That is what Phil Orr saw in 1959, in the form of protruding bone.

That is what Thomas Stafford and John Johnson confirmed in chemical analysis.

That is what the geological record corroborated in stratigraphy.

Someone was there, on an island that required crossing the sea.

The bones cannot tell us who, in the full human sense.

But they tell us, with reasonable scientific certainty, when — and the when turns out to be one of the most important facts in the story of how this continent came to be inhabited.

The first Californians may have been islanders.