The Lost World

The Lost World Beneath the Pacific Arctic

When Canada Was Ice and Siberia Was Grass

Twenty thousand years ago, the world looked very different.

Much of Canada was buried beneath enormous ice sheets. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of the country’s interior, while the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered much of western Canada. In places, the ice was kilometers thick.

But travel northwest toward Alaska and Siberia and the landscape changed dramatically.

Much of Siberia and Beringia wasn’t buried beneath a continental ice sheet.

It was cold.

It was dry.

And much of it was grassland.

Mammoths, horses, steppe bison and other large animals inhabited this enormous region.

Humans lived there too.

And if we could remove the modern ocean from the map, we would discover that these people inhabited a world that no longer exists.

Drain the Bering Sea

Look at a modern map and Siberia and Alaska appear to be two separate worlds.

They aren’t.

During the Ice Age, so much water was locked inside glaciers that global sea level fell by more than 100 meters.

The shallow seas between northeastern Asia and Alaska retreated.

What appeared was not merely the narrow “Bering Land Bridge” many of us learned about in school.

It was Beringia—an enormous region joining northeastern Siberia and Alaska.

Rivers crossed it.

Animals migrated across it.

Plants grew across it.

And humans eventually lived within it.

The modern Bering Strait is therefore deceptive.

We are looking at an ocean covering what was once inhabited land.

Humans Enter the Lost World

The people who reached this northern world were themselves the descendants of an extraordinary human expansion.

Modern humans had spread out of Africa and across Eurasia tens of thousands of years earlier. Along the way, some populations encountered and interbred with other humans, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Some human populations moved south and east through Asia toward Southeast Asia and Sahul.

Others moved north and northeast.

Toward Siberia.

Toward Beringia.

Toward the Pacific Arctic.

Eventually, populations ancestral to Indigenous peoples of the Americas emerged from this complicated northern history.

But getting into Beringia was only part of the problem.

Much of Canada to the southeast was blocked by enormous ice sheets.

So where did people go?

One possibility takes us toward the Pacific.

Follow the Coast

For generations, the familiar picture of the peopling of the Americas showed hunters walking through an ice-free corridor between Canada’s great ice sheets.

Today the story is considerably more complicated.

A Pacific coastal route is one important possibility.

Imagine traveling along the edge of Ice Age Alaska and continuing southward.

The coastline would not have been the coastline we recognize today.

Sea level was dramatically lower. Islands were larger. Some islands were connected to other land. Coastal plains existed where there is now ocean.

The geography of the Pacific Northwest had been rewritten.

People moving through this environment could have exploited fish, shellfish, marine mammals, birds and terrestrial animals while traveling between protected coastal environments.

But there is an enormous archaeological problem.

Much of that coastline disappeared.

The Ocean Takes the Evidence

The Ice Age ended.

Glaciers melted.

Sea level rose.

Beringia flooded.

Coastal plains disappeared.

River mouths moved inland.

Islands were created from former hills and mountains.

Places where people might once have camped, gathered food, hunted or traveled were submerged.

That means some of the archaeological evidence for the earliest Pacific migrations may now be sitting beneath the ocean.

The Pacific didn’t simply border this lost world.

The Pacific buried it.

And yet the maritime story did not end when the water rose.

It changed.

A New Coastline Appears

As sea levels approached something resembling their modern position, the geography of the Pacific Northwest emerged.

Southeastern Alaska.

Haida Gwaii.

The coast of British Columbia.

Vancouver Island.

The maze of channels and islands of the Inside Passage.

Puget Sound and the coast of Washington.

This was no longer Beringia.

But it remained a world shaped by the relationship between people and the sea.

Over thousands of years, distinctive Indigenous societies developed throughout the Northwest Coast.

Among them were peoples known today as the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Coast Salish and many others.

We cannot simply identify these historically known nations with the first people who traveled the Ice Age coastline. Too much time separates them, and the histories of individual peoples are considerably more complicated.

But something remarkable endured across the broader region:

the Pacific remained a highway.

The Maritime World

Along the Northwest Coast, the ocean was not an empty barrier separating communities.

It connected them.

People developed sophisticated knowledge of tides, currents, weather, islands, channels and seasonal resources.

Large cedar canoes could move people and goods considerable distances.

Fishing supported communities.

Salmon became enormously important in many areas.

Marine mammals, shellfish and other coastal resources contributed to economies adapted to one of the richest marine environments on Earth.

Trade networks connected communities along hundreds of miles of coastline.

And some peoples became extraordinary maritime travelers.

The Haida, living on Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia, became particularly renowned for their large ocean-going canoes and long-distance voyages.

The islands that might appear isolated on a modern road map were not necessarily isolated at all.

To people who understood the sea, they sat beside the principal transportation network.

The Pacific.

The Lost World Never Completely Disappeared

And this is where the Ice Age story becomes something larger.

The coastline changed.

Beringia disappeared beneath the sea.

Ancient coastal plains drowned.

But people continued adapting to the Pacific world that replaced them.

Thousands of years later, the maritime cultures of the Northwest Coast occupied the islands, channels and shorelines created in part by the enormous environmental transformation that ended the Ice Age.

The people were not living in the same landscape as their distant predecessors.

They were living above it.

Under the Bering Sea lie pieces of the old grasslands of Beringia.

Along the continental shelf lie drowned portions of ancient coastlines.

Off Alaska, British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, the modern ocean conceals landscapes that existed when humans first entered this part of the world.

Look at the Pacific Arctic today and you see water.

Remove that water, and another geography appears.

A geography of grasslands, rivers, animals, coastlines and human migration.

A lost world stretching between Asia and America.

And above its drowned edges, one of North America’s great maritime worlds eventually arose.

The lost world is still there.

We’re sailing over it.