The discovery of a remote 'lost world' off the coast of California could revolutionize our understanding of the origins of the first Americans.
Located off the Southern California coast, the Channel Islands have long fascinated researchers with their mysteries, but a new documentary is set to shed new light on the islands' secrets.
Experts describe the islands as a place where 'human history is frozen in time,' with the remains of humans thought to date back around 13,000 years hidden among the islands, along with ancient settlements and other evidence of human activity 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 settle in places like the Channel Islands.
This theory could overturn the decades-old notion that the earliest Americans traveled via a land bridge from Siberia, before moving south through an ice-free corridor in western Canada.
The Channel Islands have yielded numerous significant discoveries, including the bones of pygmy mammoths and archaeological sites, which could suggest a forgotten maritime migration occurred in the region.
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, which dated to the same period as the Clovis culture.
This finding suggests that North America's earliest inhabitants may have been accomplished seafarers, challenging the long-held notion that the Clovis people arrived in North America via an ice-free corridor in Canada.
Dr. John Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, said that the discovery of a coastal migration route via kelp forest ecosystems could connect with the idea of an ancient coastal migration, where people would have been using watercraft and navigating around glaciers.
The Channel Islands were eventually abandoned due to disease, colonization, and other factors, but it's likely that other undiscovered signs of early man lurk beneath the surrounding waters, given that lower sea levels during the Ice Age meant some areas now underwater would once have been dry land.
