I’ve never been to Beringia – and I never will
So far, I’ve visited 90 countries and I’d like to visit a few more if I can. But I’ve never been to Beringia and, to be honest, I’d never heard of it until I watched the BBC series “Human”. I won’t be visiting it because it doesn’t exist any more. This edited extract from Wikipedia explains more:
Beringia is a prehistoric geographical region, defined as the land and maritime area bounded on the west by the Lena River in Russia; on the east by the Mackenzie River in Canada; on the north by 72° north latitude in the Chukchi Sea; and on the south by the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The area includes land lying on the North American Plate and Siberian land east of the Chersky Range. At various times, it formed a land bridge referred to as the Bering land bridge or the Bering Strait land bridge that was up to 1,000 km (620 mi) wide at its greatest extent and which covered an area as large as British Columbia and Alberta together, totaling about 1.6 million km2 (620,000 sq mi), allowing biological dispersal to occur between Asia and North America.
It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand arrived in Beringia from eastern Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum before expanding into the settlement of the Americas sometime after 16,500 years before present (YBP). This would have occurred as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted but before the bridge was covered by the sea about 11,000 YBP.