A 10,000-Year Stopover En Route to the New World
7:32 minutes
There’s little dispute that during the last glacial maximum, ancestors of Native Americans wandered across the Bering land bridge from Asia into North America. But genetic evidence indicates that the migrants stayed put somewhere for 10,000 years before fanning out across the Americas. Writing in Science, John Hoffecker and colleagues suggest these early migrants may have lived on the grassy Bering land bridge, hunting big game and gathering firewood from shrubby trees.
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John Hoffecker
John Hoffecker is a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder in Boulder, Colorado.
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@cintagliataChristopher Intagliata was Science Friday’s senior producer. He once served as a prop in an optical illusion and speaks passable Ira Flatowese.