Life is a (Kelp) Highway (ca. 10,000 BC)
One of the fascinating components and great mysteries of ancient migration movements is how people – without GPS or maps – managed to make their way from one continent to the next, without getting horribly lost, starving to death, or making fatal wrong turns in the process. As it turns out, ancient humans who came to North America from Asia may have managed to make their way across the ocean by following a highway made of densely packed kelp.
Typically, “coastal migration theory” has centered around the idea that early seafaring people moved from one island to another by boat, hunting the sea creatures that lived in kelp forests for food. The potential ‘kelp highway’ from Asia to America only lends strength to this theory, and certainly provides a rational explanation for how so many people moved themselves across such a vast distance.
Kelp forests are among some of the richest ecosystems in the world today – as they were in ancient times – and are home to an incredible number of living creatures: abalone, urchins, hundreds of varieties of fish, otters, seals, and more, all of which would have provided excellent nutrition value and practical materials for people moving across the ocean.
Often referred to as ‘maritime people’, the ancient humans who made the migration move are believed to have boated along the Kurile and Aleutian Islands from Japan to Alaska approximately 16,000 years ago – some settlements of around 12,000 to 9,000 years old have been discovered along the coastlines of these islands, and they also have rich kelp forests that ecologists believe existed tens of thousands of years ago.
A group of maritime people who lived in Japan’s Ryukyu Islands around 35,000 to 15,000 years ago are known to have had the ability to travel 90 miles or more at once while moving between islands, so at the very least, humans already knew how to cover vast distances in relatively simple boats. In a place called Daisy Cave in the Channel Islands, located off of southern California, remains of some kelp resources have been found that date to around 10,000 BC!
With kelp forests found right next to plenty of the Americas’ earliest known archaeological coastal sites, it certainly seems that the ability of ancient peoples to move such enormous distances across the ocean was dependent on these kelp forests – after all, even today, a nearly continuous ‘highway’ of kelp stretches from Japan all the way across Siberia, past the Bering Strait to Alaska, and then moves down along the coastline of California!
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