The parts that remain above water are the extreme eastern tip of Siberia and the western coast of Alaska, separated now by the Bering Strait.

The rest — the vast central plain, the lakes and rivers and grasslands of ancient Beringia — is now the shallow floor of the Bering and Chukchi seas.

The archaeological sites of ancient Beringia are drowned.

What we know about human occupation of the core of Beringia comes from its margins: from sites in the eastern Siberian Arctic like Yana, and from sites in Alaska that preserve evidence of the earliest Americans after they had crossed.

The interior of Beringia, where the critical population dynamics of the Americas-founding event played out, is largely inaccessible to archaeology.