On the menu for the earliest colonizers of the Americas: seabirds, seals and sardines.
That's according to findings from three new archaeological digs on the Channel Islands off Southern California. The sites have yielded dozens of delicate stone tools and thousands of bone and shell fragments from meals more than 11,000 years old, researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Science.
The finds reveal more about how early Americans lived and ate, said study researcher Torben Rick, a curator of North American archaeology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The tools found also link the seafaring people of the Channel Islands to populations living far inland in North America, including the area that is now Utah and Nevada, Rick told LiveScience.
"These are very refined tools," Rick said. "Similar technologies had been found in the Great Basin, the interior of North America, [but] we didn't really have any on the West Coast, especially on the Channel Islands, found in situ." (In situ means the tools were found where they were left thousands of years ago.)
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