Scientific Origin Stories V::

Changes to the Bering Strait Theory

In recent years, some scholars have been espousing alternative theories to the inland Bering land bridge migration hypothesis. It has been suggested that humans may have reached the Americas not only via the Bering Strait land bridge, but via another route: by boat across the Pacific Ocean, and at least along the coastal line from Beringia to America. In 1998, the Smithsonian Institution's curator of archaeology, Dennis Stanford, agreed with certain other scholars that there were probably two, possibly several waves of prehistoric migration into the Americas - across the Arctic (the conventional assumption) but also across the Pacific and even the Atlantic oceans.

Actually, the Pacific Ocean theory was not entirely new, simply rekindled and intensified. The discovery in the 1970s of the relatively sophisticated 12,500 year old Monte Verde site as far south as Chile fuelled in some the view that northeastern Asians had crossed the Pacific to South America directly, thus circumnavigating the ice sheets that otherwise hindered migratory progress. Many archaeologists today accept both land- and coastal-route theories to account for the various human migratory movements into the Americas.

Another theory that has only just come to light and thus isn't as well-documented yet, is the suggestion by some anthropologists in South America that early settlers to the American continent came not only directly from Asia but from the South Pacific region of Polynesia.