Peopling Introduction Probably the most hotly argued subject in archeology is the question of how and when humans first arrived in the New World. Our goal is to describe the most popular hypotheses of how people first arrived in the New World and how the lands of the Aztecs , Maya , and Inca were first populated.
Dates are all subject to change and debate.
Experts often shift them by tens of thousands of years as new evidence is presented. During the Ice Age , temperatures dropped significantly forming incredibly large ice sheets, which spread across the poles of the planet. The ice reached down across northern Europe and all the way down into Iowa and Nebraska in North America. The ice sheets consumed so much of the Earth's water that ocean levels dropped significantly, exposing previously submerged landforms along the coastlines. The most important of these exposed land formations occurred where the present-day waters of the Bering and Chukhin seas separate Alaska from Siberia.