For generations, history books have offered a singular, streamlined origin story for the first peoples of North America—a narrative anchored in ice sheets, ancient glaciers, and the fabled land bridge that once connected Asia to Alaska during the last Ice Age. It was a clean, convenient explanation, one that found its way into classrooms, museum exhibits, documentaries, and academic lectures. According to that long-standing view, early humans crossed a frozen land passage and gradually dispersed across the continent. For years, that account stood uncontested as the bedrock of how scholars understood the continent’s earliest inhabitants.
But recent scientific discoveries are upending that familiar story in significant and sometimes surprising ways. Advances in genetic research, particularly the rise of high-resolution DNA analysis, are painting a much more intricate portrait of how the first peoples arrived and spread across the Americas. Rather than a single migration event, new data suggests a series …
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