The 10,300-Year-Old Man Found Inside An Alaskan Island Cave — And The DNA Test That Revealed 10,000 Years Of Native Coastal Continuity
Shuká Káa lived on an island.
He ate a diet dominated by marine protein.
He was, by the chemical evidence of his bones, a maritime person in the fullest sense.
All of this implies the existence of watercraft — without boats, an island-dwelling, marine-diet-dependent person simply cannot exist.
The specific watercraft used by the early coastal peoples of the Alexander Archipelago are not directly documented in the archaeological record.
Wood — the most likely material for boat construction in a forested coastal environment — does not typically survive for thousands of years in open-air contexts, and the cave environments that preserve bone do not typically preserve the large wooden structures of watercraft.