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arthurpete t1_j2mlteo wrote

Reply to comment by imnotsoho in Bering Land Bridge formed surprisingly late during last ice age, study finds - By reconstructing the sea level history of the Bering Strait, scientists found that the strait remained flooded until around 35,700 years ago, not long before humans began migrating into the Americas by avogadros_number

They may have started before it opened up entirely. There is the Kelp Highway Hypothesis that suggests a migration via water occurred

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The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564890701628612

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avogadros_number OP t1_j2mszev wrote

That's not really what your linked article says. From the article:

>By about 16,000 years ago, the North Pacific Coast offered a linear migration route, essentially unobstructed and entirely at sea level, from northeast Asia into the Americas. Recent reconstructions suggest that rising sea levels early in the postglacial created a highly convoluted and island-rich coast along Beringia's southern shore, conditions highly favorable to maritime hunter-gatherers... With reduced wave energy, holdfasts for boats, and productive fishing, these linear kelp forest ecosystems may have provided a kind of “kelp highway” for early maritime peoples colonizing the New World.

If you examine some maps for the coastal migration / kelp highway you'll notice Beringia is fully exposed with a large tongue from the Cordilleran ice sheet extending north along the Alaska and Aleutian Ranges. The oldest footprints along the Pacific coast of Canada date to 13,000 years ago on Calvert Island: Terminal Pleistocene epoch human footprints from the Pacific coast of Canada

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arthurpete t1_j2n7jfl wrote

They asked "Couldn't they have started when the gap was small, they may have had kayaks or other boats"

I simply responded to the notion that yes, they could have. If the idea of migrating thousands of miles via boat 10k years later is plausible then so too is traveling short distances 10k years prior. You have to assume that the formation of the land bridge didnt happen overnight and instead included a network of bergs, bays, ice sheets that allowed for migration via the sea vs land.

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imnotsoho t1_j2o25x3 wrote

I don't have a chart, but the gap now is a little over 50 miles. I it had narrowed to 10 they would have been able to see land on the other side and been curious. Little Diomede would have been evident earlier, unless it rose through volcanic activity after that period.

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