The ocean level in the Bering Strait was more like 800 feet lower, the sealevel varied a lot by latitude. And a lot of what happened in prehistory happened on what is now the continental shelf, so much more will be learned (probably, with luck) in the future.
But that doesn’t change the fact that most Pacific Islands — including Flores — were not accessible via foot traffic.
Im not trying to argue with yiu.
Here is what Gemini says it would have been like at this time.
When sea levels dropped by about **400 feet (roughly 120 to 130 meters)**—which occurred during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 20,000 to 26,000 years ago—the geography of the Asia-Pacific region was dramatically transformed.
However, accessibility to these landmasses varied entirely based on whether they sat on continental shelves or were separated by deep oceanic trenches.
### 1. Australia and New Guinea: Fully Accessible (The Supercontinent of Sahul)
* **Status:** **Directly connected.**
* **Details:** Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania were fused into a single, massive continent known to geologists as **Sahul**. The shallow Arafura Sea and the Torres Strait disappeared entirely, turning what is now shallow water into dry savannah and plains. People could walk freely between mainland Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania without ever crossing the ocean.
### 2. Southeast Asia: Fully Accessible (Sundaland)
* **Status:** **Directly connected to the Asian mainland.**
* **Details:** On the opposite side of the gap, the Sunda Shelf was completely exposed. Mainland Southeast Asia stretched southward, incorporating Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Bali, and Palawan into a massive Asian peninsula called **Sundaland**.
### 3. Wallacea (The Islands Between Sunda and Sahul): Closer, But Still Water-Bound
* **Status:** **Not connected by land; required water crossings.**
* **Details:** The islands lying between Sunda and Sahul—such as Sulawesi, Flores, Timor, Lombok, and the Maluku islands—sat across deep-ocean trenches (such as the Wallace Line and Weber’s Deep). Even with a 400-foot drop in sea level, **these deep channels never closed**.
* While individual islands became significantly larger and the water gaps between them narrowed (making island-hopping shorter), early humans still required watercraft to navigate through Wallacea to eventually reach Sahul (which humans accomplished roughly 50,000 to 65,000 years ago during earlier sea-level fluctuations).
### 4. Remote Oceania and Pacific Island Chains (Micronesia, Polynesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, etc.)
* **Status:** **Isolated by vast ocean expanses.**
* **Details:** While a 400-foot drop exposed more reef area and expanded the surface area of existing volcanic islands and atolls, **none** of the islands of Remote Oceania became connected to a continent or to each other by land bridges.
* They remained separated by hundreds of miles of open ocean. Consequently, they were **not easily accessible** during the LGM and remained entirely uninhabited until thousands of years later, when indigenous Austronesian and Lapita peoples developed advanced double-hulled voyaging canoes and deep-sea navigation technologies.
### Summary
* **Land-based access:** Only **Sahul** (Australia + New Guinea + Tasmania) and **Sundaland** (Southeast Asia + western Indo-Malayan islands) saw massive land expansion that united previously separated regions.
* **Island-hopping access:** **Wallacea** required watercraft crossings, though gaps were narrower.
* **Remote Pacific Islands:** Remained deeply isolated oceanic targets that still required sophisticated open-ocean voyaging technology to reach.
Just one point, if oceans are 400 feet lower, there may Islets or atolls that would have been available to these ancient peoples that aren’t available now to assist them in island hopping.