Daily Archives: April 25, 2009

Gaadu Din 2007

In 2007 we returned to Gaadu Din 1, a cave on the east side of Huxley Island (map) in Haida Gwaii.  In the front is Jenny (Jinky, Sniffer, Killer), while behind left to right you see her fellow UVIC graduate students Brendan (Binky, Loafer, Skipper, Dumper) and Adrian (Goat-Boy), while to the right is Jordan (Haida Watchman – which is not a nickname!).  The cave entrance can be glimpsed between Brendan and Adrian. Gaadu Din has revealed an incredible record of terminal Pleistocene fauna and artifacts, showing Ancestral Haida winter-time bear hunting as early as 10,600 14C years ago (13,000 calendar years ago).  Among the fauna are black bear, which still live on Haida Gwaii, but also brown (grizzly) bear and coast deer, neither of which were known to be native to these islands (deer are common on Haida Gwaii, but these are historically introduced). The deer in Gaadu Din all date to a narrow time window just prior to the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period, and presumably could not survive those harsh, snowy conditions, and had no way of repopulating the now-remote archipelago after modern climatic conditions arose.