Perhaps the most important research in anthropology is how modern humans left their birthplace in Africa and migrated to the rest of the world.

One big subset of that story is how humans managed to get to the Americas.

It's a tale that's resulted in theories

being updated several times based on the discovery of new evidence. Learn more

about how humans migrated to the Americas and our current best guess as to how it happened on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. One of the reasons why human migration to the Americas is such a mystery is that for

thousands of years the peoples of the eastern and western hemispheres had pretty much

no clue that the other existed.

There was effectively no contact between these two halves of humanity.

Because of the isolation of the Americas,

it was natural to wonder how people got there in the first place. Figuring out this riddle involved almost every area of science,

geology, genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and many other disciplines.

The first iteration of the story is probably one that you've heard before and it touches on several of the previous episodes I've done.

Here it is in a nutshell.

About 70,000 years ago or so, one or more migrations out of Africa occurred.

These people spread, chasing game, and also moving when there was no game to hunt.

Over the course of tens of thousands of years, this resulted in the settlement of most of the land masses in the eastern hemisphere.

And I previously did an episode that went into more depth on this subject.

The second part of the story has to do with the most recent ice age.

An enormous ice sheet several kilometers thick amassed in the northern hemisphere.

This ice sheet locked up a large part of the Earth's surface water, which resulted in sea levels dropping.

Sea levels were about 122 meters or 400 feet lower than what they are today.

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