More than three decades ago, humans took a giant step — into the lunar dust.

It was further proof that our species excels at overcoming harsh environments. Consider the Aleutian Islands. They make a chain 1,800 miles long that runs between Asia and North America.

They’re a place where warm Pacific air meets Arctic winds. The resulting attractions include chronic fog and average annual temperatures of 40 degrees, earthquakes, tsunamis and the highest straight-line winds anywhere. They’ve been clocked at up to 240 miles an hour.

None of this stopped the Aleuts, however, who spread across the chain from east to west. Settlement started 9,000 years ago, says Dixie West, research associate at the Kansas University Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.

The Aleuts reached the center of the chain 6,000 years ago, then stalled. After the climate improved 4,000 years ago, they eventually reached the far west island, Attu, whose name means “end of the world.”

West leads a National Science Foundation-funded project focused on the culture of the western island settlers. The islands are treeless and barren, so the Aleuts confined themselves to the shorelines.

They were accomplished sailors who used kayaks to stalk whales, seals and otters. They also gathered food close to home. They often lived near streams that ran when snows melted, streams in which salmon spawned. And they settled near reefs where elders, women and children could harvest plants and shellfish.

They ate the stellar sea cow — in West’s words “a harmless bag of fat that floated around in the ocean.” Until discoveries by West’s team, no one thought this extinct beast lived in the Aleutians.

The Aleuts who inhabited the distant islands had it good at first, West’s research shows. The size of excavated cod skulls indicate that some fish weighed up to 250 pounds. The Aleuts also preyed on nesting birds like puffins and murres that are fairly easy to catch.

A thousand years later, the cod skulls were smaller, the birds stalked by the Aleuts more elusive.

“They were capable of depleting their environment rather quickly,” West said.

West and her colleagues have made remarkable finds in six years of fieldwork. The early Aleuts dug pits into the earth to make houses, usually reinforcing their sides with driftwood. But on one island, the researchers discovered a 500-year-old structure made entirely of whales’ bones.

Inside it, they discovered a large pit, a whale skull thrust into it nose down. The pit was lined with sea lion shoulder blades. The structure may have been a gathering place for men, West said.

Conducting research in remote places is physically taxing. In recent years, West and her team have suffered boat wrecks and broken bones. They’ve also shared space with millions of rats. Shipwrecks brought the rodents. So did occupation by the Japanese and Americans during World War II.

The researchers’ persistence in the face of such discomfort suggests that the human desire to conquer space is equaled by a fierce will to overcome time.

We want to see into our past as much as into our future.

— Roger Martin is a research writer and editor for the Kansas University Center for Research and editor of Explore, KU’s research magazine Web site, which can be found at www.research.ku.edu. Martin’s e-mail address is martin@kucr.ku.edu.