The persistence of that development across 10,000 years — its cumulative quality as an elaboration of a founding maritime adaptation rather than a series of disrupted starts and new beginnings — is possible because the environmental foundation on which it rests has been relatively stable.

Shuká Káa was alive at the beginning of that 10,000-year elaboration.

He was one of the founding people — one of the first generation of humans adapted to the specific post-glacial ecology of the Alexander Archipelago.

The traditions that would eventually become the Tlingit potlatch, the Haida art tradition, the Tsimshian ceremonial system — all of these were, in Shuká Káa’s time, not yet what they would become.

But the people who would develop them across the subsequent millennia were his biological descendants, and the environment that would shape those developments was the same environment in which he was alive.