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Archaeological evidence, in fact, recognizes that people started to leave Beringia for the New World around 40,000 years ago, but rapid expansion into North America didn't occur until about 15,000 years ago, when the ice had literally broken. Mulligan and her colleagues took such archaeological data and plugged it into a model that included DNA sequences from modern Native American, other American, and Asian populations. Henry C. Harpending, a distinguished professor and endowed chairman of anthropology at the University of Utah, said the new model represents "innovative anthropology and (an) edge-of-the-seat population study." "The idea that people were stuck in Beringia for a long time is obvious in retrospect, but it has never been promulgated," he added. "But people were in that neighborhood before the last glacial maximum and didn't get into North America until after it. It's very plausible that a bunch of them were stuck there for thousands of years." Mulligan hopes future research on the first major human migration into the Americas will answer other pressing questions concerning early New World colonization. "Some of the most interesting questions to do with human movements concern, 'Why?'" she said. "Why did people leave Asia, settle in Beringia and move to the New World? I think (research like ours) offers our best chance of answering some of those elusive 'Why' questions." Related Links: |
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