Fedje believes that an especially promising space for archaeologists to use his group’s techniques is the southeastern coast of Alaska and the northern finish of the Gulf of Alaska. “At just 5 toes above current sea stage, you would find places that were nice for folks sixteen,000 years ago,” he says. Could humans have even survived on the excessive latitudes of Beringia over the last ice age, earlier than transferring into North America? This possibility has been buttressed by research displaying that large parts of Beringia were not covered by ice sheets and would have been habitable as Northeast Asia came out of the final ice age. Scott Elias, a paleoecologist with the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, used a humble proxy—beetle fossils—to piece together a picture of the local weather in Beringia 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
