Beringia

In the world of History and Science, there has always been the lingering question of how did the first people actually get to the America's? In recent years new theories of how the first people got to the America's have appeared. These theories include the Atlantic route, the Pacific route, and the coastal route. Along with these theories are the Indigenous and the first recognized theory the land bridge or the Clovis theory. The land bridge theory, being the first and most famous has much evidence to support its claims to how the first people came to the America's.

The first piece of evidence that supports the land bridge theory or the Clovis theory is that during the ice age in the Pleistoraene Era, the sea levels would have been lower in the Bering sea (Lebel & Orr). Because or the low sea levels there could have been a grassy plain known as Beringia linking Siberia with Alaska (Lebel & Orr). This evidence suggests that there would have been a path in which the first peoples could have traveled by. The distance would have only been seventy kilometers apart.

Another piece of evidence to support the Clovis theory is that the first peoples were big game hunters and probably traveled in hunting families following there prey across Beringia (Lebel & Orr). The size and shape of the stone projectile points used by the hunters are thought to be 9500 to 13 500 years before present, these indicate that they were in fact big game hunters (Lebel & Orr). More evidence to support this is that large grazing animals such as horses, caribou, bison, mammoth's, and musk oxen, would have migrated or traveled between the two continents via Beringia (Lebel & Orr). Fossils of similar big game animals were also found in both Alaska and Siberia (Lebel & Orr).

One of the last pieces of evidence to support the land bridge theory is that because most of the America's were covered n ice because of the ice age there would have been a coast line that was free of ice, much like modern Greenland today (Lebel & Orr). By traveling along the pacific coast this would have allowed the first peoples to spread throughout the America's. The first peoples could have also traveled along the coast by boat. The last piece of evidence is that one aboriginal tribe tells a story of how escaping from their enemies their chief made a bridge of ice between tow land masses, they then crossed into another