![[Beringia_land_bridge-noaagov.gif]] The Beringians who lived in this region for thousands of years were prevented from entering North America by the glaciers that covered all of what's now Canada and much of the northern United States. About 16,000 years ago, as the global climate began to warm, the glacier began melting along the Pacific coast. It seems people traveled down the coast along what some researchers have called the "[Kelp Highway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_M._Erlandson#Kelp_Highway_Hypothesis:_The_Peopling_of_the_New_World)", fishing and hunting marine mammals. By about 15,000 years ago, they had reached a site called [Monte Verde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde), in southern Chile. Other Beringians entered North America by land as the glaciers continued to melt. We'll talk a lot more about their descendants in the coming weeks.   One thing that it is important to note, at this point, is that aside from dogs, which the Beringians brought to America, humans had not yet begun to domesticate animals when the ancestors of Native Americans were occupying Siberia and Beringia. And when they arrived in the Americas, people did not find many species that were good candidates for domestication. In order to be domesticated, animals need to be willing to accept a human as the leader of their herd. In the Americas, llamas, alpaca, and vicuña were willing to do this; bison were not. In Afro-Eurasia, many more species were willing to trade their freedom for the security of protected grazing and defense against predators. As a result, all of the traditional "farm animals" originated in the "old world". This had tremendous consequences for the development of different human cultures, as we'll see. ---- Next: [[1.9 - Agricultural Revolution]] Back: [[1.7 - Glacial Maximum]]