People are discovering antique fishing tackle all the time, in closets and at garage sales, but none of that compares to discoveries made recently by archaeologists at two of the Channel Islands off Southern California. Looking for signs of ancient human settlement, they unearthed meticulously-crafted spearheads and other tools (see photo at right) that date back 12,000 years and provide insight into the lives of a seafaring culture that obtained bounty from the ocean.
The astonishing discoveries, at three sites on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands west of Santa Barbara, strongly support the theory that during an era when the first traces of humans appeared in the archaeological record in North America, a coastal culture existed that was distinct from the well-chronicled inland Clovis culture, which consisted of big-game hunters who subsisted on mastodons and other large mammals
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