Crossing Ice Age Beringia

As we understand it, humanity was held back by difficult terrain from accessing the Americas until about twenty thousand years ago.  Even then the penetration was achieved because of technical prowess in the making of seaworthy skin kayaks that allowed long distant jumps while occasionally resting on sea ice.  This was easily sustained by fishing and seal hunting.  Penetration was achieved on both coasts.

The west coast naturally channeled this human expansion along the coast itself with slim opportunities for inland penetration until one reaches Mexico.  The sea naturally held the population to the coast anyway.

The East Coast was much more like Europe itself and drew peoples inland as well.  From this it appears that we had the emergence of Cro Magnon.

In either case this process was both fast and slow.  Once started, it advanced inevitably and likely maxed over several thousands of years.  What always gave it pause was the need to establish new communities every step of the way.  A break away band would strike out to exploit new fishing grounds and until that band had reached a couple hundred members, the process would not be readily repeated.  Thus it was a naturally measured advance into new country.

All this begs the question of how did the Old World Primates the Sasquatch or Gigantpithecus and possibly Australopithecus do the trick also?

We got a clue with the recent observation of a Sasquatch moving cross country in the Barren lands of Nunavut while clearly following the caribou migration.  Knowing that the creature is adapted particularly to temperate forests, this was a big surprise.  They have already been found in the Boreal forest and now they are working open country in the Barrens.

For what it is worth, the only thing rarer than a Sasquatch in the Barrens are human beings.

What this really means is that the creature is well adapted to also follow the herds.  Thus it is also well adapted to penetrating the Americas through the Bering plain and ultimately into Alaska and even south over the ice if game was already doing so.  This was something that humanity would have had much more difficulty with and such penetration as did occur over that route came very late.

It may also have been able to follow the coastal periphery taking advantage of coastal forest elements.  Yet there are some seriously challenging barriers in the way of all that although the same hold through for the interior.  In fact tomorrow we will see that the coastal option was plausible in the depths of the Ice Age itself and must surely be the first choice.  Newly exposed seabed would have provided crossing of the intervening island chain at this time and passable terrain south thereafter.

The bottom line though is that Gigantpithecus is way better adapted to doing this in small family groups than we ever were.  He has his fur coat and can stalk and hunt without tools.  Even better though is his walking pace.  His stride is two to three times ours and while we can easily get up to twenty to thirty miles in a day over good ground, he can readily do fifty to a hundred miles in the same conditions.  Thus he can travel a thousand miles in a couple of weeks.  This makes crossing extreme country much less daunting.  A long ridge line through ice country is far less a barrier.

The case of Australopithecus is far trickier.  Our observations have been pretty well restricted to the Hudson Valley so far although that well likely change as awareness rises.  It is possible that they are recent arrivals coinciding with the opening of access with the end of the Ice Age just a few thousand years ago.  However, they also could have followed the Sasquatch along the Alaskan Coast.

Of course they may have merely taken ship from Ireland during the Bronze Age European expansion.