For decades, archaeologists studying the earliest North Americans have argued that the first Indigenous peoples to come to the continent travelled here from Asia by land during the late Ice Ages.

At that time, sea level was 120 metres lower and a broad land bridge now called Beringia connected North America and Asia.

The theory is that those First Peoples hiked east across Beringia, found their way through and over the ice covering the St. Elias Mountains in Alaska’s and the Yukon’s interior, then turned south to follow mammoth, muskoxen, dire wolves, sabre-tooth cats, and burro-sized beavers along an ice-free corridor between two continent-spanning ice sheets deep into the heart of North America’s interior plains and beyond.

All that did happen. Spear points, stone scrapers, butchered and burned bones preserved in permafrost and in sediments, all dating to 11,000 to 14,000 years ago, show it did.

The question is whether other peoples travelled along the coast instead. And if they did, whether those coastal seafarers arrived here first.

The argument against the coastal route has always been a lack of evidence.

But more and more evidence is coming to light to suggest North America’s first human occupants took the easy route here and arrived by........

© Times Colonist