In June, Moore Foundation grantee Beth Shapiro determined when an ice-free corridor opened up along the Rocky Mountains during the late Pleistocene using evidence from bison fossils. The corridor has been considered a potential route for human and animal migrations between the far north (Alaska and Yukon) and the rest of North America, but when and how it was used has long been uncertain.
Now, Shapiro's findings are part of a New York Times article by Nicholas Wade discussing who first used this gateway to the Americas.
About 23,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age, glaciers from west and east merged to cut off Alaska from North America. Sea levels were much lower at this time, and a now-lost continent, Beringia, joined Siberia to Alaska. However, a ring of glaciers blocked access beyond Alaska. Ten thousand years later, the glaciers began to retreat and an ice-free corridor, roughly 900 miles long, opened between Alaska and the Americas.
Using new methods for analyzing ancient bison DNA, two teams of scientists--Shapiro and Peter Heintzman at UC Santa Cruz and Mikkel Pedersen and Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen--have developed elegant methods to calculate when the corridor first became fit for human travel.
Pedersen and Willersley agree with Shapiro and Heintzman on the general chronology of the corridor but place its earliest opening 500 years earlier. This changes the possibility of whether the Clovis people--one of the first groups from Siberia to reach the Americas--ever used the gateway to gain access to the New World.
Read the full article here.
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