Artifacts Bolster Theory About Early Settlers

Grinding tools found near San Luis Obispo are believed to be the oldest in western North America, bolstering an alternate migration theory about some of the continent’s earliest settlers.

The discovery of the milling stones, beads, shells, tools, seeds and a carved stone fish, all believed to be about 10,000 years old, suggests that humans who entered the continent from the sea did not rely on hunting.

Traditionally, migration to the Americas was thought to have been led solely by humans in pursuit of game 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. These hunters could have come across a land bridge at the Bering Strait into what is now Canada and migrated down through the interior of the continent, spreading out and developing new ways of life.

“It’s a big discussion: Did [others] come in following a maritime way of life along the coast?” said archeologist James Richardson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “We don’t know a lot because almost all the early coastal evidence went under water when the sea level rose. Almost anything from before 5,000 years ago is drowned.”

Previous coastal discoveries, including two in Peru and two on California islands, have supported the theory about a second group of migrants. The sites on San Miguel Island and Santa Rosa Island--11,700 and 13,000 years old respectively--already proved that some early people used watercraft to reach the continent, experts said.

But the recently released findings on the new site, called Cross Creek, are more extensive and strengthen the theory that these migrants did not hunt.

The Cross Creek artifacts, uncovered during excavation for a water pipeline, were particularly notable because they lacked hunting tools and animal bones, but included milling tools, said Richard Fitzgerald, the excavation project’s supervising archeologist.

“The people of Cross Creek had a different tool kit. Not to say that they never hunted, but it wasn’t their emphasis,” Fitzgerald said.

Findings in Peru and at a site in southern Chile have already shown that the first inhabitants of the Americas ate a varied diet, including meat, berries, nuts, shellfish, and some vegetables.

However, no one had previously found evidence of a group that did not rely--at least partially--on hunting, which led to the belief that food-gathering behavior developed in groups that already hunted.

“They live in such different ways from the hunters that it seems like they have to be different people. This shows that there are people who arrived just after or simultaneously with the big-game hunters and that, from the get-go, they’re different,” Fitzgerald said.

Terry Jones, an archeologist and a technical consultant on the project, said the other artifacts complete the picture.

“These very well-made tools are associated with collecting and processing seeds and plant material. Clearly, their way of life emphasized gathering and collection of shellfish. That behavior has not been linked with the earliest colonists of North America,” he said.

The inland site, near the town of Arroyo Grande, caught the attention of archeologists in 1996 when workers uncovered shells. An excavation firm overseeing the pipeline construction then began exploring the site for other artifacts, later finding the millstones.

Fitzgerald and his colleagues plan to publish their technical report within the next year and are submitting their conclusions to scholarly journals.