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“It appears we had people sitting in one area making stone tools beside evidence of a fire pit, what we are calling a bean-shaped hearth,” she said. “The material that we have recovered from that trench has really helped us weave a narrative for the occupation of this site.”

The site is roughly as old as the groundbreaking Manis Mastodon spear tip found on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, a find that pushed estimates of the earliest human occupation on the West Coast back by 800 years to about 13,800 years before the present day.

Photo by Angela Dyck / PNG

Gauvreau will present her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archeology on Thursday in Vancouver. The five-day conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre will be attended by 3,000 archeologists from around the world.

Sea levels at Triquet Island have been extraordinarily stable over the millennia, which helped to preserve evidence of continuous use, and dramatic changes in the occupants’ hunting and eating habits. The natural rise and fall of sea levels and of the Earth’s tectonic plates have left ancient villages on other parts of the coast submerged.

The evidence suggests that for 7,000 years of the people’s early history, they hunted and ate large mammals, especially seals and sea lions.

“It’s a lot more work to hunt large animals, but when you get one, you get a lot,” she said. “It’s a high caloric payoff.”

Then around 5,700 years ago, their diet shifted to fin fish. Evidence of shellfish processing is found throughout the village’s history, right up to very recent times.