This combination painted a specific dietary portrait: a person who ate primarily from the marine environment, and who specifically consumed animals that were themselves predators in the marine food web.

This is the dietary portrait of a sophisticated maritime hunter — someone whose food came primarily from the sea and specifically from the productive upper trophic levels of the marine ecosystem.

It implies the specific hunting technology, the watercraft, the knowledge, and the social organization needed to take large marine prey regularly.

The consistency of this dietary portrait with the geographic setting — an island in the Alexander Archipelago, surrounded by some of the most productive marine waters in the world — makes it unsurprising in retrospect.

But at the time it was established, it was one of the earliest direct confirmations that the earliest coastal people of the Northwest Coast were genuinely maritime in their subsistence orientation — not simply coastal dwellers who occasionally exploited marine resources, but people whose lives were organized fundamentally around the sea.