Fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) bones from a 5850 year old shell midden on San Miguel Island, California, USA

Abstract

Large cetaceans were heavily impacted by commercial whaling, so relatively little is known about their biogeography prior to historic times. On California’s Channel Islands, maritime peoples hunted dolphins and porpoises for millennia, but ethnohistoric data suggest that larger cetaceans were not hunted. The Island Chumash scavenged beached whale carcasses for food and technological purposes, however, and the bones of large whales are relatively common in many Channel Island shell middens. Cetacean bones from such sites provide unique opportunities to document the ancient distribution and human use of larger whale species, but many bone fragments are not identifiable to the genus or species level based solely on osteological characteristics. Here, we report genomic data for two whale bones recovered from a 5850 year old shell midden on San Miguel Island. Both were identified as fin whale, the second largest of the great whales. Our analysis provides points in space and time for the distribution of fin whales in the past, but a wider identification of whale bones from coastal archaeological sites can potentially expand such data for numerous whale species, adding significantly to an understanding of their distributions, ecology, and utility for humans in the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Cetaceans
• aDNA
• historical ecology
• whale bone artifacts
• California Channel Islands

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, our research was supported by our home institutions. We are deeply grateful, however, to Russell Galipeau, Laura Kirn, Bert Ho, and Ian Williams of Channel Islands National Park for facilitating the data recovery at CA-SMI-526N. Hannah Erlich, Mark Alow Garcia, and Bert Ho assisted in our field work at the site and Terry Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo loaned us field equipment for the excavation. We are also grateful for the support of the project by the Elders Council of the Santa Ynez Band of Mission Indians and Quntan Shup of Southern Owl Clan Consultants. Finally, we thank the editors and reviewers for their help in the review, revision, and publication of this paper, as well as Kristina Gill for help drafting Figure 1.