• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

Bering land bridge idea

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Ken's writing a piece for school on the Bering land bridge. He's talking about the "Bering Standstill" hypothesis, which says that between 25,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago a "small but genetically diverse" population of Asians from the Chukotka region moved into the former sea bed of the Bering straight, eking out a half-frozen existence through the worst of the last glaciation. Needless to say they have no direct archaeologic evidence, and the linguists disagree altogether and to be honest I'd like to hear more about how people not only survived that long with so few resources but remained "genetically diverse".

Unfortunately, it seems to be the last stand of a Bering land bridge idea, which appears to have been horseshit from the very beginning. I did some digging and found an interesting article. It lacks any references. It's on a website with a broken encryption certificate (making me wonder why Google even listed it). And it's been archived, so none of the internal links work. But I found it worth a read. Apparently it's all been about dogma and Euro-centric chauvinism from way back and appears to be tolerated mostly out of inertia. When the linguists have an easier explanation you know you're out on a limb, but now the DNA says that maybe some of the shared haplogroups actually originated in North America among other problems. Yes, I get that the article I'm citing has .. academic quality issues. But I mean, we know humans were in Chile 15,000 years ago and Canada only 9,000 years ago. I really don't see what the issue is - why are we inventing new excuses for this mess.