This is the geographic fact that makes the Arlington Springs individual significant beyond what mere antiquity would convey.

A 13,000-year-old human being anywhere on the mainland of North America would be extraordinary.

A 13,000-year-old human being on an island that required an ocean crossing to reach is something more: evidence that maritime technology was already in the human toolkit at the end of the Ice Age, on the Pacific coast of North America.

The island was also, in 13,000 BCE, a different place ecologically from the scrubby, relatively dry terrain of today.

The late Pleistocene climate was cooler and wetter.