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I checked, and the grizzley is a Holocene entrant to North America as well: The species entered Alaska 100,000 years ago, though they did not move south until 13,000 years ago.[11] I checked with Charles Kay and asked him if the reason the grizzley survived aboriginal hunting is because the climate was warmer and they didn't need to hibernate, particularly in California.

I had surmised this because of Crespi's 1774 accounts of how happy the Indians were when the Spanish shot a griz. I suggested that their insularity (because of the lack of summer water) had coastal mountain tribes he encountered less susceptible to the dispersion of a fast acting crowd disease like smallpox than were the tribes farther to the east and that therefore Crespi's account was more redolent of pre-Columbian conditions than is commonly supposed. He said that was a legitimate hypothesis that no one had proposed.