Thu, 04/29/2021
LAWRENCE — For thousands of years during the last ice age, generations of maritime migrants paddled skin boats eastward across shallow ocean waters from Asia to present-day Alaska. They voyaged from island to island and ultimately to shore, surviving on bountiful seaweeds, fish, shellfish, birds and game harvested from coastal and nearshore biomes. Their island-rich route was possible due to a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles from one continent to the other.
A new study from the University of Kansas in partnership with universities in Bologna and Urbino, Italy, documents the newly named Bering Transitory Archipelago and then points to how, when and where the first Americans may have crossed. The authors’ stepping-stones hypothesis depends on scores of islands that emerged during the last ice age as sea level fell when ocean waters were locked in glaciers and later rose when ice sheets melted. The two-part study, just published in the open-access journal Comptes Rendus Geoscience, may answer what writer Fen Montaigne calls “one of the greatest mysteries of our time . . . when humans made the first bold journey to the Americas.”