‘Lost world’ close to California could change what we know about American history

A remote ‘lost world’ discovered off the coast of California could offer new clues as to the origins of the first Americans — and could potentially even rewrite what’s known about the nation’s history.

The mysteries of the Channel Islands, an eight-island archipelago located off the Southern California coast, have long fascinated researchers, but a new documentary is set to bring them to the fore, with experts describing the islands as a place where ‘human history is frozen in time’.

Hidden among the islands are the remains of humans thought to date back around 13,000 years, together with ancient settlements and other evidence of human activity believed to be from that period.

The evidence suggests that Ice Age humans may have reached North America thousands of years ago via a coastal ‘kelp highway’, using boats to move along the Pacific shoreline and settling in places like the Channel Islands.

And it could overturn the decades-old theory that the earliest Americans traveled via a land bridge from Siberia, before moving south through an ice-free corridor in western Canada.

The islands have also yielded such discoveries as the bones of pygmy mammoths and archaeological sites, with researchers saying the evidence could suggest a forgotten maritime migration occurred in the region.

All of which could change what we know about the earliest American settlers.

The four most northern islands — San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Anacapa and Santa Cruz — were originally located much further south before being carried to their current location by tectonic forces, which also rotated them around 110 degrees.

However, the ancient artefacts and deposits left behind have made them a source of fascination for archaeologists.

Speaking in the film, author Frederic Caire Chiles, who has a PhD in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara, calls them ‘the trace of a vanished world’.

One of the most significant discoveries on Santa Rosa is Arlington Springs Man, the bones of a human discovered 37 feet below ground on the island in 1959.

These skeletal remains were discovered to be the oldest dated human bones in North America after undergoing testing in 2001, with evidence suggesting they date from the same period as the Clovis culture,considered to have been the first civilisation to have lived in North America between 13,050 and 12,750 years ago.

However, the fact the Arlington Springs Man remains were discovered offshore suggests North America’s earliest inhabitants may have been accomplished seafarers.

And while it’s long been thought that the Clovis people — known for their distinctive fluted spear points — arrived in North America via an ice-free corridor in Canada, this discovery suggests another group may have arrived by boat.

All of which suggests such seafaring technology may have been around a lot earlier than first thought, throwing the notion of the ice-free corridor into question.

Dr John Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, said: ‘All the way from Japan to Baja California, there are kelp forest ecosystems that have very similar suites of animals.

‘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.

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

This group of people are thought to have lived on the central and southern coast of California as well as the four northern Channel Islands.

They are thought to have lived there for thousands of years until Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo reached California in 1542, with disease, colonisation and social changes eventually leading to the islands being abandoned.

It’s likely that other undiscovered signs of early man lurk beneath the surrounding waters too, given that lower sea levels during the Ice Age meant some areas now underwater would once have been dry land.

The documentary will be released on June 30 on the YouTube channel Timeline.