The Bering Land Bridge was more like a swamp | Hacker News Reader

The Bering Land Bridge was more like a swamp

gizmodo.com

60 pointsbikenaga29 comments

I wonder if this is what Doggerland was like too? Because they found evidence of occupation, and people keep finding submerged structures which look like fish stock pens, things you make when somewhere is above sealevel "mostly" or in the strand.

I wonder if there are artifacts deep in Bering St ooze?

Doggerland had a lot more hills and dry land, Doggerbank being the high spot. Combined with the warmer climate it had a far more stable and longer occupation than the Bering Land Bridge

Wikipedia has what might have been a map of Doggerbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Discovery_and_inves...

And there's individuals who have found hundreds of artifacts https://www.science.org/content/article/relics-washed-beache...

The fact that people crossed this in an arctic climate with Stone Age technology is insane. In some ways it sounds harder than trying to be an early settler of the Moon or Mars with today’s technology — at least in that case you would have medicine, climate control, nutritional science, etc.

The Polynesian settlement of the archipelago is pretty hard core too. Long range long duration ocean voyages with canoes and star navigation. They made it to f’ing Hawaii.

Of course I’m sure many people died in all these migrations… which makes it even crazier that people did it. Things like the Trail of Tears were forced but I’m not aware of anyone forcing this.

Makes me think about what wimps most of us (including myself) are today.

An important piece of context is that food organisms were way more abundant during this time in human history, than they are now. There was almost no need to carry food because the environment was so densely populated by plants and animals that humans could eat. That was true on land and in the ocean, and it made long voyages way less physically difficult than our modern approaches to backpacking or sailing, where the weight, volume, or cost of food creates a limiting distance before resupply.

Shocking to realize that the reason for the relative lack of abundance today is... we did this so much that we ate everything.

> The Polynesian settlement of the archipelago is pretty hard core too. Long range long duration ocean voyages with canoes and star navigation.

They weren't using canoes. You need something that won't capsize. They used catamarans.

Polynesian use of outrigger canoes is well documented. Are you claiming all outriggers are catamarans? Why be pedantic about this?

Because anyone with experience rowing a canoe is going to wonder how you take one across the ocean without drowning. And the answer is, you use a boat that can handle the ocean.

I initially noted that the Polynesians who settled Hawaii didn't have outriggers, and that was wrong - they did have single outriggers. They maintained heavy use of catamarans.

The technological progression goes:

raft -> catamaran ("This raft would be more stable with a canoe at either end") -> single outrigger ("I don't need the passenger space of the raft or the second canoe, but I still need the stability, so the second canoe will just be a log") -> double outrigger ("I like being lightweight with no passenger space, but I wish I could turn in both directions")

I am a Peruvian. These are my ancestors. They came from Siberia and were well used to functioning in cold weather. Today some of our northerners, the Inuit, commonly known as the Eskimo stil live in Alaska and Canada.

Super easy for humans to get around - much better than a forest. If you have canoes, fishtraps, fire and portable shelters as technology then a pretty good environment to live in as well. I should imagine that over a period of time people will have simply colonised the whole area and then colonised over into NA rather than migrating to follow game or for some other reason.

(just thinking about how when I stomp around in the northern forest, which I do daily, I avoid the swampy bits and stick to the dry bits to avoid getting really stuck in the mud. I can't imagine getting through the swamp with a canoe.)

My experience of virgin forest is that it's totally impassible - fallen trees and dense understory everywhere - really really difficult to move through, but perhaps I've just got a biased view due to low samples.

On the other hand I definitely don't think that humans would have had an easy time going through a swamp - but instead round the edges with access into the land up rivers for trapping and camping.

It's true that to move and navigate effectively you have to be super familiar with that style of environment. You have to be planning your route from what you can see no more than a dozens or perhaps a hundred metres ahead. And thick clothes really helps. It clicks when you realise you can just push through a lot of stuff. Its the kind of thing that soldiers get sent on exercise to learn by immersion.

Of course the early humans would have been probably as in-tune as the best trackers and bushcraft survival experts today, and hide makes really good clothing.

Canoe in the ocean, camp in the swamp

Small islands/hillocks are even better.

that's what I think a lot of early humans probably did, shorelines are good places to get food.

> It’s worth noting that the name “Bering Land Bridge” is often misleading. The landscape was not a literal bridge

riveting science reporting from gizmodo

I'm a bit confused - why wouldn't it have been under a ton of ice? I thought most of the northern hemisphere was under ice at the time - but from the description it sounds almost temperate.

Alaska was never really fully under ice. If you look at this picture of the Laurentide ice sheet [1] during the last glacial maximum [2] then that shows the most Alaska was covered in ice which was 26 to 20 thousand years ago.

The time frame where the Bering land bridge is being looked at for the OP article is a wider 36 to 11 thousand years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_ice_sheet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum

that's really cool thank you!

The notion is that most of the water was held in higher altitude (than sea level) glaciers across interior mountainous regions of the major continents leaving the polar sea extents much as they are today albeit with lower sea levels.

See (for further links at least): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia

nice, thank you!

And even if it wasn't glaciated, there should still have been winters where the lakes would have been less of a barrier and more of a clear path to walk..

After hearing many war stories about Siberian winters from a colleague, I asked why they didn't do field work in summer instead. The reply was short: mosquitos and mud.

(they could pretty much only travel to their field sites after the ground was frozen enough to permit it)

speculating, but it seems that durring the phase when the oceans were droping, it would have been arid , with high cold plains/step conditions in much of the sub artic, and pockets of tundra and muskeg, all dependent on average temperature, prceipitation and topography. The turn to ocean rise would have to see increased precipitation and average temperatures, so the top layers of core samples would reflect the conditions, before the land was submerged permanently......swampy, kind of like a lot of low lying areas today.....

Florida keys of days gone by

Its protected wetlands - no invading Russia!

So it was Florida but north

I mean yeah that makes sense

Reply on news.ycombinator.com