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The Origin of Island Mammoths and the Quaternary Land Bridge of the Northern Channel Islands, California1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Donald Lee Johnson
Donald Lee Johnson*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801 USA
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Abstract

Pygmy proboscidean remains of Mammuthus exilis occur abundantly in late Quaternary deposits on the Northern Channel Islands, California. On the assumption that ancestral elephants could not have swum to the islands and must therefore have walked out, various land bridges have been hypothesized that link the northern islands to the mainland by a peninsula. Geological evidence for a land bridge, however, is lacking, and new evidence shows that elephants are excellent swimmers and skilled at crossing watergaps. The Santa Barbara Channel was narrowed to only 6 km during glacially lowered sea levels. Modern elephants swim much further, and at speeds ranging from 0.96–2.70 km/hr. Motives for California elephants to cross Pleistocene watergaps are inferred from motives that lead modern elephants in Asia and Africa to cross watergaps. These are the visual and olfactory sensing of islands and of insular food during times of drought or fire-induced food shortage. Diminutive size of M. exilis principally reflects lack of island predators, an adaption to periodic food stress in a finite forage area affected by periodic drought and fire, and an adaptation for keeping population numbers high to maintain genetic variability and to ensure survival despite accidents. A late Quaternary scenario describes the environmental setting of the Santa Barbara Channel and the conditions that led to proboscidean dispersal to the preexistent super-island Santarosae.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Quaternary Research , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , September 1978 , pp. 204 - 225
Copyright
University of Washington

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Footnotes

1

This paper is an expanded synthesis of parts of two papers read at national meetings; “On the origin and extinction of pygmy elephants, Northern Channel Islands” (read at the Geological Society of America National Meeting, Dallas, November 1973); “The origin of land mammals and herpetofauna on the California Channel Islands” (read at the Association of American Geographers National Meeting, Seattle, May 1974).

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