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What is Beringia?
The term Beringia comes from the name of Vitus Bering, a Danish explorer for the Russian czar in the
18th Century. Bering-Chirikov expedition explored the waters of the North Pacific between Asia and
North America. The Bering Strait, which lies between Alaska and Northeast Russia, and Bering
Island, in the Commander Islands, are named after him.
In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, P. Sushkin and E. Hulten began to use the word "Beringia" as a
geographic description. Today, we use the term to describe a vast area between the Kolyma River in
the Russian Far East to the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories of Canada. It is a region of
worldwide significance for cultural and natural resources. This area also provides an unparalleled
opportunity for a comprehensive study of the earth th--its unusually intact landforms and biological
remains may reveal the character of past climates and the ebb and flow of earth forces at the
continents’ edge. Biological research leads to the understanding of the natural history of the region
and distribution of flora and fauna. As one of the world’s great ancient crossroads, Beringia may hold
solutions to puzzles about who the first people were to come to North America, how and when they
traveled and how they survived under such harsh
climatic conditions.
It is currently believed that the ocean levels rose and
fell several times in the past. During extended cold
periods, tremendous volumes of water are deposited
on land in the form of ice and snow, which can cause
a corresponding drop in sea level. The last "ice age"
occurred around 12-15,000 years ago. During this
period the shallow seas now separating Asia from
North America near the present day Bering Strait
dropped about 300 feet and created a 1,000 mile
wide grassland steppe, linking Asia and North
America together with the "Bering Land Bridge". Across this vast steppe, plants and animals traveled
in both directions, and humans entered the Americas.
The National Park Service administers the Shared Beringian Heritage Program and is actively
working for the establishment of a Beringian Heritage International Park. Our area of primary focus for
research and cultural development is Central Beringia, that area adjoining the Bering Strait between
64 and 70 degrees north latitude and 160 and 180 degrees west longitude. In addition to promoting
the conservation and enjoyment of the natural and physical features of the region, the program
supports the understanding and celebration of the common shared heritage between the United
States and Russia in this part of the world.
About 12,000 calendar years ago, during the Last Ice Age,
the water level of the oceans were lower, exposing land
that today is under the Bering and Chukchi Seas. During
the glacial epoch this was part of a migration route for
people, animals, and plants. Most archeologists agree that
it was across this Bering Land Bridge, also called Beringia,
that humans first passed from Asia to populate the
Americas. The Preserve's western boundary lies 42 miles
The green outline indicates the area
from the Bering Strait and the fishing boundary between
that was exposed during the last Ice
Age, the area now known as Beringia or the United States and Russia.
the Bering Land Bridge.
Beringia still exists today in the people of Northwest Alaska
and the Russian Far East. Though they are separated by water the people of these two areas have
common language, traditions and depend on the same environment.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —• Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as
scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. Do the ancestors of Native Americans derive
from only a small number of "founders" who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? How did their migration to the New World
proceed? What, if anything, did the climate have to do with their migration? And what took them so long?
Map showing migration of humans from Asia to the Americas.
A team of 21 researchers, led by Ripan Malhi, a geneticist in the department of anthropology at the University of Illinois, has a new set of ideas.
One is a striking hypothesis that seems to map the peopling process during the pioneering phase and well beyond, and at the same time show
that there was much more genetic diversity in the founder population than was previously thought.
The team's findings appear in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science in an article titled, "Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native
American Founders."
"Our phylogeographic analysis of a new mitochondrial genome dataset allows us to draw several conclusions," the authors wrote.
"First, before spreading across the Americas, the ancestral population paused in Beringia long enough for specific mutations to accumulate that
separate the New World founder lineages from their Asian sister-clades." (A clade is a group of mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs ) that share a
recent common ancestor, Malhi said. Sister-clades would include two groups of mtDNAs that each share a recent common ancestor and the
common ancestor for each clade is closely related.)
Or, to express this first conclusion another way, the ancestors of Native Americans who first left Siberia for greener pastures perhaps as much
as 30,000 years ago, came to a standstill on Beringia – a landmass that existed during the last glacial maximum that extended from
Northeastern Siberia to Western Alaska, including the Bering land bridge – and they were isolated there long enough – as much as 15,000
years – to maturate and differentiate themselves genetically from their Asian sisters.
"Second, founding haplotypes or lineages are uniformly distributed across North and South America instead of exhibiting a nested structure
from north to south. Thus, after the Beringian standstill, the initial North to South migration was likely a swift pioneering process, not a gradual
diffusion."
Beringia links of interest
National Geographic atlas of human migration
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html
Bering Land Bridge Movie
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/parcs/atlas/beringia/images/movies/lbridge.mov
What is Beringia?
http://www.nps.gov/akso/beringia/WHATISBERINGIA2.htm
DNA research into the populating of the Americas
https://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27479&start=0