That is the story of Shuká Káa.

It is a story about an ancient man in a cave, about the world he lived in, about what his bones preserved and what his DNA revealed — and about what all of it means for understanding who the first coastal peoples of North America were and what happened to them.

The Island and the Cave

Prince of Wales Island is the third-largest island in the United States, after Hawaii and Kodiak.

Its position in the Alexander Archipelago of southeastern Alaska places it at the boundary between open Pacific and the sheltered inland waters of the Inside Passage — the long protected channel that runs between the mainland and the archipelago’s outer islands, shielded from the full force of the North Pacific swells.

The island is dominated by forest — ancient, multi-layered temperate rainforest that receives among the highest annual precipitation of any landscape in North America.

The combination of mild maritime temperatures, abundant moisture, and the specific light conditions of the North Pacific coast produces an ecosystem of extraordinary biological richness.

The forest understory is a mosaic of mosses, ferns, devil’s club, and berry shrubs.

The forest canopy is dominated by the massive trunks of Sitka spruce and western hemlock, trees that can live for centuries and grow to dimensions that make a person feel small in their presence.

The coastline of the island is complex — not a smooth arc but a highly articulated edge of bays, inlets, coves, and passages that dramatically extends the total shoreline beyond what the island’s simple perimeter would suggest.

This complex coastline creates an enormous interface between land and sea, and it is at that interface that the biological abundance of the Southeast Alaskan coast concentrates.

Tidal zones rich with shellfish.

Kelp forests sheltering fish.

River mouths drawing salmon from the open ocean.