When science meets history: Sorting out the path of the first Americans

You may have learned a story of the peopling of the Americas in grade school. The tale begins near the end of the last ice age with a mass migration across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska From there, the first Americans spread down into North, then South America along an interior corridor that opened up between thick ice sheets that blanketed what is now Canada. Or perhaps the tale included a Pacific coastal route.

But coming up with a single narrative isn’t actually as straightforward as it may seem. Without written records, we need scientific data to teach us our prehistory.