Bering Land Bridge

Geography The Bering land bridge was a land bridge roughly 1,000 miles north to south Joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times during the Pleistocene ice ages During cycles of global cooling, such as the most recent ice age, enough sea water became concentrated in the ice caps of the Arctic and Antarctic that the subsequent drop in sea levels exposed shallow sea floors.

For decades, the "Clovis-first" model of initial colonization held sway. It says that the first Americans were the Clovis people—named for an archeological site located near Clovis, New Mexico and that they walked across the Bering Land Bridge and spread into what is now the United States about 13,500 years ago.

In recent years, however, researchers have unearthed many sites that appear to be pre-Clovis, some of them potentially doubling the time frame people have been in the Western Hemisphere. Look at interactive site What evidence do researchers have of pre-Clovis settlements? Those that settled in North America were deft hunters capable of bringing down massive animals while tolerating harsh environmental conditions, There is no evidence that early Americans hunted the short face bear and saber tooth cat. They did hunt Mastodon

dire wolf and peccary The giant ground sloth is just one of numerous large mammals that vanished forever as the Ice Age wound down in North America.

Stone Age Toolkit Draw (as best you can each tool) Guess what each tool was used for.