Submission + - Ice Agers Stopped Off at Beringia for 20,000 Years
Hugh Pickens writes: "Research analyzing DNA sequences from Native American, New World and Asian populations shows a gradual migration and expansion of people from Asia through Siberia and into Beringia, a once-habitable region that today lies submerged under the icy waters of the Bering Strait, starting about 40,000 years ago; a long waiting period in Beringia where the population size remained relatively stable; and finally a rapid expansion into North America through Alaska or Canada about 15,000 years ago. "If you think about it, these people didn't know they were going to a new world. They were moving out of Asia and finally reached a landmass that was exposed because of lower sea levels during the last glacial maximum, but two major glaciers blocked their progress into the New World. So they basically stayed put for about 20,000 years, says Connie Mulligan, Ph.D. "It wasn't paradise, but they survived. When the North American ice sheets started to melt and a passage into the New World opened, we think they left Beringia to go to a better place." Researchers believe that their synthesis of a large number of different approaches into a unified theory will create a platform for scientists to further analyze genomic and non-genetic data as they become available. The original paper is published open-access on PLOS."