During the last ice age, humans ventured into two vast and unknown continents: North and South America. For nearly a century, researchers thought they knew how this wild journey occurred. The first people to cross the Bering Land Bridge, a massive swath of land that connected Asia with North America when sea levels were lower, were the Clovis, who made the journey shortly before 13,000 years ago. According to the Clovis First theory, every Indigenous person in the Americas could be traced to this single inland migration. But in recent decades, several discoveries have revealed that humans first reached the so-called New World thousands of years before we initially thought, and probably didn’t get there by an inland route. Who were the first Americans, and how and when did they arrive?
Genetic studies suggest that the first people to arrive in the Americas descended from an ancestral group of Ancient North Siberians and East Asians that mingled around 20,000 to
