The Beringia standstill: ancestors of Native Americans in isolation
- Date
- c. 25,000–15,000 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.
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Related social & demographic events
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000–3100 BCE
- Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megalithsc. 4000 BCE
- Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatoliac. 7100 – 5950 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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