Two Routes to the Americas | The Great Human Race

After being trapped on the Bering Land Bridge for several thousand years, our ancestors headed south in search of warmer climates and better food sources. Once people made it across the land bridge, it was like the floodgates opened up. Kent and I are splitting up to represent two of the major migration routes into North America.

As the Ice Age came to an end, the coastal glaciers melted, allowing humans to migrate south by boat. Later, an interior corridor opened up in the ice, providing a land route into the Americas. I'm taking an interior route through the thick, lush temperate rainforests—beautiful and harsh. The coastal route is a much faster route than the inland route, but it's a lot more treacherous. This is the one I've been taking.

The Pacific Northwest was one of the first areas to be populated in America. When humans arrived here, they found a bountiful resource that would one day create empires: salmon. Because of this abundant salmon resource here in the Pacific Northwest and the way that people dealt with it prehistoricly, complex societies developed—everything from almost kings down to slaves.

Now Bill and Cat will each take one of these migratory paths and meet at a river mouth to capitalize on the salmon run before the season ends.