Prehistory: Pacific Seafarers and Maritime Culture

I would consider myself someone who lives on North America's coast even though I'm a bit inland. I, nor anyone I know, regularly frequents the ocean (at least not directly). Therefore, the topic of seafaring and coastal settlement aren't of great interest. The water is usually too cold for activity!

I remember learning about Homo erectus when I was in the eighth grade. They were the first humans to stand up right and to walk largely bipedal. It makes sense how they could bethe first to migrate across waters with simple rafts.

"It now appears that the Northwest Coast route opened a millennium or two earlier than the ice-free corridor and that the diversity and richness of coastal ecosystems after the LGM may have created a 'kelp highway' that facilitated a maritime migration from notheast Asia into the Americas. A coastal route around the Pacific Rim - a linear entirely at sea level, and without major geographic barriers - featured similar types of shellfish, fish, seabirds, sea mammals, and seaweeds, as well as terrestrial plants and animals from adjacent landscapes."

I had to reread this multiple times to understand what this additional theory was communicating. I think I've been so tied to the Land Bridge theory that was ingrained in my mind as a child.

It's impossible for me to truly understand that humans have been using the ocean as transportation for 800,000 years ago. I find it sad that a lot of this evidence is being lost due to raising sea levels.

I enjoy that people find seafood as nutritional as animals found on land. More people I know eat meat more often than seafood. I don't eat chicken, beef, lamb, or pork so I'm glad that this is more accepted because now almost all restaurants have either one vegetarian option or a seafood one!

Haplogroup D populations:

• 9,200 year old skeleton found in On-Your-Knees-Cave on Prince Wales Island, Alaska
• Chumash Indians of the Santa Barbara Coast
• another population on the coast of Ecuador
• a population in Southern Chile
• prehistoric sites in Tierra del Fuego

Honestly, this packet is somewhat boring to me, but the evidence of human migration from different populations genetically and from different locations is pretty interesting. I perceive life before modernity was very difficult to survive through especially if these people were migrating into truly untouched lands that were ruled by nature.
I find that Native American technology is quite ingenious. Perhaps their designs were as sophisticated as they were because it was essential to their lives. Just for argument's sake, the direct use of bodies of water for me are recreational; for them, it was a way of life.