Pygmy Mammoths and the Oldest Californians: Channel Islands Before the Chumash

The islands visible on a clear day from the Santa Barbara waterfront are among the oldest continuously occupied places in North America. Human remains found on Santa Rosa Island have been dated to approximately thirteen thousand four hundred years ago, the oldest human bones found anywhere in the National Park Service system.

Those early people arrived at an interesting moment. The Channel Islands at that time were not the separate islands you see today. Sea levels were lower during the last ice age, and the four northern islands, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Anacapa, were joined into a single larger landmass that geologists call Santarosae. The crossing from the mainland was shorter then, perhaps six to eight miles at the nearest point. The first people crossed it, by whatever means, and stayed.

Around the same period, a species found nowhere else in the world was going extinct on these islands. The pygmy mammoth, a dwarf descendant of the Columbian mammoth that had swum to the islands and evolved over thousands of years into a creature roughly the size of a large pony, lived on Santarosae until approximately the time the first humans appeared. The youngest pygmy mammoth fossils and the oldest human remains on these islands overlap in the archaeological record. Whether those first people hunted the mammoths, or arrived just after the climate changes of the retreating ice age finished the job, or some combination of both, remains an open question in the research.

What the record shows is a place that has been occupied by humans for a span of time that makes most American history look like a footnote. The islands you can see from this coast held dwarf elephants and the ancestors of the Chumash at the same moment, on a land mass that the rising sea eventually divided into four. The Chumash went on crossing to those islands for thirteen thousand years.