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The Beringia ice wall measured over a half-mile high and only melted 13,800 years ago — more than 12,000 years after the earliest evidence of humans in North America.

Scientists have long suggested that the first people who migrated from Asia to the Americas traveled over the land bridge known as Beringia that connected the two continents. But a new study has posited that this overland route would have been impossible for millennia — as an enormous 300-story-tall ice wall blocked any attempts at passage.

Oregon State University geologist and archaeologist Jorie Clark spearheaded this fascinating new research. He aimed to make sense of the contradictory evidence of when precisely the first people migrated to the Americas.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that an ice-free corridor migrants supposedly used wasn’t even open until 13,800 years ago. With ancient footprints in Mexico suggesting humans arrived thousands of years earlier, an alternative route must have been taken — which Clark posits was sea-based.

Clark’s new study flies in the face of one of the most widely held theories of early migration to North America. Most researchers once agreed that the first people traveled to the New World when Beringia, a landmass that once connected Asia with North America, was largely ice-free.
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