New discoveries, reported at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), have moved the “coastal migration theory” to the forefront of debate on the origins of the First Americans, though it has yet to be proven with hard evidence. It is now known that seafaring peoples living in the Ryuku Islands and Japan may have migrated into the Americas about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago.

“The fact that productive kelp forests are found adjacent to some of the earliest coastal archaeological sites in the Americas supports the idea that such forests may have facilitated human coastal migrations around the Pacific Rim near the end of the last glacial period,” said Jon Erlandson, professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the study’s lead researcher. “In essence, they may have acted as a sort of kelp highway.”

Kelp forests are some of the world’s richest ecosystems, providing an assortment of food resources—including shellfish, fish, sea mammals, and seabirds—along thousands of miles of the North Pacific coast.

“This study is a unique example of collaboration between coastal archaeologists and marine biologists,” Erlandson said. The “kelp highway hypothesis” first crystallized at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and includes research from groups and laboratories throughout the U.S.