The 31,000-Year-Old Children’s Teeth Found Above The Arctic Circle — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Lost Ice Age Population Connected To Native American Origins
The question of how the Americas were first populated is one of the most debated questions in all of human prehistory.
It is a question that sits at the intersection of archaeology, genetics, geology, and paleoecology, and the evidence has been accumulating and shifting for decades.
The broad outline of the current understanding is this: the ancestors of Native Americans came from Siberia, crossing into the Americas via Beringia — the land bridge and the continental shelf that connected northeastern Asia to northwestern North America during periods of low sea level in the Ice Age.
The crossing happened, best current evidence suggests, sometime between roughly 15,000 and 25,000 years ago.