hull, nothing of the watercraft that had to have carried him or his ancestors across that channel. Boats of that age were almost certainly made of wood, reeds, hide, stuff that rots and vanishes. And anything left on the old shoreline is under 100 feet of ocean now. What we've got is a pair of thigh bones and an island that was never connected to land. And that turns out to be enough because the logic is airtight.

[00:08:59]The person is real. The island is real.

[00:09:02]The water between them is real. A body in a sealed room is proof that something opened the door. It's a discovery made almost entirely of absence.

[00:09:10]No boat, but there had to have been a boat. A drowned road nobody can walk that somebody clearly walked. A whole seafaring people who left behind on dry reachable land one person and two bones.

[00:09:21]The ocean took the evidence and left the conclusion. Step back and Arlington Springs man didn't just add a date to a list. He moved the whole story off the land and onto the water. For decades the first Americans were pictured as walkers following herds through an inland gap in the ice. One island, one person, 13,000 years old, made that picture impossible to hold on its own. If people were already out on the Channel Islands that early, they weren't sitting around waiting on an inland corridor to melt open. They were coasting down the edge of the continent by sea, and they were doing it while Clovis was supposedly still the leading edge of human arrival.

[00:09:56]The margin of the old map turned out to be the main road, but the bones didn't answer everything, and it's worth being honest about what they leave open. Start with how little there is. This is one individual, a few bones with no tools, no grave goods, no camp around him that survived, or thought the burial was accidental. A person who simply died at the edge of an ancient marsh. A single skeleton can prove a person was there.

[00:10:20]It can't tell you how many others there were, how long they'd been on the island, or where exactly they'd come from. And the sex of the bones was uncertain for years. A reanalysis in the 1990s suggested the remains might be female, and for a while he was called Arlington Springs woman, before later study went back to the original reading of a man. When the field can go back and forth on something that basic, it tells you how thin the evidence really is.

[00:10:43]There's a deeper limit, too, and it comes back to the drowned coast. The best place to test the whole coastal migration idea, the actual ice age shoreline these people traveled, is exactly the part that's underwater and nearly impossible to dig. So, the case rests on the fragments that happen to survive up on high ground, which is a lucky and lopsided sample. The bones tell us the truth, they just can't tell us the whole of it. And the sensational version is worth heading off directly.

[00:11:10]This isn't a lost advanced civilization or a mystery race or aliens or anything outside ordinary human history.

[00:11:16]Arlington Springs man was a Native American, an ancestor of living peoples, doing something completely human and honestly brilliant. Getting into a boat and crossing water to reach a new shore.

[00:11:28]In 2022, after a request under federal law, his remains were returned to the Santa Ynez band of Chumash Mission Indians, whose ancestor he is, for reburial. The extraordinary thing about him was never that he was strange. It's that he was early, and that he came by sea. So, the honest position is the one the evidence supports and no further.

[00:11:46]The bones fixed a person on that island at that date [music] with a certainty nothing before had come close to. They proved the boat by proving the island.

[00:11:54]What they can't give us is the crossing itself, or the drowned road that carried his people down the edge of a continent.

[00:12:00]Go back to that canyon wall on Santa Rosa, and to the bones the island kept.

[00:12:04]37 ft down in the sediment of a marsh that dried up 10,000 years ago, two thigh bones from a person who lived and died on a super island the ocean has since torn into four. For 30 years those bones sat in plaster in a museum drawer, a rough date and a quiet question nobody could answer.

[00:12:21]And when the answer finally came, it didn't just make him old. It put the first Americans in boats, out on the water, moving down a coast everyone had treated as the empty edge of the story, and the proof was almost nothing at all.

[00:12:34]A person, an island, and the deep water in between that he could not have walked across. And the sea is still holding the rest.

[00:12:41]A drowned shoreline nobody has fully searched. Campsites and landings under 100 ft of ocean. The boats themselves long rotted, and the road they traveled waiting the way these bones waited, out past the surf in the dark, for someone with the right tools to finally go down and ask.