More evidence that Native Americans came by boats
Posted on Wednesday 5 November 2003 to Story So Far
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.
