Recently newspapers have trumpeted new scientific discoveries that lead some scientists to conclude that early American Indians lived in the area of the Bering Strait, known as Beringia, for more than 10,000 years before colonizing the Americas around about 15,000 years ago. Headlines such as “First Americans May Have Been Stuck in Beringia for Millennia” from NBC News, and “On Way to New World, First Americans Made a 10,000-Year Pit Stop” from National Geographic have once again brought attention to a long-held, scientifically entrenched theory–but one that is still highly controversial–that the ancestors of American Indians walked across a land bridge from Asia to settle in the Americas.

The media attention stems from an article in the February 28 issue Science magazine authored by paleoecologists from three universities and entitled “Out of Beringia?” Digging up sediment cores from that region dated to between 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, they found in the spores of shrubs and other plants, “evidence that central Beringia supported a shrub tundra region with some trees during the last glacial maximum and was characterized by surprisingly mild temperatures, given the high latitude.” During that time (the “last glacial maximum” or LGM as it is known), the massive ice sheets over North America and Europe lowered the ocean levels by hundreds of feet, making Beringia a large vast plain that connected the two continents.

Beringia was left uncovered by the ice because of the dryness of the region, which produced little snowfall despite the cold. The assumption is that the region could have supported a large population of ancient Indians. As one of the co-authors, Scott Elias of the University of London explained, "We believe that these ancestors survived on the shrub tundra of the Bering Land Bridge because this was the only region of the Arctic where any woody plants were growing. They needed the wood for fuel to make campfires in this bitterly cold region of the world."