Footprints put people on Canadas west coast 13,000 years ago

29 fossil prints provide rare evidence of early New World settlers’ coastal travels
BY BRUCE BOWER 2:00PM, MARCH 28, 2018

People who reached what’s now Canada’s Pacific coast around 13,000 years ago made some lasting impressions — with their feet.

Beach excavations on Calvert Island, off British Columbia’s coast, revealed 29 human footprints preserved in clay-based sediment, says a team led by archaeologist Duncan McLaren. About 60 centimeters below the sandy surface, the deposits contained the footprints of at least three individuals, the Canada-based researchers report March 28 in PLOS ONE.

Smudged remains of many more footprints surrounded these discoveries. Ancient people walking on the shoreline apparently trampled those footprints and distorted their shapes, the scientists say.

Radiocarbon dating of bits of wood from shore pine trees found in the clay sediment narrowed the age of the footprints from 13,317 to 12,633 years old. Who these footprints belonged to is unknown. Their arrival roughly coincided with the North American appearance of Clovis people, makers of distinctive spearpoints who may have entered the New World via an ice-free, inland route (SN: 5/13/17, p. 8). But stone tools unearthed with the Calvert Island footprints were not made by Clovis people, says McLaren of the Hakai Institute, a research organization in Heriot Bay, and the University of Victoria.

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/footprints-put-people-canada-west-coast-13000-years-ago

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Archaeologists Discover 29 Human Footprints From the Last Ice Age

George Dvorsky
Today 2:00pm

Archaeologists working off Canada’s Pacific Coast have found 29 human footprints dating back to the end of the last Ice Age. The buried impressions were found along a beach—a discovery that’s bolstering the case for a coastal migratory route into North America.

When archaeologists are on the hunt for evidence of ancient human activity, they tend to find hardy things like bones, stone tools, and cave art. Finding the preserved remains of human footprints, on the other hand, is exceptionally rare. New research published today in PLOS One describes the discovery of 29 human footprints found buried on the shoreline of Calvert Island in British Columbia. Dated to around 13,000 years old, the impressions offer potential proof that America’s first migrants traveled along the Pacific West Coast when the continent became accessible at the end of the last Ice Age. But because ancient humans had already taken root in North America by this point in history, more evidence will be required to bear this out.

During the last Ice Age, a massive chunk of ice called the Cordilleran Ice Sheet created a natural and impenetrable barrier between Eurasia and North America. When this obstruction finally melted some 16,000 to 15,000 years ago, it opened the gates to North America, allowing humans to venture from Siberia and Beringia into the continent. Owing to a dearth of archaeological evidence, however, archaeologists aren’t entirely sure about the routes taken by these venturous humans.

A popular and longstanding theory among many scientists is that the first Americans followed big game herds along a narrow, ice-free corridor that opened up in North America as the glaciers retreated. In recent years, however, an alternate theory has emerged, one known as the Coastal Migration Theory, or the Kelp Highway Hypothesis. According to this view, the first Americans migrated along the Pacific West Coast, traveling along the shorelines of what is now Alaska and British Columbia. It’s even possible that North America’s first settlers used boats, skimming the shoreline as they steadily moved south and eventually into the continent’s interior.

More:
https://gizmodo.com/archaeologists-discover-29-human-footprints-from-the-la-1824147540