The Beringia standstill: ancestors of Native Americans in isolation

Date

c. 25,000 to 15,000 years ago

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Beringia (Bering land bridge)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

Genetic evidence indicates that the ancestors of Native Americans diverged from their Siberian and East Asian relatives around 25,000 years ago and then spent thousands of years as a relatively isolated population before entering the Americas, a scenario known as the Beringian Standstill hypothesis.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the exposed land bridge of Beringia and adjacent refugia separated this founding population from Asia to the west and, to the south, from the rest of the Americas by the vast Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets. In genetic isolation the population accumulated distinctive mitochondrial and nuclear variants found today only in Indigenous American peoples. Estimates of the standstill's duration range from about 2,400 to 9,000 years, with a commonly cited figure of roughly 5,000. Paleoecological reconstructions suggest parts of Beringia supported shrub tundra capable of sustaining people and game. The model reconciles genetic, archaeological, linguistic, and environmental data on how and when the New World came to be populated.

Related social & demographic events

• Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africa
  c. 300,000 years ago
• Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralism
  c. 3300 BCE
• The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherers
  c. 15,000 to 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000 to 9500 BCE)
• Uruk becomes the world's first city
  c. 4000 to 3100 BCE
• Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megaliths
  c. 4000 BCE
• Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatolia
  c. 7100 to 5950 BCE

Essential reading

• The Pleistocene-Holocene boundary and the start of the Holocene
  c. 11,700 years ago (c. 9700 BCE)
• Monumental urbanism at Caral and the Norte Chico civilisation
  c. 2600 BCE
• Standardised Binary Weights System of the Indus
  c. 2600 BCE
• Rise of Kerma as an Urban Centre in Nubia
  c. 2500 BCE

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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