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Let's slip back through history... Back before the European colonization of California, back through the much longer Native American period, back more than 200,000 years ago during the late period of the Pleistocene era that began 600,000 years ago. There are no people living in the Channel Islands region, or on North America, although humans were living other places in the world. Ancient mammoths are migrating across the Bering Land Bridge, a journey that they began 1.5 million years ago. In the Channel region, there is a different landscape than we can see today. The shoreline is one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet lower than we see it today - which means that the location where the cities of Santa Barbara and Ventura are today would have been five miles inland.

We are back during an ice age where polar ice caps hold more of the earth’s waters frozen, and the sea levels are lower than any human being has since ever seen. With the lower sea level, more of the earth’s surface is exposed to the air and sun, and the shape of the islands and coastline along the California Channel is much different than today.

Wild animals and plants flourish in a pre-civilized landscape, untouched by any over powering dominant species. The age of the dinosaurs has long past. This is the age of the mammals and early man is developing on other continents, soon to also follow the mammoths across the Bering Land Bridge into North America. The islands are becoming populated by species either extinct today, or species that have may since have evolved into subspecies that exist only on the Channel Islands. Fossils today tell us of giant mice, a now-extinct flightless geese, vampire bats ( now extinct ), rattlesnakes and gopher snakes, sea otter’s, whales, sharks, prehistoric seaweeds, and as we will see, the remarkable mammoths.

The islands in the northern Channel are actually connected to each other and form a large 724 square mile land mass scientists now call Santarosea. The sea level would at times have been 300 lower than it is today, changing the distance between the mainland and the islands significantly. The distance from the tip of Anacapa Island to the mainland would have then been less than five miles ( compared to eleven today ). But most amazing, it is a time where long-furred mammoths roam the mainland - and - somehow cross the Channel to inhabit the islands.



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Mammoths Arrive on the Islands


Imagine this possible event : washed out to sea in a storm from some river’s edge, amidst logs and debris, a family of mammoths manage to stay afloat and swim to Anacapa Island. Or, as some scientists suggest, the huge shaggy beasts may have been drawn out to the islands by the smell of vegetation wafting across the less than five mile wide channel.

Mammoth crossing Santa Rosa Island

These mammoths then migrate westwards crossing to the rugged, mountainous Santa Cruz Island, then to Santa Rosa Island, and on to San Miguel Island - at this time all one continuous land mass. They settle among the fertile green rolling hills lush with native vegetation, and multiply, forming many family bands roaming the island.

Try to imagine what their world was like. Ample fresh streams and springs. No predators, such as prehistoric tigers, to fight off. No airplanes crossing overhead, not even any boats passing by the shore. No air pollution being pushed out the island from the mainland cities. The climate is cooler than we now know it, probably wetter. Pine forests cover large tracts of the island. As the years pass, the polar ice caps melt, and the sea water rises, and by 10,500 years ago, the islands begin to be separated by the rising sea levels. First Anacapa is separated from Santa Cruz, then a thousand years later, Santa Rosa and San Miguel are separated from Santa Cruz, and finally San Miguel is separated from Santa Rosa.

The first mammoths that crossed from the mainland to Santarosea were full sized animals, about fourteen feet tall as adults. These were the Imperial Mammoths. As the years went by, the mammoths adapted to the specific islands environment, and became smaller as time proceeded. Eventually they developed a distinctly different body scale, one we now call dwarf or pygmy mammoths, and reached heights of 4-8 feet, significantly smaller than their predecessors. Their tusks were up to five or more feet long, and were five to six inches in diameter.

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