Title: The Bering Land Bridge and the First Americans - SAPIENS
Headings: 
Searching for the Origins of the First Americans
Content: We also know, thanks to the research of Russian archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko and his colleagues, that Beringia itself was already inhabited at this time. The sea level in the Bering Strait today is hundreds of feet higher than it was when the Bering Land Bridge connected Siberia and Alaska. Public Domain Images
P itulko’s team has excavated a remarkable group of 32,000-year-old sites near the mouth of the Yana River in what would have been the northwestern portion of Beringia. ( Beringia is now more broadly defined as the region stretching from the Verkhoyansk Mountains in the west to the Mackenzie River in the east.) At the workshop, these sites were described as the “Olduvai Gorge of Beringia”—a reference to the famous fossil site in East Africa that has reshaped our understanding of human origins—because they yield a wealth of archaeological and environmental information about life in Beringia during the ice age. A round 30,000 years ago, climates in Northern Asia became extremely cold and dry, and there is evidence for a large-scale abandonment of much of the region. Plant productivity declined with the cold, which had an immediate impact on the animal population. Think of Arctic deserts as sets of lungs. In warmer and moister times they breathe in people and animals, then they exhale them when aridity and cold intensify. This is what happened in Siberia during the last glacial maximum—the period of maximum cold during the last ice age, from roughly 30,000 to 15,000 years ago. (