Before 20,000 BCE: (The Initial Spread of Human Beings to the Americas — Probably Beginning Even Before 20,000 BCE, Lowered Ice Age Sea Levels Connecting Nor…

Before 20,000 BCE: (The Initial Spread of Human Beings to the Americas — Probably Beginning Even Before 20,000 BCE, Lowered Ice Age Sea Levels Connecting North America and Asia Via the Lands Now Under the Bering Strait, the Older Theory of Migration Through Interior Alaska and an Ice-Free Corridor Through Alberta Now Yielding to an Alternative Proposition That the Initial Amerind Expansions Passed Primarily Along Coastal Areas from Eastern Siberia and Kamchatka Eastward Along the Southern Coasts of the Land Bridge and Then Southward Along the Western Coast of North America): Still another major development of this age, probably beginning even before 20,000 BCE, was the initial spread of human beings to the Americas. Lowered Ice Age sea levels connected North America and Asia via the lands now under the waters of the Bering Strait. Scholars long proposed that Native American populations arrived by spreading first through interior Alaska and then, after a shrinking back of North American glaciations later in the Ice Age, passing south via an ice-free corridor through today’s Alberta. But recent scholarship has given increasing credence to an alternative proposition: that the initial Amerind expansions passed primarily along coastal areas, from eastern Siberia and Kamchatka eastward along the southern coasts of the land bridge, and then southward along the western coast of North America, before spreading inland and southward to the rest of the Americas. If so, the ancestral Native Americans would have been taking advantage of similar kinds of food resources across the cold northern coastal areas, while perhaps simultaneously developing an additional new subsistence reliance on the resources of the seas and seashores themselves. The peopling of the Americas, in this revised understanding, was not a single dramatic crossing of a frozen land bridge by big-game hunters following mammoth herds through an interior corridor. It was a slow, patient, generations-long movement along coastlines — people who lived by the sea following the sea eastward and then southward, adapting their maritime skills to new shores, new currents, new fisheries. These were not the bold explorers of popular imagination. They were practical people making practical decisions about where the next meal would come from, and the answer, for generation after generation, was: further along the coast. The Americas were settled not by conquest but by continuity — by people doing what they had always done, in a direction they had never gone.