Arlington Man’s remains were originally excavated by the archaeologist Phil Orr in 1960, decades before they were dated precisely enough for their significance to be understood. At the time, the Chumash were largely powerless to stop scientists from digging wherever they pleased. On the whole, that golden age of archaeology was not overly concerned with the wishes of Indigenous populations. “Some dug up cemeteries that were so fresh, they complained of the smell,” Braje said.
The Chumash still view archaeologists with suspicion. “I’ve had people sit this far from my face and call me a traitor,” Holguin told me, holding his fingers an inch apart. He said that some scientists remain sloppy in the way they deal with people, but that in general, things are getting better. “The older scientists are starting to retire, and this generation has a new perspective,” Holguin said, nodding toward Braje.
Orr originally suspected that Arlington Man hailed from the end of the Ice Age, based in part on his femur’s location, 37.5 feet beneath the present surface. But it wasn’t until 2008 that radiocarbon analysis confirmed its age as 13,100 years old.
According to the Clovis-first theory, people entered the Americas less than 500 years before Arlington Man died here. If Arlington Man’s ancestors were part of the Clovis culture, that means they would have taken only a few centuries to journey thousands of miles to California’s coast. That’s not altogether implausible, given the speed of Clovis expansion, but if they did take this route, they then promptly shed their existing hunting tools (no Clovis points have ever been found on the Channel Islands) and developed a sophisticated set of coastal technologies. This scenario strikes Braje as unlikely, because the artifacts in the Channel Islands appear to have emerged from a culture that had long lived in ecological communion with the ocean.
We get a clue as to the potential sophistication of this culture from the location of Arlington Man’s remains. During the Ice Age, when fewer carbon molecules were afloat in Earth’s atmosphere than today, more sunlight bounced off the planet’s surface and back into space. Much of Earth’s water was locked into thick ice sheets. Sea levels fell so low that some of California’s beaches stretched dozens of miles farther out to sea than they are now—and Santa Rosa was joined with three of the other Channel Islands into a super-island, called Santarosae. The channel separating the island from the mainland was narrower, but it was still too wide and violent for people to swim across. Arlington Man’s presence on Santarosae is widely considered the oldest evidence of watercraft use in the Americas.