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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Except the Inuit and similar peoples point and laugh at land bridges. You don't need a "land" bridge if you can live on the ice. Out there somewhere is probably a site showing that a wandering group of people paddled along the ice NA from Siberia long before anyone could walk the journey on dry land.

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The Intuit are a relatively recent group that's developed incredibly sophisticated technologies and cultural traditions that specifically enable(d) them to live on the ice and even then they're only dealing with our temperate Holocene climate. Ancient people wouldn't have had the benefits of that advanced technology and their environment was far harsher than today.

The high arctic was one of the last places on earth inhabited by humans. We don't find evidence of humans (archaic or modern) before about 45ka. Even then, habitation seems to have been minuscule outside refuge microclimates for millennia. Beringia was probably the biggest and most important of the Arctic microclimates, likely comparable to modern Alaska in some areas.

> The Intuit

Living in the high arctic is quite taxing.

This argument goes both ways, so they could have wandered there long before or long after the land bridge existed. The linguistic link could be much stronger if there was direct connection a few thousand years ago.

Unlikely as that would have been during the Ice Age and we have evidence of humans in Southern, but not Northern Siberia at that time.

We have evidence of people living in Northern Siberia 72°N over 30,000 years ago, well before the last glacial maximum.

https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-evidence...

apparently some groups followed woolly mammoth herds (and eventually hunted them to extinction)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammoth_specimens

Mammoths and mastodons might be the only North American extinctions we can reliably blame on early Americans. The rest of the extinct macrofauna (30+ genera) fell to the end-Pleistocene comet strike and continent-spanning wildfires, or follow-on effects.

its just a very strange thought to me, that some early humans followed intelligent mammals like a pack of dogs, to feed on their meat. The mammoths were victims, to their complete demise.

In another thread, post-civil war, US Calvary hunted all bison (a million animals? whole herds including calves?) to eliminate them and therefore cut the food supply of the native people; really brutal and ugly realities.

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