New map of Beringia 'opens your imagination' to what landscape looked like 18,000 years ago

CBC News ^ | January 31, 2019, Last Updated: February 1 | Karen McColl

[SunkenCiv]

The Bering land bridge was exposed at various times over an almost three million year period, when wide scale glaciation lowered sea levels by as much as 150 metres. The land bridge was part of "Beringia," which refers to the stretch of land between present day Siberia and Yukon Territory. It's been home to woolly mammoths, steppe bison and humans.

Jeff Bond, a geologist with Yukon Geological Survey in Whitehorse, has produced a map showing what Beringia looked like 18,000 years ago. At that time, much of the earth was glaciated, but Beringia remained predominantly ice-free due to its arid climate...

Bond said the data are accurate down to about one square kilometre in most places... He said some areas have a 100 square metre resolution...

"I think these waterways would be very significant in terms of campsites, places which would have maybe impeded peoples' migration or dispersion across the land bridge."

[PIF]

All those costal rivers in the south must have supported huge runs of pacific salmon: sockeye, pink, chinook, coho, and chum. Were there were that many fish in a ready food supply there were also villages or even city sized towns dedicated to the harvest. They likely traded as far south as what is today the sea of japan. All or most of them drowned when the ice suddenly melted.

It is worth downloading the .pdf of the map, and any one who can open a .lyr doc for the hydrology.

[PIF]

Hides are used to store water and they would have had pottery also from their trades with the peoples living in what is now the sea of japan. Southern coastal towns would have been permanent, not camps and they would have been primarily fishermen of salmon which would have been available during most of the year (run timing). The Jomon in Japan have a documented culture going back 14,000 years.

[lepton]

in some of the most difficult terrain around.

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How difficult of a terrain were the lowlands? They’d have had a lot of silt on them, so more likely to be plains and low hills, yes?

[COBOL2Java]

Looks like Diego ("Ice Age" movie)

[Red Badger]

The Bering land bridge was exposed at various times over an almost three million year period, when wide scale glaciation lowered sea levels by as much as 150 metres.

Wouldn't it have been an 'Ice Bridge' then?..................

[M Kehoe]

In the fwiw department, Florida was over a hundred miles wider back then.

5.56mm

[SunkenCiv]

The lower the altitude (or latitude), the warmer the temperature, so, compared with the iced over parts of the Earth, food would have been plentiful. Also, there's no evidence for the oceans having frozen over (at least, not for long) and there is evidence of some form of navigation going back 100s of 1000s of years, so, yeah, probably lots of trade, and traces of drowned towns are probably down there.

[American in Israel]

In the dead of winter in cold years you can walk across the ice to Russia. No need to wait 10,000 years...