The Yana site, in the western reaches of Beringia — or just west of it, at the edge of the region — represents the kind of community that was part of the human presence in this broad geographic zone during the critical period.

The people at Yana, 31,000 years ago, were living in the western margins of the region that would eventually become the launching point for the Americas’ founding.

They were not the people who crossed.

But they were living in the same broad region, adapted to the same broad suite of environmental challenges, participants in the same complex demographic history that would eventually produce the people who crossed.

The continent-sized land bridge of Beringia has been submerged since roughly 11,000 years ago, when sea level rise following the glacial maximum drowned most of it.