A bearded seal rests on ice in the Bering Sea. NOAA/Cameron NOAA Fisheries is proposing to designate critical habitat in U.S. waters off the coast of Alaska for Arctic ringed seals and the Beringia distinct population of bearded seals. Both species are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The ESA requires that NOAA […]
Americans get a day off work on October 12 to celebrate Columbus Day. It’s an annual holiday that commemorates the day on October 12, 1492, when the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus officially set foot in the Americas, and claimed the land for Spain. It has been a national holiday in the United States since 1937. […]
During the coldest days of the last ice age, the Bering Land Bridge was 1,000 miles wide, a belt buckle the size of Australia that connected North America and Asia. That mysterious land of green plants, streams and hills persisted for thousands of years, until seas swelling with glacial melt ate it up. All that […]
It’s one of the most contentious debates in anthropology today: Where did America’s first peoples come from — and when? The general scientific consensus is that a single wave of people crossed a long-vanished land bridge from Siberia into Alaska around 13,000 years ago. But some Native Americans are irked by the theory, which they […]
The timing of the first entry of humans into North America across the Bering Strait has now been set back 10,000 years. This has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt by Ariane Burke, a professor in Université de Montréal’s Department of Anthropology, and her doctoral student Lauriane Bourgeon, with the contribution of […]
University of Utah scientists deciphered maternal genetic material from two babies buried together at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago. They found the infants had different mothers and were the northernmost known kin to two lineages of Native Americans found farther south throughout North and South America. By showing that both genetic lineages lived so […]
The original Americans came from Siberia in a single wave no more than 23,000 years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, and apparently hung out in the north – perhaps for thousands of years – before spreading in two distinct populations throughout North and South America, according to a new genomic analysis. […]