Abstract

Ever since Jose de Acosta pondered the issue, 400 years ago, it has been evident to most serious students that the geographical point of contiguity between Northeast Asia and Northwest North America had to have been the « passage obligé » for the initial colonisation of the New World. But ever since this « gateway » has become known and studied under the label of Beringia, it has also been clear that its eastern reaches corresponded, in fact, paradoxically, and this for many millennia of the Upper and Final Pleistocene, to a large bio-geographical cul-de-sac, cut off by Laurentide and Cordilleran glacial ice from the more southern American continental regions. and actually corresponding to the easternmost extension of the vast Eurasian Mammoth Steppe Biome. Focusing on this and a variety other Beringian research paradoxes, and with special attention given to the pertinent questions of chronological and geographical scales, this paper will show that any productive investigation of prehistoric Beringian human bio-geography, at least with regards to its earliest moments, must view the latter as a very Far Eastern component of a complex series of interactive northern Eurasian adaptation processes whose roots can probably be traced back to the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition of Northern Asia and, by extension, to vast segments of Northern Eurasia.