Atlantis Found Part 103

IN 1960, ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVERED the ancient bones of a woman on Santa Rosa, one of the channel islands off California. After she lay in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Santa Barbara museum for forty years, a team of scientists conducted sophisticated DNA and radiocarbon tests on the skeletal remains. Results revealed the bones to be as old as thirteen thousand years, making the lady the oldest known human skeleton found in North America.

During the era in which she lived, the lady would have seen glaciers the size of Australia, woolly mammoths, and saber-toothed tigers, and she could have walked from island to island, since the sea level was 360 feet lower than it is today. Her discovery challenged traditional theories that the first people to live in the Americas came across the land bridge over what is now the Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska.

The Spirit Caveman, as another human relic is called, lived more than 9,400 years ago in Western Nevada and has a cranial profile that suggests his origins are j.a.panese or East Asian. The Wizard's Beach Man, whose skull was also found in Nevada, closely resembles both the Norse and the Polynesians. Other skulls found in Nebraska and Minnesota, all at least eight thousand years old, resemble both Europeans and South Asians.

New evidence suggests that the first settlers might have been Polynesians and Asians who inhabited the western end of North and South America while the eastern seaboard was settled by Europeans who arrived by boat, navigating along the ice pack that spanned the North Atlantic during the ice age and following the migratory birds that flew west.

It is known that people traveled by boats from southern Asia to Australia more than forty thousand years ago, so sea travel is hardly an invention of civilizations around the Mediterranean. The seas beckoned ancient mariners, who explored and discovered far more of the world than they were given credit for, and whose history is only now being written.