People of the Bering Land Bridge
Uncertainty still exists about the sequences of migration across the Bering Land Bridge that originally peopled North and South America.
It is fairly certain that humans were in the Americas at least 12,000 years ago and perhaps even tens of thousands of years earlier. Evidences of pre-Eskimos and pre-Aleuts in Alaska have been thought to be less old, so it has been conjectured that they were relative latecomers, following after groups of peoples who moved across the Bridge and migrated southward through western North America.
A somewhat different, seemingly quite logical, hypothesis was published in 1967 by W. S. Laughlin of the University of Wisconsin. His idea was that the Bering Land Bridge might have been occupied by forerunners of the Aleuts and Eskimos simultaneously with the presence of those pre-Indians who moved through and came on southward.
Laughlin noted that there was plenty of room on the Bridge for two populations since at maximum exposure the Bridge was a thousand kilometers wide, north to south. At least there would be room if the two populations had different lifestyles analogous to the modern differences between Athabascans, on the one hand, and Aleuts and Eskimos on the other. The Eskimos and Aleuts live primarily from the sea and the Athabascans from the land.
Laughlin argued that it was logical for the Mongoloid peoples of Asia who were used to living along the shore to invade the southern coastal boundary of the Bering Land Bridge when it existed 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. His idea was that they would have an easy time of it because of the richness of that coastline, especially the eastern part of it where strong coastal upwelling would support many fishes, sea mammals and birds.
While these coastal people remained comparatively stationary, as a maritime livelihood dictates, other peoples could pass eastward across the Bridge to the north of them. These people would have to be hunters who followed the game and lived off of it. Their lifestyle would demand that they live in small groups able to move on as local scarcities of game might demand. One can imagine that any contacts between the coastal dwellers and the nomads might have been hostile, just as were most contacts between Eskimos and Athabascans in recent times.
Once the Bering Land Bridge began to close, the nomadic hunters would have been cut off on the west by the waters. Then the Pre-Aleuts and Pre-Eskimos on the eastern end would have extended north along the new shoreline and along the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There is good evidence that the Eskimos, who spread eastward along the shore as far as Greenland, did in fact come from western or southwestern Alaska. Yet another possibility is that the Eskimos who spread into Greenland actually arrived in Alaska by boat from Siberia after the Land Bridge closed.
While Laughlin's joint residency hypothesis seems to make good sense, archeological finds during recent years fail to substantiate it. If his idea is correct, it is expected that archeological finds in the Aleutians and on the nearby Alaska Peninsula should reveal cultural differences between the ancient people who live there and those inland and farther north. Instead, the most recent finds seem to show a high degree of similarity. Of course, much of the evidence that might support Laughlin's hypothesis is now beneath the cold waters of Bering Sea.
