Posted on Wednesday 5 November 2003

The conventional view of how the Native Americans originally migrated from Asia to America is that they walked across the land bridge that formed across the Bering Strait (otherwise known as Beringia) during the last Ice Age.

At this time, sea-levels had dropped by as much as 110 metres thus creating land bridges like Beringia but it's worth noting that this was because most of sea water was locked up massive glaciers that rested upon the land, especially in North America and Eurasia. These glaciers created enormous, high and generally impassable wastelands and it is likely that they would have prevented migration until 12,000 years ago at the earliest. Furthemore, it has been argued that this route may have been blocked in Canada for even longer than that.

An alternative theory that is now starting to gain ground argues that humans may have migrated to the Americas by sea instead of land, by island hopping along an archipelago just off the ancient coastline. This is just what the Australian Aborigines did more than forty thousand years ago. Recent studies of plant and animal life indicate that even during the Ice Age the environment of the coastal regions would have been rich enough to sustain human populations as early as 16,000 year ago and possibly even much earlier.