i have lived a thousand years questions and answers

The heart of that territory has long since been submerged by the Pacific Ocean, forming the present-day Bering Strait. And new research raises the possibility of an intermediate settlement of hundreds or thousands of people who spread out over the wild lands stretching between North America and Asia. The emerging picture suggests that humans may have arrived in North America at least 20,000 years ago-some 5,000 years earlier than has been commonly believed.

Now our understanding of when people reached the Americas-and where they came from-is expanding dramatically. Right, Louie Wilson (in hat), an archaeologist and member of the We Wai Kai nation, works with graduate students from the University of Victoria to record data on Quadra Island, British Columbia. Left, Paleolithic evidence: a modified carnivore tooth from the Yana River in Siberia a spear point from Quadra Island a stone flake found on the island, at Yeatman Bay. This article is a selection from the January/February 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Supporting that idea are archaeological sites along the West Coast of North America that date back 14,000 to 15,000 years. A subsequent theory, known as the “Kelp Highway,” came closer to the mark: As the massive ice sheets covering western North America retreated, the first humans arrived on the continent not only by foot but by boat, traveling down the Pacific shore and subsisting on abundant coastal resources. In recent years, however, that version of events has taken a beating, not least because of the discovery of archaeological sites in North and South America showing that humans had been on the continent 1,000 or even 2,000 years before the supposed first migration. Chasing steppe bison, woolly mammoths and other large mammals, these ancestors of today’s Native Americans established a thriving culture that eventually spread across two continents to the tip of South America. For more than half a century, the prevailing story of how the first humans came to the Americas went like this: Some 13,000 years ago, small bands of Stone Age hunters walked across a land bridge between eastern Siberia and western Alaska, eventually making their way down an ice-free inland corridor into the heart of North America.

I have lived a thousand years questions and answers