CBC The Nature of Things (2018.01.14) Ice Bridge

Duration: 44m7s
Resolution: 1280x720
Video Format: AVC
Audio Format: AAC
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It is widely believed that the first migrants to North America arrived approximately 14,000 years ago, having trekked across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska. However, extraordinary new evidence supports an explosive new theory of another trip to the New World.

A group of international scientists believe they have discovered evidence to prove that an earlier route was taken by brave souls from the European continent across the Atlantic Ocean during the last Ice Age. It is thought that they travelled across a massive ice bridge spanning thousands of miles from mainland Europe, and arriving in North America approximately 6000 years before those from the west. These discoveries could change everything we know about the earliest human inhabitants of the New World and how they arrived here.

In Ice Bridge, Professor Dennis Stanford from the Smithsonian Institution and Professor Bruce Bradley from the University of Exeter are on a mission. They are seeking to uncover evidence of an epic journey that the Solutrean people, from what is now France and Spain, may have taken across the Atlantic Ocean some 20,000 years ago over an ice bridge.

Meanwhile, geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer and his team at Huddersfield University are tracing unique DNA found in North America back to the Solutrean region, undertaking an unprecedented genetic study of Native American remains to see how and when this gene arrived in the New World in the first place.

If the geology, archaeology, and genetics can prove Stanford and Bradley’s theory, the team will rewrite history and alter our perspective on how North America was first populated.