Crossroads, p.3
Their route into the New World was the so-called Bering Straits Land Bridge, actually a 1,000 mile wide subcontinent called Beringia that emerged from the shallow waters of the Bering Straits between Asia and Alaska. This "bridge" appeared as the Ice Age progressed and the glaciers grew to the point where they covered most of northern North America and Europe (but not northern Asia and Alaska) with ice up to two miles thick. Because so much water was locked up in the ice, sea levels dropped by 300 feet or more, slowly exposing Beringia and many other land masses in the shallowest parts of oceans around the world.
Beringia was dry land during the 8,000 years between 15,000 and 23,000 years ago. It was a cold and treeless place, but by 18,000 years ago it supported enough tundra plants to attract woolly mammoths, giant yaks, steppe bison, wild horses, caribou, saiga antelope, musk oxen, Dall sheep, Jefferson ground sloths, tundra hares, lemmings, and various Arctic predators--Arctic foxes, wolves, wolverines, grizzly bears, and Canada lynxes. It also attracted the greatest predators of all, the Paleo Indians.
The Paleo Indians had no idea they were colonizing a new world as they walked into Beringia. They were just drifting eastward, perhaps a few hundred miles per generation, to find unoccupied hunting grounds as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. Not many people took part in this migration into new territory, possibly no more than 400, because the harsh Arctic environment of Beringia could not support large numbers of hunters. At the time of European contact the entire Arctic from Greenland to the Aleutian Islands supported only about 15,000 Eskimos.
Getting to Beringia, which included most of Alaska, was easy, simply a matter of following the animals.
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