The ice-free corridor route was also likely used as humans followed animal groups, the primary food source in the late Pleistocene. According to Simms (2008, p. 110), pre-Clovis explorers in the Americas preyed on a wide variety of faunal resources and were opportunistic when it came to alternate sources of food. Early people travelled great distances over the course of their lives - another fact that gives credence to the Beringia entry theories. We must be careful though not to point to a coastal route or an ice-free corridor route as the only entry option. Humans perhaps used both routes in several different migrations over several thousand years (Grayson 2011, p. 52). Alternately, there could even be another route that the archaeological record does not know about yet. Some Pacific Island cultures insist on the validity of a transpacific …show more content…
We can answer “when” questions by looking at the charcoal tested from Monte Verde II which securely shows that humans crossed into North America by at least 13,565 radiocarbon years ago (Early Archaeology of the Americas PowerPoint). By looking at the geological history of Earth from the last glacial maximum to the separation of the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets we can conceptualize two distinct routes, a coastal option and an ice-free corridor option, for how humans passed from Beringia into the New World. Finally, we make an educated guess about who these first people were by studying similarities in genetic evidence from Paisley Caves in comparison to populations that were present in northeast and central Asia 15,000 years ago (Simms 2008, p. 107). These facts expel the argument that the Clovis period, around two thousand years after our oldest Monte Verde II date, represents the first secure evidence for the human colonization of the