New Understanding that America’s First People Arrived by Boat – Part II

Continued from the previous post regarding the so-called open land corridor in northwest Canada and southern Alaska, and how a simple understanding of the ice sheets of the last Ice Age shows this corridor did not exist for people or animals to cross through until long after people and animals had reached the Americas.
    The reason is that along the western edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which had been assumed to have ended along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, there are thousands of erratics boulders. And the story behind them shows that no land corridor could have existed between the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice sheets.

Huge “erratics” boulders and massive rocks pushed by glaciers across the western Canadian plains during the Last Ice Age

These boulders are part of the “Foothills Erratics Train,” in southern Alberta, where thousands of large boulders (erratics) form a train over 580 miles long. These rocks contain clues that have helped scientists to understand the movements of the ice sheets that covered Canada during the last Ice Age, and when geologists examined them, they discovered that the boulders were all made of the same kind of rock, which they traced back to an area around Mount Edith Cavell in Jasper Park, just north of the confluence of the Athabasca and Astoria rivers.
    The pathway of these boulders, named the Foothills Erratics Train by geologists is important, because it is the reason why the previously so-called open land corridor between the ice sheets has now been discarded as the means by which the first people arrived in the Americas. First of all, to better understand what this “boulder train” is and why it exists where it is, and the significance of it, is to understand that “erratics boulders” are those boulders that differ from the surrounding rock and brought from a distance by glacial action. And in knowing where they are now located in relationship to their original placement, shows when and along what path they were moved by the glacial action.
    Originally located along Mount Edith Carvell by the city of Jasper in the Jasper National Forest, the 580-mile-long Foothills Erratics Train, with its thousands of angular boulders of distinctive quartzite and pebbly quartzite that lie on the surface of a generally north-south strip of the temperate grasslands and shrublands of the Canadian Prairies. These boulders, which are between one and 135-feet in length, are glacial erratics that lie upon the surficial blanket of Late Wisconsin glacial till.

Map showing the area of Mt Edith Cavell, the city of Jasper and the general area of the Jasper National Forest, along with the Athabasca and Astoria Rivers

This narrow strip of boulders extends along the eastern flanks of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and Northern Montana. The boulder train consists of pink and purple Lower Cambrian shallow marine stones that are not native to this region of Alberta—they came from the Cog Group Sedimentary Basin that is exposed in the Tonquin Valley in the Rocky Mountains of central western Alberta.
    Their specific source has been identified as being near Mount Edith Cavell in Jasper National Park. Lying on prairie to the east of the Rocky Mountains, the larger glacial erratics of the Foothills Erratics Train are visible for a considerable distance across the prairie and likely served as a prominent landmark for Indigenous people in antiquity.
    More importantly, the erratics reveal the direction in which the ice sheet travelled. The rocks take a sharp right-angle turn out on the Plains, changing from an easterly to a southerly direction. Scientists believe that the western Cordilleran ice sheet "bumped into" the eastern Laurentide Ice Sheet, and was deflected southward. This shows that the two ice sheets were joined together, and no "ice free corridor" could have existed between them until later, when the glaciers started to melt. Yet, even after the ice melted, it would have taken many years before the land could support plants and animals (Lionel Jackson, Adjunct Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Burnaby British Columbia, Canada, 2005).

Map showing ancient coastal sites that support man being in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age, and before the so-called Open Land Corridor through Canada could have possibly been opened, and five of the fifteen before the Clovis (11,500 BC), and seven others only 500 years after them, making any pretense of a Land Bridge inaccurate as the means that people first arrived in the Americas. Note that two specific areas in South America date to 1500 years and 1000 years and are about 5000 miles to the south, with another four within 500 years to migrate of the Clovis people arriving in the U.S.—If the uncalibrated dates (actual measurement dates) are used (11,500 to 1,000 years ago (which is 9,500 BC to 9.000 BC, then 14 of the 15 sites were occupied before the Land Bridge existed

This study by geologists of the movement of the huge erratics boulders shows that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet moved further east than is claimed by anthropologists and archaeologists, in fact so far east that it joined the Laurentide Ice Sheet, eliminating any claim for an open corridor through the ice covering Canada that was 8,000 to 10,000 feet thick. It also might be of interest to know that new research supports an early sea arrival, by way of the Pacific coast through the dating of rocks and animal bones. Scientists have always found it of extreme variance to “the normal” migratory practices of people, that a large amount of migrants would have traveled northward in Siberia, which is, despite all the rhetoric by anthropologists and others that the far north during the Ice Age was, for some reason, warmer than the lower latitudes—in reality, the further one goes northward from the equator, the colder the latitude is throughout the world, with one exception to this, the area of warm wind-driven Gulf Stream current which warms the Britain climate on its way to the Arctic, making it the same general temperature as that of Maine in the U.S.
    Until about twenty years ago, the debate itself was settled: Researchers were certain that the first people to enter North America walked down an ice-free corridor in western Canada some 13,500 years ago. School textbooks claim it as fact, all research and dating was based upon that so-called fact. However, recently, many archaeological sites in the Americas have been dated even earlier, as shown on the map above. According to Quentin Mackie, associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, and who has spent the last fifteen years excavating sites and studying their results of modern climatic and vegetation conditions and their effect on the early indigenous populations that first settled along the British Columbia coast—a set of islands once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, and now the archipelago of over 150 islands covering 3900-square miles, Haida Gwaii, states: “Early sites on Haida Gwaii are changing our thoughts on the earliest occupation of the Northwest Coast and the Americas.”
    In fact, though not involved in the erratics train study, Mackie claims that “Ancient landscape reconstructions like this provide a good starting point for imagining how ancient peoples would have come down the coast, and where archaeologists should look for their settlements.” In the work he has personally done, he says that the early ancestral Haida people were fluent in marine resource use and organic technologies so early adds context to broader models of early West Coast occupation—they also showed human occupation at a time of extreme environmental change, which attests to the resilience of these early coastal adaptations.”
    With these recent archaeological evidences casting doubt on the Land Bridge theory, scientists are seeking new explanations. Today, most archaeologists are thinking the first Americans left Beringia, the now-drowned land between Siberia and Alaska, about 16,000 years ago—likely before the ice-free corridor opened—and traveled by boat down the Pacific coast, though any direct evidence for such a journey is lacking.
    At least the Land Bridge theory is no longer the prevailing idea of how the Americas were first populated, and scientists are now looking to the arrival of the first people into the Americas as traveling by boat. Alia Lesnek, a geologist at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, wanted to figure out when the trip would have been possible. So she spent the summer of 2015 helicoptering between remote islands off southeastern Alaska, seeking rocks exposed to the sky. Such rocks are constantly hit by cosmic rays hurtling down from space, which change individual oxygen-16 atoms in quartz to beryllium-10 atoms, one by one.

It is claimed that measuring the exposed rocky shore along Alaska’s coastline has pointed to a time when the last ice on this area had melted away 

By measuring the concentration of radio-active beryllium-10 (¹⁰Be), which is formed in the Earth’s atmosphere by cosmic ray spallation of nitrogen and oxygen, researchers can calculate how long the rock has been out in the open (in this case, uncovered by the elimination of snow and ice covering it). When Lesnek dated the rocks from four islands along the coast of southeastern Alaska, she found that the ice covering them had melted away about 17,000 years ago—just in time for the hypothesized coastal migration. As reported in the journal of Science Advances, “Making the actual measurement is very, very difficult, so each one of these data points is a diamond,” says Derek Fabel, an expert in this dating technique at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow. He also states that “Clues on Alaska’s ancient coastline suggest an early arrival by boat was possible for America’s first people.”
    The point of all of this is to show that the idea of a Land Bridge across the Bering Strait, no matter if it existed or not, and there are those who insist it did—it does not alter the fact that the so-called open land corridor between and through the ice sheets did not exist until long into the period of the sheets melting since they were abutted into one another as the Foothills Erratics Train proves.
    It is of interest to us that scientist have moved now from man walking from Siberia to North America via a land bridge and open land corridor has now been shown to be in error and not possible to provide the original migration into Alaska, Canada and the U.S. That scientists are now entertaining the idea that man arrived in the Americas via the ocean is of interest—though they do not yet have it right, at least they are moving in the right direction!