Rather than being the relatively recent product of a post-Contact or late-prehistoric cultural florescence, it is the culmination of 10,000 years of cumulative cultural development by a specific founding coastal population.

The Tlingit clan system, the Haida art tradition, the Tsimshian potlatch, the Coast Salish fishing technologies — these are not recent innovations but the current expressions of cultural traditions whose roots extend back to the people who first settled this coast in the early Holocene.

The Science of Reading the Past in Bone and DNA

The specific scientific methods that extracted such rich information from Shuká Káa’s remains are worth examining in some detail, because they illustrate how modern science transforms ancient material into historical knowledge.

Radiocarbon dating — the technique that established the 10,300-year age of the remains — works by measuring the ratio of carbon-14 (radioactive) to carbon-12 (stable) in the organic material of the bone.