The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge

It might be the 90-degree weather outside, but something drew me to this book this week and the frozen tundra of western Alaska in which it’s set. Normally I want to wait until I’m in a particular geographic location before I read a book about it, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Alaska or the Bering Strait. I’ve got several books about Alaska that I’d like to read, anyways, so I can hold onto those other books for future use while I dip my toes into the Arctic with this one.

This book follows the career of geologist Dave Hopkins and his lifelong search for evidence proving the existence of “Beringia,” the name given to the submerged land that at one time may have connected North America to Siberia. I don’t know Dave Hopkins from Adam, but the natural history and the crossovers between geology and many other disciplines in this intrigued me. It may have been my recent visit to the museum of geology at UW-Madison, but sometimes I think I might have missed my calling. Geology’s amazing!

While I had been unfamiliar with the term Beringia before reading this book, I have in the past read a number of books about America’s early history and am familiar with the land-bridge theory. These include: 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies (2003), 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles Mann (2005), and The Island of Seven Cities by Paul Chiasson (2006). Books like this fascinate me, because they’re like real-life mysteries, complex puzzles being solved with the tiniest pieces of evidence.

Of course, I’m a Bible-believing Christian and also a Creationist, so while the wisdom of these scientists and researchers always floors me, I’m also constantly reminded of the creativity of God and the stubbornness of mankind. I’m not one of the weird Creationists that disbelieves all science and thinks that we can pin down Creation to the third Tuesday in October, 6004 BC. And while I definitely believe in a worldwide flood, I also don’t believe that The Flood is the answer to every ecological mystery. Instead, I’m a reasonable believer who takes God seriously as the only all-powerful being Who created this place in His timing, by Him methods, and with His rules. Science is part of that creation, and so I’m all for following the evidence to where it leads—as long as the evidence remains detached from the godless interpretations that hope to disprove the Bible.

To take the analogy of our natural history being a complex puzzle a step further, it’s like these evolutionary researchers are trying to sort out the trillions of pieces of this puzzle without ever looking at the box, searching for the corners or end-pieces, or asking the Designer for a little help. In fact, they refuse to acknowledge there even is a Designer. A geologist like Hopkins can find a microblade 30 feet below the surface of the frozen tundra and know that man must have chiseled it by hand X-amount of millennia ago, yet he also looks at a mammoth bone and chalks it up to some Darwinian accident. It boggles my mind.

It’s sort of unfair to bring a discussion like this into a review of The Last Giant of Beringia, though, because I don’t recall ever reading anything about Darwinism or the Evolutionary Theory in this book. The history involved here is relatively recent, like 18,000 years at the most, and it’s a celebration of the scientific community’s cooperation (even that between the U.S. and the Soviet Union!) and Hopkins’ own determination to throw countless disciplines at this problem and to produce books and seminars that handily convince the world of Beringia’s history. As such, this was a fascinating summary of his life and a convincing overview of his conclusions! Honestly, I loved it.

I don’t know what other books of natural history await, but I do believe that I will be ever fascinated by the history that lies beneath my feet. If you’re interested in one highly convincing theory about how the first nations ended up in the Americas, this is a great introduction for the layperson to the theory of Beringia. I highly recommend it.

©2022 E.T.