This story is amazing for two reasons. It changes our understanding of how North America was settled, in that it supports the idea that there was land that wasn’t covered by ice during the ice ages along which people migrated. For me, it’s even more intriguing that the story of this settlement was passed along by oral tradition and survived for 14,000 years.
Think about that: that’s three times older than the pyramids. This story was passed down, parent to child, for close to 500 generations.
A team of Canadian Ph.D students discovered an ancient village that dates back to before the era of the pyramids. [They] began investigating the area for ancient settlements after hearing the oral history of the indigenous Heiltsuk people, which told of a sliver of land that never froze during the last ice age.
William Housty, a member of the Heiltsuk First Nation, said, “To think about how these stories survived only to be supported by this archeological evidence is just amazing. … [This find] reaffirms a lot of the history that our people have been talking about for thousands of years.”
Researchers believe that this settlement indicates a mass human migration down the coast of British Columbia.
“What this is doing, is changing our idea of the way in which North America was first peopled,” said Alisha Gauvreau, a Ph.D student who helped discover this site.
