“So we’re still looking at the Bering Crossing, but by canoe instead of walking.”
That part confuses me. If it was an ice age harsh enough to lower the sea level enough to expose a land bridge across the Bering, then the ice should have extended down over that bridge as well, shouldn’t it?
A several thousand mile journey across ice as barren and hostile as a glacier doesn’t seem all that survivable.
“Feasible, but incredibly remarkable for 40,000 years ago.”
The tech available 200 years ago to the Aleuts and arctic area indigs could well be the same general level of tech from that period. The tools required for kayak construction didn’t rely on iron or metals. Bone, hide, and wood.
“It would have failed far more often than it would have succeeded.”
Most things do. Didn’t stop man from learning how to fly either.
Of course, I’m just guessing. But the sea born coast hopping route does seem to have all the pluses it needs.
I don't think so. The theory is that the land bridge across the Bering Sea approximately 13,000 years ago was caused by declining sea levels due to glaciation on the continents.
This was the time when glaciers were carving Yosemite Valley, for example.
There might well have been some snow on the Bering Sea landbridge, but not a whole lot as snowfall has always been light in that area.
The problem is that the land bridge was definitely not there 40,000 years ago, so any migration to the Americas would have to have been by boat or raft, a difficult and dangerous proposition at best.
Somebody apparently made it, though, if the evidence from Mexico is credible.
However, since we haven't found much evidence, if any, of a human presence between the period of 13,000 years ago and this evidence of 40,000 years ago, it is suggestive that whoever made that earlier passage was unable to maintain a population.
Whoever made this footprint in the ash might well have ended up as supper for a saber-toothed cat.