Bering Archipelago May Debunk Land Bridge Migration Theory
A controversial new study may rewrite the history books on how and when North America was first populated.
Historians and archeologists have tried for years to answer the question, “how did our ancient ancestors first populate North America?”
The most prevalent theory has been the Bering Land Bridge theory—that ice age migrants crossed an ancient landmass from Siberia to North America. But a new theory states that ice age migrants may have used a series of islands, The Bering Transitory Archipelago, to make the crossing and use these islands as stepping stones to get to North America. Using a method called retrospective sea-level mapping, scientists found evidence of an archipelago nearly 900 miles long that existed up to 30,000 years ago.
This theory could debunk the Bering Land Bridge theory, change our understanding of early human migration to North America, and shine a light on maritime technologies they may have possessed.
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Skull Fragment of Missing Human Species Found in Israel
Archeologists in Israel have just made a groundbreaking discovery; could the skull they found belong to a new type of human and our oldest relative?
In recent years, the regular discovery of new species of archaic humans has been complicating the human family tree. The finding in Israel is the latest to fill in missing information on this ever-changing timeline of human evolution.
Andrew Collins is an ancient history researcher who has written extensively on the topic. “One of the most important discoveries in anthropology in recent years has been the finding of fragments of a human skull at a place named Nesher Ramla in Israel. It’s an open-air site that was functional between about 120,000-140,000 years ago,” Collins said.
“And the archeologists who have been working there have discovered, not only sophisticated stone tools, but they found fragments of this skull, and this skull is unique because it has elements of an archaic human that look similar to a Neanderthal, but also it has human elements.”
