Human and Animal Dispersal in Beringia: Reconciling the Genetic and Archaeological Records

Summary

Peopling of the New World involved a dispersal process across Beringia that included both humans and animals. The archaeological record from eastern Beringia suggests a multiple-stage process of both pre- and post-Younger Dryas (YD) colonization from different regions of Northeast Asia, with the pre-YD colonization subdivisible into multiple waves. These archaeological manifestations can in turn be related to waves of terminal Pleistocene opportunistic entry into NE Asia itself, but can only be distantly related to linguistic and genetic groupings in Northeast and East-central Asia today (with Y-chromosome data providing the most consistent patterning). However, animal resources hunted by early human colonists, particularly megafauna such as mammoth, bison, wapiti, caribou, and moose also show dispersal patterns in the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene that can be traced genetically and related to dispersal patterns of early humans in Beringia, revealing complex associations as well as important environmental and demographic correlates. The latter include genetic bottlenecks which may be related to regional extinction patterns as human populations expanded into the region during the terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• After Anzick: Reconciling New Genomic Data and Models with the Archaeological Evidence for Peopling of the Americas

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