Beringia

The Bering land bridge joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at times during the Pleistocene ice ages.

Its greatest extension was about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north to south. It was not glaciated because snowfall was extremely light as the winds from the Pacific Ocean lost their moisture over the fully glaciated nearby mountains.

The grassland steppe, including the land bridge, that stretched for several hundred miles into the continents on either side has been called Beringia. It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand survived the ice age in Beringia. It was isolated from populations in Asia for at least 5,000 years. Sometime after 16,500 years ago, it started to populate the Americas when the American glaciers that blocked the way southward melted.^[1][2][3][4]

1. ↑ Goebel, Ted; et al. (2008). "The late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the Americas". Science. 319 (5869): 1497–1502. doi:10.1126/science.1153569. PMID 18339930. S2CID 36149744.
2. ↑ 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): 583–592. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2007.11.013. PMC 2427228. PMID 18313026.
3. ↑ Tamm, Erika; et al. (2007). "Beringian standstill and spread of native American founders". PLOS ONE. 2 (9): e829. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000829. PMC 1952074. PMID 17786201.
4. ↑ Achilli A.; et al. (2008). "The phylogeny of the four Pan-American mtDNA haplogroups: implications for evolutionary and disease studies". PLOS ONE. 3 (3): e1764. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001764. PMC 2258150. PMID 18335039.