Postglacial viability and colonization in North America's ice-free corridor
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Colleges, School and Institutes
- Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen 1350, Denmark.
- Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2H4, Canada.
- School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK.
- Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.
- Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton, Alberta T5N 0M6, Canada.
- Department of Anthropology, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 4S2, Canada.
- Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
- Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775, USA.
- Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark.
- Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada.
- Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75275, USA.
- Mouse Pipelines, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK.
During the Last Glacial Maximum, continental ice sheets isolated Beringia (northeast Siberia and northwest North America) from unglaciated North America. By around 15 to 14 thousand calibrated radiocarbon years before present (cal. kyr bp), glacial retreat opened an approximately 1,500-km-long corridor between the ice sheets. It remains unclear when plants and animals colonized this corridor and it became biologically viable for human migration. We obtained radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and metagenomic DNA from lake sediment cores in a bottleneck portion of the corridor. We find evidence of steppe vegetation, bison and mammoth by approximately 12.6 cal. kyr bp, followed by open forest, with evidence of moose and elk at about 11.5 cal. kyr bp, and boreal forest approximately 10 cal. kyr bp. Our findings reveal that the first Americans, whether Clovis or earlier groups in unglaciated North America before 12.6 cal. kyr bp, are unlikely to have travelled by this route into the Americas. However, later groups may have used this north-south passageway.
|Number of pages||5|
|Early online date||10 Aug 2016|
|Publication status||Published - 1 Sep 2016|
- Animal Migration, Animals, Bison/physiology, DNA/analysis, Deer/physiology, Forests, Fossils, Genomics, Geologic Sediments/chemistry, History, Ancient, Human Migration/history, Humans, Ice Cover, Mammoths/physiology, Models, Theoretical, North America, Pollen, Radiometric Dating, Siberia