Maybe You Can Sort It Out

I like the site Anthropology.net, though I have not subscribed. I get the newsy updates on research.  This morning was a recent paper on the Bering Strait Land Bridge only being open for two brief periods.  It puzzled me a bit.  I had thought that the trend of research was pointing increasingly to a Beringian Refugium, a steppe area where mammoths lived - plenty of good eatin' on those bones. Because of that steppe, it was better to think of the "migration" to North America as a back-and-forth spreading that eventually included the New World and then sort of gradually trapped those inhabitants because the area their ancestors had come from was increasingly difficult to navigate back, rather than a direct movement captured by an arrow on a map.  

This research quite explicitly points to (ice-)shoreline and living on marine resources instead.  Looking over what little I can go back and reference online from my reading and listening over the last few years, these are certainly not completely incompatible, referencing the same geological dates and an approximation of the same movement of people. One has to squint a little, but it could be all the same thing, and the only conflict is that I am moving from one oversimplified picture to another, while the reality not only looks muddled to us because of incomplete data, but actually was muddled between land and sea resources.  And the word "brief" does include thousands of years, which is plenty of time for people to move great distances if the food is there.