The temptation to expand them into a narrative biography of “the first Californian” or “a pioneering navigator” should be resisted.

The individual was a person whose full life, in all its human specificity, is as invisible to us as the lives of almost everyone who has ever lived.

The Kelp Highway — A Model Explained Carefully

The coastal migration model — sometimes called the Kelp Highway hypothesis after one of its most discussed ecological formulations — deserves explanation on its own terms, because it is often conflated with the specific Arlington Springs evidence in ways that overstate what the bones can demonstrate.

The Kelp Highway hypothesis, as developed primarily by Jon Erlandson and colleagues, proposes that maritime peoples migrated from northeast Asia to the Americas along the North Pacific coast during the late Pleistocene, following the productive kelp-forest ecosystems that form a nearly continuous chain from Japan and the Russian far east, along the Aleutian Islands, down the northwest coast of North America, and south to Baja California.