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by civilitty
988 days ago
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To add to that great explanation: those ice free corridors were important because during the glaciation there were vast expanses of ice with zero vegetation or animal life, making it impossible for humans to cross without starving to death. Those glaciers essentially looked like the South Pole - nothing but ice for hundreds of miles. How humans managed to get so far and colonize so much of the continent while it was still iced over is one of the great "mysteries" of the new world. It took plants and animals thousands of years to colonize Berengia before it was possible for humans to cross the expanse on land so the main competing hypothesis states that the people of Oceania - at this point very capable of navigating at sea and exploiting marine resources - were the first ones to make the trip, hugging the coast of Beringia to navigate and wait out storms but eating seafood caught at sea to stay alive. Unfortunately the sea level at this point in time was at least 150 ft below and while underwater archaeology has had somewhat of a renaissance, there's still very little evidence to support what many (most?) archaeologists expect is true: human arrival in the Americas predates any evidence we've recovered by many thousands of years. |
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It doesn't make much sense either, as all of our South American aDNA (e.g. Los Rieles 10900BP) is highly related to other American populations. We also know that boats and marine resource exploitation were used in Northeast Asia prior to the crossing period, given the whole PSHK complex thing (whether or not they're truly ancestral to the first americans). They would have been much better positioned than the people of Oceania, who had just barely colonized the nearest few islands off Sahul and did not leave behind much to suggest particularly advanced marine exploitation at this point.