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Collagen fingerprinting and the earliest marine mammal hunting in North America

Hofman, C.A.; Rick, T.C.; Erlandson, J.M.; Reeder-Myers, L.; Welch, A.J.; Buckley, M.

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Authors

C.A. Hofman

T.C. Rick

J.M. Erlandson

L. Reeder-Myers

M. Buckley



Abstract

The submersion of Late Pleistocene shorelines and poor organic preservation at many early archaeological sites obscure the earliest effects of humans on coastal resources in the Americas. We used collagen fingerprinting to identify bone fragments from middens at four California Channel Island sites that are among the oldest coastal sites in the Americas (~12,500-8,500 cal BP). We document Paleocoastal human predation of at least three marine mammal families/species, including northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris), eared seals (Otariidae), and sea otters (Enhydra lutris). Otariids and elephant seals are abundant today along the Pacific Coast of North America, but elephant seals are rare in late Holocene (<1500 cal BP) archaeological sites. Our data support the hypotheses that: (1) marine mammals helped fuel the peopling of the Americas; (2) humans affected marine mammal biogeography millennia before the devastation caused by the historic fur and oil trade; and (3) the current abundance and distribution of recovering pinniped populations on the California Channel Islands may mirror a pre-human baseline.

Citation

Hofman, C., Rick, T., Erlandson, J., Reeder-Myers, L., Welch, A., & Buckley, M. (2018). Collagen fingerprinting and the earliest marine mammal hunting in North America. Scientific Reports, 8, Article 10014. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28224-0

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 18, 2018
Online Publication Date Jul 3, 2018
Publication Date Jul 3, 2018
Deposit Date Jun 22, 2018
Publicly Available Date Jul 4, 2018
Journal Scientific Reports
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Article Number 10014
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28224-0

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.




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