Islands Are a Living Lab

Who was she, this woman whose bones found on Santa Rosa Island are now believed to have been resting there for 13,000 years?

A new round of radiocarbon tests indicates that her bones may be the oldest human remains ever found in North America. That discovery is stirring up the debate over how people first came to the Western Hemisphere.

It also underscores the many different ways in which the Channel Islands are important. Each adds a dimension to the islands’ allure--and to the difficulty of managing them.

The past few years have brought a string of controversies over stewardship of the five islands, as control of them passed from private hands to the National Park Service: A goal of returning the islands to their native condition led to removal of cattle and horses. Suspected artifact hunters have been dealt with aggressively. An epidemic of hantavirus among mice on the islands poses a potential threat to human visitors. Golden eagles from the mainland are decimating the island fox population. Yet thousands of people each year still want to visit the islands.

Balancing all these competing considerations is a never-ending challenge. As a national park, the islands must be as available and welcoming as possible to anyone willing to make the effort to visit. At the same time, visitors must be protected from undue risk of injury or disease--and the islands’ archeological legacy must be protected from all those visitors. That includes artifact hunters out to profit from pillaging as well as far larger numbers of the merely curious or clumsy.

The urgency of protecting the islands’ legacy is dramatically illustrated by the recent discovery that the Channel Islands may be the first place human feet ever touched the Western Hemisphere. It has long been theorized that the first people migrated to North America over a land bridge that once connected northern Asia and what is now Alaska. But these bones found on a coastal island, fully 1,400 years older than the most ancient skeletal remains yet found on the mainland, suggest that the first people could have arrived on boats, possibly from Polynesia or southern Asia.

The bones, scooped from a gully at Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island 40 years ago, were tested in the 1960s before being packed away in the basement of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Researchers at the museum and Channel Islands National Park assembled a team of experts to reexamine the bones using the sophisticated DNA and radiocarbon methods now available.

A natural reaction to this discovery would be to place even tighter restrictions on who may visit the Channel Islands and where they can wander while there. That would be a mistake. The Channel Islands must remain available as a living laboratory for students of history and the natural sciences and as a retreat for those who love the peace and beauty of these incomparable surroundings.

Greater knowledge of the islands’ importance in the past must not eclipse their vital role in Ventura County’s present and future.