If people have been in the Americas for thousands of years, and homo-sapiens originate from Africa, how did they get there?
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There were several ways to travel between Eurasia and the Americas. The simplest is a boat. Many humans travelled in many waves across the Pacific, but mostly from Siberia to Alaska because that distance is way the hell shorter than going from Japan to California. There was also a land bridge in that exact location during the last Ice Age, during which many travelled from Siberia to Alaska and later Canada and the north-eastern United States on foot.
The most accepted manner is humans migrated from Africa, north and east through Asia and across the Northern Pacific to Alaska and then down south. During the prior ice age there is believed to have been a solid “land bridge” of ice that connected Russia with Alaska. People made it across, the bridge melted behind them (this took hundreds of years) and people eventually moved all the way to South America.
More recently, genetic research indicates that Polynesian peoples likely also made it across the Pacific Ocean via island hopping and long distance sailing and also made it to South America. This is still a recent and not universally agreed theory but genetics does suggest that Polynesian blood was mixing with Indigenous South American blood many, many years early than previously believed.
Over the “Bering land bridge”.
Land spanning from Asia to North America that eventually disappeared into the ocean and only remains visible by numerous islands.
By walking with perhaps some use of boats. Distances are long but it took tens of tenns of thousands of earth so the moment per generation could be quite slow. There is a map with the approximate time for human arrival-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Early_migrations_mercator.svg
During the last ice age the global water level was lower. One of the results is the bearing sea and bearing sea between Asia an America was dry land so it is possible to walk between the continents. Exactly how they passed by the glaciers.
Exactly how the past by the shelf ice is not clear, the two main alternatives is inland after enough ahead melted for a passage through or with boats along the coast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas
Roughly 14-17,000 years ago (I believe are the latest estimates), much of North America was was covered in glacial sheets, while the oceans had a much lower sea level. This revealed a large land mass that stretched from the eastern edges of Siberia to Alaska called Beringia (or the Bering Land Bridge, or Bering Straight). This land mass revealed a sort of pathway between glacial sheets directly into North America (more centrally), which humans entered into. Around the same time, other groups of humans from Siberia would follow the coast lines from Beringia down along the Western Coast, eventually reaching South America.
These migration patterns would have taken around 1,000 years until humans had reached the bottom of South America. The migrations were motivated likely by the migration patterns of animals as well as a “push” from more populated areas to less populated areas from Siberia (less competition with other humans).
During the last ice age there was a land bridge between Alaska and Asia until around 11,000 years ago. The leading theory is that the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of the Americas simply walked across.
Humans were hunting wooly mammoths in what is now Eastern Russia. Alaska and Russia were connected by land due to lower ocean levels. It was an ice age, so a lot of water was trapped in glaciers rather than in the ocean.
The mammoths crossed over the land bridge, and the humans followed them in order to continue hunting. The humans were then able to spread out and populate all of North and South America.
During the last ice age, sea levels at the Bering Strait (where modern-day Russia meets modern-day USA [Alaska] ) were low enough that it was a continuous landmass (instead of the water separating “Russia” and “USA”) . People migrated by walking along that landmass.
This is often described as a “land bridge” but I think calling it a bridge is misleading. It’s land just like any other land at that time.
What’s not clicking? They originate from Africa 200,000 years ago. That’s plenty of time to spread out of Africa and get to all the other continents. They reached Australia by 60,000 years ago, and North America by probably 25,000 years ago.
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