Prehistoric Alaska begins with Paleolithic peoples moving into northwestern North America sometime between 60,000 and 50,000 BC across the Bering Land Bridge in western Alaska. They found their passage blocked by a huge sheet of ice until a temporary recession in the Wisconsin glaciation (the last ice age) opened up an ice-free corridor through northwestern Canada, possibly allowing bands to fan out throughout the rest of the continent. Eventuall...
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Prehistoric Alaska begins with Paleolithic peoples moving into northwestern North America sometime between 60,000 and 50,000 BC across the Bering Land Bridge in western Alaska. They found their passage blocked by a huge sheet of ice until a temporary recession in the Wisconsin glaciation (the last ice age) opened up an ice-free corridor through northwestern Canada, possibly allowing bands to fan out throughout the rest of the continent. Eventually, Alaska became populated by the Inuit and a variety of Native American groups. Today, early Alaskans are divided into several main groups: the Southeastern Coastal Indians (the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian), the Athabascans, the Aleut, and the two groups of Eskimos, Inupiat and Yup'ik .
The Coastal Indians lachlan were probably the first wave of immigrants to cross the Bering Land Bridge in western Alaska, although many of them initially settled in interior Canada. The Tlingit were the most numerous of this group, populating most of the...
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