Skeletons Beneath Our Feet

You may have heard that a skeleton was found at the Transbay Terminal construction site, 60 feet down. “The agency said its archaeologists worked in coordination with the San Francisco coroner’s office and determined that the remains are of Native American descent.” 60 feet down is pretty old, especially when you consider that in the 1840s when Yerba Buena started booming, First Street once bordered the water.

How old? Well, in 1969, construction workers digging out BART found a skeleton 75 feet below Civic Center. Turns out it was nearly 5000 years old.

The top half of the skeleton was lost during construction, but from the remaining half archaeologists determined that it was a 24-26 year old female who may have drowned in a creek. @davely was kind enough to scan an 1972 article from California Geology journal which had this diagram:

I took the liberty of redrawing the diagram in color, and stretching the vertical axis for clarity.

Archaeologists found both fresh and salt-water plant matter attached to the skeleton, indicating that our friend may have died in a creek or a marsh near the shore. She was found 26 feet below current sea level, which implies that sea level 5000 years ago was around that level.

San Francisco Bay as we know it is relatively new — as the ice age ended, sea levels rose dramatically. 18,000 years ago, to get to the beach you would need to take the N-Judah or the K past the Farallons, which were once hills by the sea. The Bay was a valley with a river running through it, and the Golden Gate was a waterfall.

San Francisco would have been Walnut Creek.

But as the waters rose the Farallons were cut off.

map via Late Pleistocene to Holocene History of San Francisco Bay, Prof. Lynn Ingram, UC Berkeley

These once were hills, separated only by sand dunes.

Around 10,000 years ago, the sea breeched the Golden Gate and continued to rise rapidly, filling the valley we now know as San Francisco Bay. There must have been settlements by the water — imagine each generation having to pull back, each high tide greater than the last.

In 1818, a Spanish missionary recorded some of the oral traditions of the Ohlone and neighboring tribes. One story went like this:

“What is now the port of San Francisco was formerly according to the tradition of the old ones an oak grove, and without water other than of a river that crossed at its foot, and in evidence of this tradition, they say you still find in the port and marsh, trunks and roots of oak trees.”