We arrived in Whitehorse, Yukon last night. We are in the province that borders Alaska. I am so happy to have a campsite in the woods again. We spent 2 days in Fort Nelson, with a site that faces the general store and check-in. The kids couldn’t understand why people were sitting outside on the front porch smoking cigarettes all day long(ok, maybe not all day).
Kids and I headed to town to go to the visitor center today. That is usually one of our first stops at a new place. It’s nice to get the maps and find out what they recommend. Also, free wifi! I had already researched the Beringia Interpretive Centre, so I knew I wanted to take the kids there. So I am realizing that I must have missed some schooling along the way. 🙂 Beringia? Ok, I don’t remember it! Well, that is how they think the first people came to North America through the land bridge(they call this area Beringia) that was created between Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age. This area was grassy and windy, but it was the perfect place for the Wooly Mammoth, short faced bear, steppe bison, scimitar cat, giant beaver, and Jefferson sloth(all extinct now). I have to say, I am happy that I don’t have to worry about running into a few of them. The Giant Beaver was 15 times the size of a beaver today. Really interesting stuff, though! We all learned alot! Kane is going to do a report on the Short-Faced Bear and Kat picked the American Scimitar Cat for schooling.
I grew up with the canonical image of cave men stalking the woolly mammoths across the land bridge into Alaska then Canada and thereafter populating the Americas. So I was fascinated to read as I went along these areas a book that questioned the whole theory. It started with a bit of skepticism that the paleoindians could have found and successfully used any open corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice sheets, questioned the evidence that the clovis spear point technology that the Beringian migrators supposedly brought along was really as old as claimed, and then topped it all off with then recent evidence of other archeological finds much older than the end of the Wisconsin glacial period that ended ~11,500 years ago. Monte Verde in Southern Chile is 33,000 years old.
Now that you prompt me to look it up again, I see that in the meantime, the genetic paleobiologists have been at work, suggesting coastal migrations in small boats, also chasing food, from Asia and also from even France, where they also used Clovis point spears! Check out note 4 in the Wikipedia Beringia entry – if the guys smoking on the front porch don’t have anything more to say.
Throw back your shoulders, take a broad stance and a deep breath and smile. Its a fine day for a personal migration. Enjoy!
Bob-that is awesome! Thanks for the research!! So interesting all these theories!!!