Beringia

This article is about the prehistoric land mass. For the battle of World War I in Beringia, Darfur, see Invasion of Darfur § Battle of Beringia. For modern proposals to construct a connection over the Bering Strait, see Bering Strait crossing.
Image of the Bering land bridge being inundated with rising sea level across time
Beringia sea levels (blues) and land elevations (browns) measured in metres from 21,000 years ago to present

Beringia is defined today as the land and maritime area bounded on the west by the Lena River in Russia; on the east by the Mackenzie River in Canada; on the north by 72° north latitude in the Chukchi Sea; and on the south by the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula.[1] It includes the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, the Chukchi and Kamchatka Peninsulas in Russia as well as Alaska in the United States and the Yukon in Canada.

The area includes land lying on the North American Plate and Siberian land east of the Chersky Range. At various times, it formed a land bridge referred to as the Bering land bridge, that was up to 1,000 km (620 mi) wide at its greatest extent and which covered an area as large as British Columbia and Alberta together,[2] totaling about 1.6 million km2 (620,000 sq mi), allowing biological dispersal to occur between Asia and North America. Today, the only land that is visible from the central part of the Bering land bridge are the Diomede Islands, the Pribilof Islands of St. Paul and St. George, St. Lawrence Island, St. Matthew Island, and King Island.[1]

It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand arrived in Beringia from eastern Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum before expanding into the settlement of the Americas sometime after 16,500 years Before Present (YBP).[3] This would have occurred as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted,[4][5][6][7][8] but before the bridge was covered by the sea about 11,000 YBP.[9][10]

  1. ^ a b Shared Beringian Heritage Program. "What is Beringia?". National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.
  2. ^ Dr Barbara Winter (2005). "A Journey to a New Land". sfu.museum. virtualmuseum.ca. Archived from the original on 28 April 2015. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
  3. ^ "Home". bbcearth.com. BBC Earth.
  4. ^ Wang, Sijia; Lewis, C. M. Jr.; Jakobsson, M.; Ramachandran, S.; Ray, N.; et al. (2007). "Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans". PLOS Genetics. 3 (11): e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185. PMC 2082466. PMID 18039031.
  5. ^ Goebel, Ted; Waters, Michael R.; O'Rourke, Dennis H. (2008). "The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas". Science. 319 (5869): 1497–1502. Bibcode:2008Sci...319.1497G. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.398.9315. doi:10.1126/science.1153569. PMID 18339930. S2CID 36149744.
  6. ^ Fagundes, Nelson J. R.; et al. (2008). "Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas". American Journal of Human Genetics. 82 (3): 583–92. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2007.11.013. PMC 2427228. PMID 18313026.
  7. ^ Tamm, Erika; et al. (2007). Carter, Dee (ed.). "Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders". PLoS ONE. 2 (9): e829. Bibcode:2007PLoSO...2..829T. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000829. PMC 1952074. PMID 17786201.
  8. ^ Achilli, A.; et al. (2008). MacAulay, Vincent (ed.). "The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies". PLOS ONE. 3 (3): e1764. Bibcode:2008PLoSO...3.1764A. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001764. PMC 2258150. PMID 18335039.
  9. ^ Elias, Scott A.; Short, Susan K.; Nelson, C. Hans; Birks, Hilary H. (1996). "Life and times of the Bering land bridge". Nature. 382 (6586): 60. Bibcode:1996Natur.382...60E. doi:10.1038/382060a0. S2CID 4347413.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference jakobsson2017 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).