The discovery of numerous artifacts that pre-date Clovis has, over the years, required scholars to come up with different ideas about not only when people arrived in the Americas but how they got here. For instance, if they were already established 14,800 years ago, they must not have used the famed ice-free corridor through North America: Researchers say that it would not appear for another 1,000 years.
Maybe the first Americans didn’t walk here but came in small boats and followed the coastline, some researchers say. That possibility was first suggested in the 1950s with the discovery of Clovis-era human bones—but no artifacts—on Santa Rosa Island in the Santa Barbara Channel off the California coast. Over the past decade, though, a joint University of Oregon-Smithsonian team of archaeologists unearthed dozens of stemmed and barbed projectile points from Santa Rosa and other Channel Islands, along with the remains of fish, shellfish, seabirds and seals. Radiocarbon dates showed much of the organic material was about 12,000 years old, roughly within the Clovis time frame.
The findings do not prove that the continent’s first settlers came by sea, of course. The islands were only about four miles offshore at the time, and could have been visited by people who’d settled on the mainland. Still, the sites establish that these island dwellers were seafarers of a sort and accustomed to a seafood diet.
Jon Erlandson, a University of Oregon archaeologist, and Torben Rick, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, propose a pre-Clovis “kelp highway” for coast-hugging seamen skirting the southern edge of the Bering land bridge on their way from northeast Asia to the New World. “People came between 15,000 and 16,000 years ago” by sea, and “could eat the same seaweed and seafood as they moved along the coastline in boats,” Erlandson said. “It seems logical.” The notion that ancient people could travel great distances by boat isn’t far-fetched; many anthropologists believe that humans voyaged from the Asian mainland to Australia 45,000 years ago.
Though Erlandson said he’s convinced that the Clovis people were not the first in the Americas, he acknowledged that definitive proof of a pre-Clovis coastal route may never be found: Whatever beach settlements existed in those days of especially low sea level were long ago submerged or swept away by Pacific tides.
Moreover, the Channel Islands projectiles have nothing in common with Clovis points, as Erlandson pointed out. They appear to be related to a different toolmaking approach called the western stemmed tradition; featuring stems of different shapes that attach the projectile points to spears or darts, they were prevalent in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin. And they do not have the fluting characteristic of Clovis. Those observations strengthen the view that other tool-making human cultures were present in the Americas at the same time as the Clovis people, and in all likelihood beforehand as well.
[A] study by Irina Pugach of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, and her colleagues, which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [suggests that a]bout 4,000 years before Captain Phillip and his merry men arrived to turn the aboriginals’ world upside down [in 1788], it seems that a group of Indian adventurers chose to call the place home. Unlike their European successors, these earlier settlers were assimilated by the locals. And they brought with them both technological improvements and one of Australia’s most iconic animals.
Dr Pugach came to this conclusion by studying what are known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. These are places where single pairs of the genetic “letters” that make up DNA often vary between individuals. (The letters themselves are chemical bases of four varieties, which pair up in specific ways, and which encode the instructions for making proteins, and thus living creatures.) SNPs act as markers for blocks of DNA that get swapped around during the process of sexual reproduction. Examining their pattern can therefore reveal a person’s ancestry—both where those ancestors came from, and when they lived.
[. . .]
There is a pattern of SNPs in aboriginal Australians that is not found in people from New Guinea or the Philippines. But it is found in some Indians—particularly in Dravidian speakers from the southern part of the subcontinent. That discovery both meshes with the Y-chromosome data and enriches it, because the pattern of the SNP data meant that she and her colleagues could calculate when the Indian genes (and thus the Indians who carried them) arrived in Australia.
The answer is 141 generations ago. Allowing 30 years a generation, that yields a date of 2217BC. Obviously, this is not a precise date. But it is probably good to within a century or two. And that is interesting for two reasons. One is that the 23rd century BC is slap-bang in the middle of the period when Indian civilisation was emerging. The other is that it coincides with a shift in both the culture of Australia and the composition of the continent’s wildlife.
The bronze-age Indus valley civilisation, which reached its peak of development between 2600BC and 1900BC, is less well-known to outsiders than its contemporaries in China and the Middle East, partly because no one has managed to translate its written records. But it was no less successful, and it led—just as those two other areas did—to an urban culture that resonates today.
One technology it managed to develop was seaworthy ships, rather than mere boats, and Indus valley states used them to trade with their Middle Eastern neighbours. Such ships could have provided the means to get to Australia, either deliberately or by accident, for by then the sea had risen close to its modern level.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Indus valley civilisation did not extend into the area where the telltale SNP patterns came from, so any connection is speculative. But many anthropologists believe Dravidians were once more widespread than they are today. (There is, for example, a group of Dravidians living south of Quetta, in Pakistan, on the edge of the territory occupied by the Indus valley civilisation.) In any case, Dr Pugach and her team could find no sign of the relevant SNP pattern in South-East Asia. That suggests the people who brought it may have travelled directly across the Indian Ocean, rather than coasting through what is now Indonesia. If so, they probably came by ship, rather than boat.
Mayor Rob Ford's 2010 election campaign broke the law, an official audit has found.
Ford may face non-criminal charges. If he is found guilty of violating the Municipal Elections Act, he could be fined or removed from office.
Severe penalties for campaign finance violations are rare in Ontario, and the elections law gives the courts more leeway in sentencing than the conflict of interest law Ford was previously accused of violating.
The audit is now in the hands of the city's compliance audit committee. The committee, composed of three non-politician experts, will decide at an upcoming meeting whether to take no further action or to begin legal proceedings.
If the committee chooses to proceed, the city will hire a special prosecutor. That prosecutor, likely a lawyer in private practice, will decide whether to lay charges. Ford will have the option of plea bargaining.
Regardless of the eventual outcome, the audit findings cast another shadow over Ford’s tumultuous mayoralty — and one that may linger. Any court case could well continue into the 2014 campaign. The special prosecutor could take months just to make a decision on which charges to pursue.
The audit was conducted by Froese Forensic Partners and released Friday. The three compliance audit committee members are chair Douglas Colbourne, a chartered accountant and former chair of the Ontario Municipal Board; John Hollins, former chief electoral officer for Elections Ontario; and Virginia MacLean, a municipal lawyer based in Oakville.
Early on the morning I showed up, men were arriving on bicycles, red or green milk crates holding their nylon nets. They were deeply tanned, some in shorts, some in waders. Ivan Ferraz de Bem, in a wetsuit stretched over an ample beer belly, took a cast net out of his red dune buggy. A skull-and-crossbones flag tied to his bumper snapped in the stiff wind. Recently retired from a government job in Brasilia, he seemed to enjoy the hours by the shore––and those in the nearby bar to which he retreated when things slowed down even more.
As we watched the turbid green waters flow into the lagoon, a tall dorsal fin broke the surface, followed by a smaller one. A mother dolphin and calf swam in, the youngster staying close to its parent’s side, then headed out for rougher waters. Perhaps they found no fish or were just assessing the situation. These are wild dolphins—untrained, undomesticated—and it was clear that they run the show. When the dolphins aren’t around, one fisherman told me, it’s not worth fishing. Some gave it a try anyway, with an underhand toss into the blue. A few small fish were landed.
Another dorsal fin rose a hundred meters from the shore. “Escubi,” one man called out, recognizing the white scuff marks on the leading edge of the fin. The men broke off their chatter, dashed into the water. Thigh deep, almost motionless, they stood at the ready, a line of six, as if awaiting Escubi’s orders.
Most of the helpful dolphins have names: “Escubi” is a variant of Scooby Doo. “Filipe” is a Brazilian adaptation of Flipper. Dolphins have something like names among themselves, too—each has a signature whistle, and they recognize one another by their unique calls when they meet at sea.
Another blow broke the surface. Escubi lifted his dorsal fin, reversed course. One man splashed his net in the water, to convey where he was standing. Escubi signaled with a slap of his gray tail, then charged straight for the shore.
Dolphins can swim faster and accelerate more quickly than torpedoes, so the nearest fisherman, in an olive green rain jacket and black cap, cast his net quickly as Escubi approached. It spread like a spider web, landed on the surface, and closed below as Escubi veered to the left. As the fisherman retrieved the hand line, a large tainha, the local mullet, thrashed in the mesh.
Escubi headed out to sea. The men cleaned their fish. One tossed an anchovy to a razor-thin heron, feathers lifting like white caps in the wind.
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