An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.
These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said.
There are two main hypotheses as to how people first migrated to North America. The older idea suggested that people made this journey when Beringia — the landmass that once connected Asia with North America, now divided by the Bering Strait — was relatively free of ice. The more recent notion suggested that travelers made their way on watercraft along the Pacific coasts of Asia, Beringia and North America.
