archeology humans on coast Canada 12,000 years ago. check out the sea level issues

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Globally, sea level was much lower during the Last Glacial Maximum as a result of the large amount of the earth’s hydrosphere being trapped on land as ice. In most regions of the globe, sea level was in the order of 120 m lower than today [51]. In some higher latitude areas, however, this eustatic lowering was counteracted by isostasy as glaciers advanced towards continental margins. On the Pacific coast of Canada, the changing volume of ice on the continent during and after the Last Glacial Maximum resulted in a complex array of sea level changes due primarily to eustatic and isostatic factors [45,46]. In parts of the mainland coast, sea level was up to 200 m higher than today [52], while on the outer islands, sea level was as much as 150 m lower at the same time [20,47,53,54].

Calvert Island is situated between these two areas of vastly differing sea level history (Fig 1). After 14,500 years ago, sea level dropped rapidly on the mainland and rose rapidly on the outer coast, but remained relatively stable in between these two regions. On Calvert Island sea level was 2 to 3 metres lower than today between 14,000 and 11,000 cal BP [40] (Fig 2). With this knowledge, we devised a program of intertidal testing to search for archaeological deposits dating to this time period. Unexpectedly, a series of human footprints were found while testing deposits under a beach on Calvert Island, the results of which we report here.

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