When the northern hemisphere was covered in a mile thick sheet of ice you could walk to the Americas from Europe..............
Yep... I often wonder why everyone still thinks that early man did not know how to float and had to walk as a prerequisite and only know method of travel. Or that there was no way possible they could have survived migrating along the edge of the ice caps eating Seals and fish.
Even in the South. In the South the Circumpolar current would have floated man from Australia or New Zealand to South America in just a few weeks. And as you say with sea levels lower the distance apart would have been even less.
Man floated over the Wallace Line to Australia about 55,000 years ago or more, and we have living examples of this survival ability of living on pure ice skirting the ice cap possibility with the Inuit. Yet we are still stuck on “The only way possible was to walk”.
Thanks for mentioning that-it is what got archaeologists interested in researching whether people could have gotten here from Europe, Asia, etc much earlier than thought to leave their artifacts behind as they went about the business of hunting, gathering, trading, fighting over territory, etc.
It has always made perfect sense to me that when the cold and/or other environmental conditions thins out your food supply, you walk or get into a canoe to find a warmer place with more resources-people have never been stupid about survival, and have always liked to explore and trade, no matter how far back in time it was-we really aren’t much different now-just better at creating technology to compete...