The middens — accumulations of shell, bone, and other debris that mark habitation sites — allow reconstruction of the marine environments that early islanders were exploiting.

One important line of evidence from the broader early Channel Islands record is the association of human sites with the remains of the pygmy mammoths.

The relationship between early islanders and the mammoths is a topic of ongoing research.

Some sites show temporal overlap between early human occupation and the presence of mammoth remains in the geological record, suggesting the possibility that early islanders and pygmy mammoths were contemporaries on Santarosae.

Whether humans hunted the mammoths, or exploited carcasses opportunistically, or had no direct relationship with them at all, is not established.