The continental connection was severed.

What had been a landscape of grasslands and herds became open ocean.

The Trail Creek child, alive approximately 9,000 calendar years ago, was living in a world that had already completed this transformation.

The Bering Land Bridge had been gone for approximately 1,000 years by the time she was alive — gone within the living memory, perhaps, of her grandparents’ generation.

The world she knew was a peninsula, not a promontory on a larger landmass.