[LINK] "Signs in B.C. point to earliest human habitation"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star shares Dene Moore's article suggesting that an archeological site dating back to the Ice Age has been found just off the British Columbian coast.

An archeologist who has studied the Haida Gwaii archipelago in British Columbia for 15 years believes his research team may have found underwater clues pointing to the world’s oldest human habitation.

Quentin Mackie from the University of Victoria and his team returned earlier this month from a research trip to the archipelago, where they used an autonomous underwater vehicle to scan the sea floor in search of evidence of ancient civilization.

The evidence they found, lying beneath more than 100 metres of sea water, could date back almost 14,000 years.

“We’re not quite ready to say for sure that we found something,” he said. “We have really interesting-looking targets on the sea floor that, as an archeologist, they look like they could be cultural.”

Mackie’s studies have led him to believe that ancient residents would have harvested salmon near the coast of what was then a single island that stretched well across Hecate Strait toward the mainland.

At the time, the sea level was about 100 metres lower than it is today and the main island of the archipelago was twice as large.

Stone tools or evidence of campfires would not be possible to see on the ocean bottom. They’re too small.

“But we had this idea that if people were harvesting salmon in the rivers . . . they might have been building fish weirs,” Mackie said.