A few weeks ago I regaled you with the tale of “Juana Maria,” the Native American woman who lived alone for 18 years on our neighboring San Nicolas Island in the mid-1800s until her “rescue” by an American sea captain and subsequent removal to Mission Santa Barbara.
A few weeks ago I regaled you with the tale of “Juana Maria,” the Native American woman who lived alone for 18 years on our neighboring San Nicolas Island in the mid-1800s until her “rescue” by an American sea captain and subsequent removal to Mission Santa Barbara.
The “Lone Woman of San Nicolas,” whose real name (in keeping with many Native American traditions) was never divulged, was the subject of the Newbury Award-winning novel “Island of the Blue Dolphins” by Scott O’Dell, which was and still is required reading in many schools across the state.
“Juana Maria” was one of the last of America’s native peoples to live in their traditional ways, unadulterated by European influence. Therefore, it is fitting perhaps that the very first peoples in all of the Americas—both North America and South America—quite possibly lived here as well.
You may think that the oldest known inhabitants of the so-called New World lived at Machu Picchu or Monte Alban or Mesa Verde. But the recent identification of three human bones found on our very own Santa Rosa Island has, thus far, given California’s Channel Islands that distinction. Who woulda thought?
The discovery of the bones in 1959—and more importantly the more recent identification of their age of 13,000 years B.P.—is one of a number of recent discoveries in the past decade or so that has brought about a revolution in thinking regarding the peopling of the Americas.
Not since Thor Heyerdahl’s “Kon Tiki” has so much discussion—and controversy—been raised on the subject.
Who was “Santa Rosa Woman” and how did she and her presumed fellow adventurers get here so many millennia before the so-called “Native Americans”?
If you paid attention in your high school history classes, you probably learned that the first Americans came from Siberia through Alaska via a now submerged land bridge in the Bering Strait. But relatively recent discoveries such as Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave Man and other human remains that bear little resemblance forensically and genetically to “Native Americans” (not to mention they are much older) have caused something of a rift in archaeological circles.
These new theories on the peopling of the Americas include the early migration to the New World by Polynesians and Southeast Asians. Another theory, postulated by Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, holds that maritime cultures from Europe may have actually been responsible for bringing the earliest humans to the New World; not so crazy an idea when you consider that the city of Los Angeles is actually closer to London than it is to Tokyo.
Dr. Wendy Teeter, whose work as head of UCLA’s Fowler Museum often brings her to Catalina, recently sent me a fascinating article published in the Journal of Island and Coast Archaeology entitled “The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas,” in which Dr. Jon Erlandson and his fellow researchers argue that the kelp forests stretching from Asia to the tip of Baja California lured the first hunter-gatherers to the New World.
Since California’s Channel Islands—including Catalina—make a convenient pit stop along that highway, it’s very possible that “Santa Rosa Woman” was one of the early travelers that plied that highway.
The controversy in this field, as mentioned earlier, narrows down to the age-old conflict between politics and science; a row that is possibly second only to the rift between religion and science.
Native American tribes have been loathe to allow anthropologists to study some of these human remains because of their understandable reverence for their ancestors.
But—aside from the fact that we all descend from a common ancestry—are these remains actually our “ancestors”? Since the term “Native American” was legally defined in the era before these controversies developed, the term basically referred to any human remains older than the year 1492.
Therefore, the various Native American nations have generally had the law on their side, thereby complicating forensic efforts.
For example, attempts to classify the remains of Kennewick Man, a 40-something hunter-gatherer who died 9,000 years ago, was strung out in the courts for years. It was eventually ruled that Kennewick Man had features much more in common with Polynesians or even “Caucasoids” and was thus declared non-Native American and therefore available to anthropologists for study.
As for Santa Rosa Woman’s remains, they are kept at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, ironically not far from the remains of “Juana Maria” at Mission Santa Barbara, thereby in a sense completing a 13,000-year-long circle.
Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores all over Avalon.
