Interesting article, thanks for posting. I wonder how they would have been isolated?
Perhaps by migrating as a tribe to northeast asia and no one followed them. The cold could have kept them alone...
In Beringia. The land bridge, which was not so much a bridge as a small continent, between NA and northern Siberia. Lasted for thousands of years until it was drowned by global warming ca. 12,000 (?) BC.
Oppenheimer points out that groups entering before the great Ice Age would have been pushed south by the ice caps, and then as the ice caps melted, would have re-entered the formerly ice-covered areas and repopulated them.
Somehow this article doesn’t seem right.
I have to agree with squarebarb’s comment in #19.
In all likelihood, the population was actually Beringian, not Eurasian nor American.
The bering strait land bridge was more than a bridge, it was a fertile land mass, thriving with game, and probably warmed by pacific sea currents.
It would have been isolated during the last ice age, and the human population that existed there would have had plenty of time to develop unique genetic characteristics.
At the end of the ice age, some of the population went west, and some went east, into the americas.