NEWS FEATURE

NEWS FEATURE

Is theory about peopling of the Americas

a bridge too far?
Some argue that humans flourished for thousands of years on a fertile intercontinental land
bridge until melting glaciers opened the route to the Americas. But major gaps in the
evidence remain.
Traci Watson, Science Writer

Twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was hostile
territory. Hulking glaciers smothered much of North
America. Deserts claimed swathes of every continent,
and winters were 40 degrees colder than today in
some spots. But far to the north lay a sprawling, unlikely
haven that stretched from modern-day Canada to Siberia.
This was Beringia, a refuge of tundra and grasslands
dotted with wildflowers, ponds, and scrubby willow
trees. Mammoths and bison roamed its plains for thou-
sands of years. And, if a controversial theory is to be
believed, people did too.
Researchers once envisioned Beringia, an area that
included the now-submerged land bridge connecting
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thousands of years. An idea originally devised to
explain genetic variation among Native Americans is
now reaping support from fields as disparate as linguis-
tics and paleoecology. Recent analyses of massive
DNA databases and ancient DNA have only shored
up the genetic underpinnings of the theory, known
as the Beringian Standstill Hypothesis. And archae-
ological work offers tantalizing—though disputed—
evidence that people were living in Beringia at the
hypothesized time.
Skeptics remain, and proponents admit that it will
be a challenge to find conclusive proof that people
lingered in a landscape now drowned by more than

Alaska to Siberia, as flyover country, a mere corridor to 100 meters of seawater. Still, the idea “has legs,” says
the New World. But growing evidence suggests that evolutionary anthropologist Drew Kitchen of the Uni-
bands of hunter-gathers from Asia tarried there for versity of Iowa, who worked on the hypothesis after

About 20,000 years ago, when the Earth was still in the throes of the last major ice age, humans are thought to have
inhabited Beringia, which stretched from modern-day Canada to Siberia. The general vicinity includes well-established
archeological sites (labeled here) from before and after that ice age. But little evidence supports the presence of
humans in Beringia at the right time. Bones at the Bluefish Caves site have been dated to the ice age, but that timing is
controversial. Reproduced with permission from ref. 8 and adapted by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda (graphic artist).

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 Cut marks from stone tools scar a horse mandible from the Bluefish Caves archaeological site, suggesting a human
presence. The mandible dates to 24,000 years ago, but the site’s age remains a matter of debate. Reproduced with
permission from ref. 7.
others proposed it a decade ago. Back then, Kitchen
wasn’t sure the idea would endure. “I wouldn’t have
staked my life on the model,” he says. “I am pleasantly
gratified that it has been shored up.”
Evolution of an Idea
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The Standstill Hypothesis’s pedigree stretches back
almost to Columbus. Less than a century after the
explorer landed in the New World, a Spanish mis-
sionary wrote that the first humans to reach the
Americas might have come by land from Asia. The
term “Beringia” was coined in 1937 by Swedish bot-
anist Eric Hultén. As defined today, Beringia stretches
from Siberia’s Verkhoyansk Mountains in the west to
the Mackenzie River in Canada in the east. It includes
the now-vanished Bering Land Bridge, the corridor
between Alaska and Russia exposed by falling seas
during the last major ice age. At the time, an immense
ice sheet sheathed most of Canada, blocking access
from Beringia to the Americas.
The notion of Beringia soon became useful across
disciplines. In the 1970s, biological anthropologist
Em} oke Szathm áry, now an emeritus professor at
Canada’s University of Manitoba, and physical anthro-
pologist Nancy Ossenberg of Canada’s Queen’s Uni-
versity proposed that genetic and physical similarities
between two modern-day Native American groups had
arisen when different founding populations exchanged
genes while living in Beringia (1). In the 1990s, Brazilian
scientists wrote that the people who became the Native
Americans might have “settled and diversified” in
Beringia, building up genetic diversity before entering
the New World (2).
A decade later, Estonian geneticist Erika Tamm
and colleagues were puzzling over a trove of mito-
chondrial DNA, which is passed down only from
mother to child. Tamm and her colleagues noticed
Watson
that Native American mitochondrial DNA includes
four unique variations absent in related Asians.
When the Tamm group read the Brazilians’ work,
the idea of a Beringian layover “fit with the patterns
we were seeing,” says team member Ripan Malhi of
the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The
result was a landmark 2007 paper making the case for
a “Beringian standstill” (3). The authors argued that
people leaving Asia had “paused in Beringia,” iso-
lating themselves from their ancestors so long that
their mitochondrial DNA evolved new variations seen
only in their descendants in the New World.
In this scenario, the Asian emigrants probably
reached Beringia before the full brunt of the Last
Glacial Maximum, a period of glaciers and fierce cold
that lasted from roughly 27,000–19,000 years ago.
Once in Beringia, the emigrants could go no further,
thanks to the ice sheets blocking the door to the rest
of the Americas. Tamm’s group hypothesized that peo-
ple were isolated in Beringia for up to 15,000 years until
they could venture into the unknown lands to the east.
The model was popular from the start, Malhi says,
but “for a really long time, there were no formal sim-
ulations or actual testing of this hypothesis.” That’s no
longer the case.
Mounting Evidence
In the past 2 years, several powerful studies have
buttressed the original genetic findings. One large
consortium of scientists from Australia, the United
States, and elsewhere focused, as Tamm’s group did,
on mitochondrial DNA, some of it from Native Amer-
ican mummies dating back hundreds of years. The
results showed Native Americans were genetically
isolated from their source population for 2,400–9,000
years (4). Another large consortium examined nuclear
DNA and found evidence for an ancient separation
between the ancestors of modern-day Siberians and
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 modern-day Native Americans. This team estimated
the separation at 8,000 years, perhaps less (5). The
fact that nuclear DNA points to the same conclusions
as the mitochondrial DNA, Kitchen says, is “reaffir-
mation that the mitochondria [effect] we’re seeing
is real.”
The new mitochondrial DNA results suggest only
2,000 women gave rise to the inhabitants of the New
World, says Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an author of the
mitochondrial DNA paper and a human ecologist at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. That translates
to a standstill population numbering in the few tens of
thousands. Fehren-Schmitz and his colleagues also
modeled the capacity of Beringia during the Last
Glacial Maximum, given the vegetation and fauna.
They found that 18,000–54,000 people could have
lived off the land, which is roughly in line with their
population estimate.
In early April, Malhi and his colleagues published
yet more genetic evidence providing subtle evidence
of a standstill (6). His group found that four prehis-
toric individuals—including one from more than
“These were not people who are scared away by a little
bit of snow.”
—Lars Fehren-Schmitz
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10,000 years ago—who lived on the Alaskan and
British Columbian coasts had DNA characteristic of
the so-called northern lineage of Native Americans.
People of that lineage still live in the region, as well as
in the northern interior of the continent. Malhi says
that one possible explanation for the lineage’s ap-
pearance is that it existed in Beringia. He confesses to
having harbored serious doubts about the Standstill
Hypothesis after hearing of another mechanism that
could explain the genetic patterns. But his new paper
(6) has made him more of a believer. “I’m more con-
vinced than I was a year ago,” he says.
Also supporting the hypothesis’s validity is new
data from Bluefish Caves, an archaeological site in the
Canadian Yukon. Researchers working there in the
1970s and 1980s excavated animal bones with signs
of human butchering. Now scientists have used ra-
diocarbon techniques to show that people occupied
the site as early as 24,000 years ago, the heart of the
most recent severe ice age (7). If confirmed, the data
are strong evidence that “somebody was in Beringia
during the Last Glacial Maximum,” says archaeologist
John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Humans clearly lived on the other side of Beringia
too. At several Paleolithic sites on the Yana River in far
northern Siberia, researchers found mammoth-ivory
artifacts including a tusk that had been scraped to
make spear points or the like. The artifacts date to
between 21,000 and 24,000 years ago, says Vladi-
mir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who
heads research at the Yana sites. Those dates, part
of research that has been accepted for publication
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(8), confirm humans did not abandon Beringia even
when the climate was far chillier and drier than to-
day, Pitulko says.
But Pitulko allows that conditions at Yana River
might have gotten tiresome. If your local temperature
averages 5 degrees, “you’ll probably think about
getting to some other place 5 degrees warmer, which
makes a big difference,” he says.
Humans seeking more hospitable real estate could
aspire to southeastern Beringia, which Hoffecker calls
the “Riviera” of the glacial maximum. During that cold
and arid period, Beringia’s most productive ecosys-
tem was the area now just offshore of southern Alaska,
according to modeling of the ancient vegetation
based on local temperatures, carbon-dioxide levels,
and other conditions. Ice-age sediment drilled from
the nearby sea floor included pollen from birch and
alder (9). Unless that pollen eroded out of older
sediments, it indicates relatively mild conditions,
says paleoecologist Nancy Bigelow of the University
of Alaska Fairbanks. The whole of the Arctic was
dominated not by grass but by protein-rich broad-
leaf plants, according to a recent study of plant
DNA embedded in permafrost (10). Those plants
helped support herds of mammoths, bison and other
large game.
Linguistic as well as genetic evidence implies that
humans were situated to take advantage of this bounty.
Researchers examined languages from Siberia, Alaska,
and northern North America, looking for structural traits,
such as the presence of plural pronouns. Using these
traits to build an evolutionary-tree–like diagram, they
found that the Siberian languages evolved alongside
the Native American languages (11). This finding
supports “at least a period of occupation and di-
versification within the Beringian area, and probably
somewhere within the southwestern Alaskan area,”
says study coauthor Gary Holton of the University of
Hawai’i at Manoa.
Alternate Route
Despite all of the evidence, the case for a Beringian
standstill remains open. The genetic patterns seen in
Native Americans could have been created by “ge-
netic surfing,” Malhi says. That’s rapid genetic change
seen when a small population expands rapidly in a
large area, as happened when humans finally spread
across the New World; Malhi says it could have pro-
duced the DNA relationships researchers see without
a long genetic isolation.
The sparse archaeological record is particularly
troubling. Bluefish Caves provides some of the only
archeological evidence for human occupation of
Beringia during the glacial maximum. But that timing
provokes skepticism, and if it’s correct, it places
humans at a spot in Beringia close to the ice sheet,
which was much more barren than the land bridge.
“For people to be that far north at Last Glacial Maxi-
mum times you would need a lot of compelling evi-
dence to demonstrate that,” says Ben Potter of the
University of Alaska Fairbanks. “I’m not convinced.”
Watson
 There is a middle course. Perhaps people paused
on their way to the New World, but not in Beringia.
Genetic data do not specify where the standstill took
place, only that the people who gave rise to Native
Americans were genetically isolated. “It’s unlikely to
actually be in Beringia, because we don’t have evidence
of people there between 25,000 and 14,000 years ago,
the time period when this supposedly took place,” ar-
gues Potter, who points to alternative spots in Siberia.
One recently proposed option centers on the
Japanese island of Hokkaido and the neighboring
Russian island called Sakhalin. During the glacial
maximum, Sakhalin was connected to Hokkaido, the
mainland, and some of the nearby Kuril Islands.
Starting 26,000 years ago, signs of human habitation
on Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils rose sharply,
according to the number of archaeological sites and
other data (12). That implies an influx of people, says
archaeologist Ian Buvit with the National Park Service
in Anchorage. And this happened shortly before the
number of human sites in southern Siberia fell sharply,
as if people were fleeing from one place to another.
But every proposed incubation site has its weak-
nesses. It would’ve been difficult for people living in
Siberia to be genetically isolated from their neighbors,
as the genetics patterns demand. Genetic isolation
requires not just harsh climate but physical barriers,
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such as mountains, says Fehren-Schmitz. “These were
not people who are scared away by a little bit of
snow,” he adds. It also seems likely that the standstill
site was within striking distance of North America.
The models show that people entered the Americas
from wherever they were waiting as soon as the
glaciers began to pull back. Either they were on the
doorstep of the Americas at that time, or the instant
the ice sheets retreated they sprinted “very, very fast,”
Kitchen says.
Finding an Asian site that checks all of the boxes is
not easy, Hoffecker says, although he’s open to
credible alternative locales from critics. “I’m all ears,”
Hoffecker says. “But I haven’t heard it yet.”
Beringia is the most plausible site to many re-
searchers, but it’s also problematic. The region is
nearly devoid of signs of a human presence during the
Last Glacial Maximum; whether that’s because there
wasn’t such a presence or it hasn’t been found is un-
clear. The argument is likely to continue until re-
searchers recover ancient DNA from a population that
shows initial signs of genetic isolation. Or perhaps
researchers will stumble across a site that holds un-
deniable evidence of a human presence during the
glaciers’ reign. “I hope someday it is going to be
found,” Pitulko says. “I am optimistic. . . . It might be
this coming summer. Who knows?”

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