People of the ice: The lost arctic civilisation that changed the course of history Feifei Ruan
SOME 15,000 years ago, a small band of pioneers stood on the threshold of a new world. To the south were the Americas, 40 million square kilometres of virgin territory including wide-open prairies, dense rainforests and high mountain chains. An epic journey was about to begin – but only because a remarkable adventure had just ended.
Before these original American frontiersfolk ventured south, their forebears had spent millennia scratching a living in the desolate regions just south of the Arctic circle. Once they had arrived in the north, global temperatures plunged and the climate became bleaker still.
Faced with worsening conditions, these original pioneers stayed put, spending thousands of years isolated from the rest of humanity. Their fate is now coming to light, and it is clear that something remarkable happened during those missing years. The people who would eventually conquer the Americas evolved some unusual adaptations to survive, and it turns out that this genetic legacy can help trace their descendants today.
We don’t know exactly when humans first reached the New World. The consensus is that the first Americans arrived fairly recently, about 15,000 years ago. It is also widely believed that they did so via Beringia – an area centred on the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska, which was dry land at that time.
This implies that the story of the first Americans began with a subarctic odyssey. Whereas Europe and Asia has been home to hominins for almost 2 million years, it …
