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Fish soup. Salmon tartare with mango salsa. Sea bream a la plancha.The human genus has been eating fish since the dawn of time. Almost 2 million years ago, hominins in Kenya deboned a catfish. Around 800,000 years ago, hominins in Israel grilled a giant carp. Evidence of shellfish consumption also abounds, and it’s even been proposed that coastal Neanderthals dived for clams.It is therefore unsurprising that freshwater fish were critical resources for inland prehistoric peoples in North America, not to mention modern ones. It is surprising that archaeologists investigating their predecessors – the earliest people in Beringia (the land bridge...

An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said...Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. Prior work regarding the...

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...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

A re-dating of mastodon bones reveals that the extinct mammals, related to the modern day elephant, disappeared from the area during a glacial period more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps—a chronology that is at odds with what scientists know about the massive animals' preferred habitat: forests and wetlands abundant with leafy food... Over the course of the late Pleistocene, between about 10,000 and 125,000 years ago, the American mastodon (Mammut...

Using a new method for exploring ancient relationships among languages, linguists have found evidence further illuminating the peopling of North America about 14,000 years ago. Their findings follow a recent proposal that the ancestors of Native Americans were marooned for some 15,000 years on a now sunken plain before they reached North America. This idea, known as the Beringian standstill hypothesis, has been developed by geneticists and archaeologists over the last seven years. It holds that the ancestors of Native Americans did not trek directly across the land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska until the end of the last...

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder bolsters the theory that the first Americans, who are believed to have come over from northeast Asia during the last ice age, may have been isolated on the Bering Land Bridge for thousands of years before spreading throughout the Americas. The theory, now known as the "Beringia Standstill," was first proposed in 1997 by two Latin American geneticists and refined in 2007 by a team led by the University of Tartu in Estonia that sampled mitrochondrial DNA from more than 600 Native Americans. The researchers found that mutations in the...

Beringia: humans were hereIt was an extraordinary ancient land filled with fantastic creatures and intrepid people. ALEX ROSLIN, Special to The Gazette Published: Saturday, May 17 Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology's greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent. This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving...

Bye Bye, Beringia Anthropology and Archaeology of The Americas by Bill Jones One might think that Archeology sites throughout the World have produced many datable human remains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ancient human remains have so rarely been found that these singular findings could not be connected to others to form chronologies about human evolution. The scarcity of human remains to be analyzed has prevented the sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology from forming conclusions about the cultural levels of ancient humans. We try to measure the culture of a people in terms of the totality of their...

News in Science 18/4/2003 Ancient dung reveals a picture of the past [This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s833847.htm] An arctic mound of soil covering a core of solid ice in northeastern Siberia (Pic: Science) The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. An international research effort led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark reports in today?s issue of the journal Science it has extracted well preserved animal and plant DNA from...