Fig 2
Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, showing the location of P2, Arch-2, and Port Eliza caves. The base map is open source, WGS84 datum, and specifies degrees of latitude and longitude.
Source publication
Phenacomys cf. intermedius, the heather vole, is known from three late Pleistocene and early Holocene localities on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, where they are absent today. This study describes the heather vole specimens from one of these sites, P2 Cave, and provides a human behavioural context for its presence and eventual extirpat...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... 2005). Three fossil localities on north Vancouver Island, British Columbia, have reported occurrences of Phenacomys cf. intermedius and indicate its presence during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. The localities are Port Eliza Cave (Al- Suwaidi et al. 2006), Arch-2 Cave, and Pelludiar II (P2) Cave (Steffen 2016;Steffen and Fulton 2018) (Fig. 2). This study reports the heather vole specimens from P2 Cave and their sedimentary and environmental contexts. It addresses how habitat and climatic changes are likely to have influenced its local extinction and additionally considers species-specific characteristics and geographic isolation as contributing factors. This study was ...
Context 2
... Wisconsin Fraser glacial maximum (Carlson and Dalla Bona 1996;Mackie et al. 2011;McLaren et al. 2019). The archaeological sequence in this region is well established from the early Holocene ( Carlson and Dalla Bona 1996). On northeast Vancouver Island the early Holocene record of human occupation is known from the Bear Cove site near Port Hardy (Fig. 2) (Carlson 2003). A number of additional early period sites have recently been found. Lithic artifacts including debitage flakes, a spall flake, and a unidirectional core that date to approximately 9545 years ago were recovered at a raised beach site near Port McNeil ( Stafford and Christensen 2009), and several flake tools on an inland ...
Citations
The timing of the initial peopling of the Americas is unresolved. Because the archaeological record necessitates discussion of human entry from Beringia into southern North America during the last glaciation, addressing this problem routinely involves evaluating environmental parameters then targeting areas suitable for human settlement. Vertebrate remains indicate landscape quality and are a key dataset for assessing coastal migration theories and the viability of coastal routes. Here, radiocarbon dates on vertebrate specimens and archaeological sites are calibrated to document species occurrences and the ages of human settlements across the western expansion and decay of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet (CIS) during the Late Wisconsin Fraser Glaciation in four subregions of the north Pacific coast of North America. The results show archaeological sites occur after glacial maxima and are generally consistent with the age of other securely dated earliest sites in southern North America. They also highlight gaps in the vertebrate chronologies around CIS maxima in each of the subregions that point to species redistributions and extirpations and signal times of low potential for human settlement and subsistence in a key portion of the proposed coastal migration route. This study, therefore, defines new age constraints for human coastal migration theories in the peopling of the Americas debate.
