Environments that support long-term human occupation without dramatic disruption are environments where continuity of ancestry and cultural tradition can persist across many generations.

The Totality of What Shuká Káa Represents

Ten thousand years.

The number is not simply a large number attached to a collection of bones.

It is a span of time that encompasses essentially the entire history of human civilization as conventionally understood, and it is the span across which the Northwest Coast peoples’ connection to their homeland is now documented.

The Shuká Káa discovery, and the DNA analysis that revealed the deep genetic continuity of the Northwest Coast peoples, represents something genuinely unprecedented in American archaeology: the ability to trace a specific founding human population forward from the early Holocene to its living descendants, and to confirm through both genetic and archaeological evidence that the connection is real, continuous, and deep.