Arising in tropical Africa, the human species stayed in Earth's middle latitudes until liberated by the conquest of fire. Captive fire brought climate control — and migrations northward around the Mediterranean Sea. Using hides for warm clothing and developing insulating shelters, humans eventually inhabited far northern climates. Crossing the Bering Land Bridge, humans spread rapidly eastward and southward over the Americas — and plants and animals took advantage of the bridge as well. Constantly sorting out new clues in this fascinating story, scientists generally agree about its broad themes while arguing many of its details.

The First Americans

Whether on land, along Bering Sea coasts, or across seasonal ice, humans crossed Beringia from Asia to enter North America about 13,000 or more years ago. Humans were latecomers to this magnificent landmass so widely separated from other continents by vast oceans except near Earth's poles. Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Indonesian Archipelago, and Australia already hosted humans. Well-dated finds in both the southwestern United States and South America suggest that humans were in these locations about 12,000 years ago. Although much closer to the Bering Land Bridge, the arctic coastline was not peopled year-round until about 4,500 years ago.

Today's Peoples

Some 150 U.S. citizens live just three miles from Russia. They are the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents of Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. From Alaska's Seward Peninsula it is just 25 miles to Little Diomede and from there only 3 miles to Big Diomede Island, Russia, and then 28 miles on to Siberia. The U.S.Russia fishing boundary is also the International Date Line. Native subsistence use links past and present here in a paradise for geologists, archeologists, paleoecologists, and other students of Earth and human pasts. Difficult for the average traveler to reach, the park nevertheless is host to sport hunting, fishing, skiing, and hot springs bathing besides the subsistence activities protected by law.

Terrestrial Mammals

The Bering Sea has a long history of stable, although seasonal, animal populations productively supporting human life despite otherwise harsh environments. Making the journey across the land bridge with their hunters were musk ox, lemmings, and some of the big Pleistocene animals, including the mammoth. Lemmings have remained, musk ox are back after an absence, but mammoths have been extinct for 11,000 years.

Marine Mammals

When Asia and Alaska were joined, marine mammals could not travel between the Bering and Chukchi seas, nor could they range between the Atlantic and Pacific via arctic waters. Various seals, bowhead whales, walrus, and beluga whales were historically important to Inupiat Eskimos of the Seward Peninsula, and they remain so today for subsistence living. Walrus are a food mainstay for residents of the Diomedes and St. Lawrence Island. Polar bears may range the park and often ride ice floes through the Canadian Arctic to the Bering Strait. Marine mammals, still of immense importance along the Bering Strait, are not often sighted along the park coast, although they do migrate through the Bering Strait in concentrations unknown elsewhere.

Birds

Cold much of the year, the park today is a primitive landscape into which, paradoxically, flocks of migratory birds may descend so profusely in summer as to look like snowstorms. Birdlife from six continents comes each season — some travel 20,000 miles yearly.

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