Ancestors of Native Americans likely lived on or around the Bering Strait for approximately 10,000 years before reaching what is now the U.S., according to a University of Utah news release.

Researchers gathered existing data to support what is now known as the Beringia standstill hypothesis.

Among the evidence is genetic data proving that founding populations of Native Americans separated from their ancestors over 25,000 years ago, according to the news release.

They spent most of their time living in "shrubby lowlands" on the bridge, which once connected Alaska to Siberia, but has since become submerged under water when sea levels rose.

University of Utah anthropologist Dennis O'Rourke and his colleagues John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Scott Elias, a paleoecologist at the University of London, were able to determine based on evidence that the ancestors didn't start heading towards the Americas until about 15,000 years ago, once ice sheets started to melt and migration routes opened up, according to the news release.

"Nobody disputes that the ancestors of Native American peoples came from Asia over the coast and interior of the land bridge" during the "last glacial maximum," O'Rourke said.

Research was published in journal Science this week.

The discovery also helps solve the mystery of how the Native American genome "separated from its Asian ancestor," according to O'Rourke.

"We're putting it together with the archaeology and genetics that speak to American origins and saying, look, there was an environment with trees and shrubs that was very different than the open, grassy steppe," O'Rourke said. "It was an area where people could have had resources, lived and persisted through the last glacial maximum in Beringia."

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