The evidence from the genetics and the archaeology increasingly argues for a different understanding: Beringia was a homeland.

For thousands of years during the Last Glacial Maximum, the broad expanse of land connecting Asia and North America was not just a throughway but a place — a productive, inhabited landscape where people lived for many generations, developing the specific cultural adaptations and genetic distinctiveness that characterize the founding population of the Americas.

The ecology of Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum was not what it might seem from a modern perspective.

The central and eastern portions of Beringia that are now submerged under the Bering and Chukchi Seas were then dry land covered by vegetation — not the barren tundra of the modern Siberian and Alaskan coasts, but a productive steppe-tundra ecosystem that supported dense populations of large herbivores.