Why did they cross that forbidding, near-lifeless landscape into an unknown world? And once they arrived, why and how did they push southward so quickly? The classic explanation-that they were following animal herds-is far too simplistic, says Meltzer, author of First Peoples in a New World: Populating Ice Age America. The theory with near-unanimous support from both archeologists and geneticists is that the first humans to populate the Americas arrived on foot via a temporary land bridge-across a region known as Beringia-that connected Eastern Siberia to Alaska for a span of roughly 5,000 years. The Land Bridge Theory: Crossing Beringia Here is the evidence for three theories explaining how the first humans arrived in America: the land bridge theory, the trans-Pacific migration theory and the controversial Solutrean hypothesis. Could some of the first Americans have crossed oceans to get here? And do those theories hold up to scientific scrutiny? There are outlier archeological sites in both North and South America that date to times before a land route was accessible. Thanks to advances in genome sequencing and data analysis, we know that some of the first humans to set foot in North America (known as Paleo-Americans) were direct descendants of ancient people in Siberia, which is solid evidence for the land bridge hypothesis.īut not everyone is convinced that all Paleo-Americans walked to the Americas from Asia. “‘Wow, we’ve got an entire land to ourselves.” Meltzer, an archeologist and professor of prehistory at Southern Methodist University. “One can only imagine what they thought when they got to North America south of the ice sheets and looked around and realized nobody else was home,” says David J. According to most archeologists and geneticists, the best theory for how the first humans migrated to the Americas is the same one that many likely learned in grade school: they crossed the Bering Strait from Asia via a now-extinct land bridge.
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