Beringia
A thousand-kilometre plain joins Siberia to Alaska, and it is not a bridge but a homeland.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 18 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 3 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
With sea level 120 metres down, the shallow Bering and Chukchi shelves become a broad, cold, largely unglaciated grassland connecting the two continents. The old image of a bridge crossed in transit has given way to something better supported: a place people lived for thousands of years. Genetic evidence indicates the ancestors of Native Americans were isolated there for millennia — the Beringian standstill — diverging from Asian populations before any of them entered the Americas.