[Ellendra]

when the first plants and animals showed up in the region. Meanwhile, archaeologists have ample evidence that people were living in the Americas long before then.

People were here before plants or animals?

[righttackle44]

You don't need a land bridge to cross the Bering Strait. During the Soviet years, the Russians would house a detail on their side of the Strait to keep Russian Inuits (Eskimos) from crossing the ice to visit family members in Alaska, and keep Alaskan Inuits from visiting. My understanding that the current Russian government has renewed the practice.

So, for however many millennia you didn't have Soviets or the current regime, you only needed to wait for winter to cross.

Of course, that bit of knowledge would play hob with many tenured professor-ships, published papers, books, and lecture-circuit presentations as well as scholarly lectures, would it?

[redfreedom]

No one has absolutely any proof of how the Americas were first settled. It’s all pure speculation.

[a fool in paradise]

[bunkerhill7]

When they looked back after they crossed, they could see Russia from there.

[dfwgator]

So the “Native Americans” stole the land from somebody else.

[BeauBo]

Just skirt the coastline/icepack in kayaks.

Fish, hunt seals, camp overnight, repeat. Dress warmly.

[BeauBo]

Just skirt the coastline/icepack in kayaks.

Fish, hunt seals, camp overnight, repeat. Dress warmly.

[montag813]

Stone tools alongside mastodon bones in Florida were recently found to be 14,550 years old.

Um, how does one carbon date a STONE tool? Unless there was a wood handle attached, the material would be older by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000.

[SES1066]

It was just 20-30 years ago that the date of 12k years ago was SETTLED SCIENCE amongst the EXPERTS. Does that suggest anything to those who have the senses and intelligence that God Gave us?

For non-Government-dependent scientists, the concept of SETTLED SCIENCE went out with Aristotle and Ptolemy! One of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization is organized scientific inquiry and one of it’s most basic tenants is that a theory is always subject to dispute and disruption as facts can render it void.

Example: Benjamin Franklin was only one of many to note that the ocean borders of Africa and South America were impossibly aligned. In the 1910s&20s, German scientist Alfred Wegener added fossil & geological evidence to make a claim that the Continents Drift but the geophysicists rejected his claim because they could not see any mechanism for such movements. It took new facts derived from oceanography and vulcanism to establish that mechanism in the 1950s.

As for human settlement in the Americas, I give a raspberry every time I see a ‘documentary’ on “Who Discovered America”, because it is both obvious and immaterial. Obvious in that the permanent discovery was the one by Christopher Columbus and immaterial in that there were so many before his expedition as to be meaningless.

My semi-educated guess is a strong and foolish sailor on a strong raft who got caught in a storm off Europe and survived the Westerlies to make it to the Americas. He probably lived well but died very lonely . Rinse and repeat many, many times until actual societies made it who could sustain themselves. Could be by the Bearing Straight or by sea-ice routes from Europe during the Ice Ages. DNA appears to show that the Amerind populations were the last great migration and came from Asia.

[zeestephen]

I was under the impression that modern day genetic studies clearly link Native Americans to various Siberian people.

Unless there is definitive proof that the Siberians had no boat or canoe or rafting technology, this does not seem like a hugely important issue.

I have also read in other sources that rising sea levels after the last Ice Age ended most likely washed away all traces of pre-12,600 ya North American coastal communities, if any actually existed.

[JoeProBono]