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.