Mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, horses, bison — all the prey animals of the Yana hunters would have been present in Beringia too.

Beringia was, by current evidence, already inhabited by human populations during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The concept of a Beringian standstill — a period during which the ancestral Native American founding population was geographically isolated in Beringia, separated from other Asian populations by glacial conditions, while developing the specific genetic profile that characterizes Native Americans — has been supported by genetic modeling studies.

The isolation produced genetic drift: the accumulation of random genetic changes in a small population separated from its source population, resulting in a distinctive genetic profile.