Todd Braje
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tbraje.bsky.social
Todd Braje
@tbraje.bsky.social

Executive Director, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History; archaeologist; historical ecologist; author Understanding Imperiled Earth; science communicator

Environmental science 40%
Geology 17%

Learn more with Mammoths and Empires, out January 5: www.amazon.com/dp/B0H58VLS3...

Nearly everywhere else on the Pacific Coast, the beaches those first travelers walked are now hundreds of feet underwater.

Daryl Fedje, Duncan McLaren, Quentin Mackie, and their First Nations collaborators found the first print in 2014, after more than a decade of working out where to look.

They survive because of a geological fluke. As the ice sheets melted, the land around Calvert Island rebounded upward at almost exactly the rate the sea was rising. This shoreline has barely moved in 13,000 years.

Twenty-nine footprints in the clay of a British Columbia beach. Two adults and a child, stepping out of a canoe, 13,200 years ago.

That's the whole site. The moment a family got out of a boat and walked up the shore.