Life in the Northern Hemisphere if Beringia Never Drowned
When one hears the name "Beringia", we most often think the land bridge that formed as a result of a drop in sea levels during the Pleistocene, resulting in a connection between Alaska and Russia. But Beringia had been connecting East to West in a continuous cycle, the earliest so far being in the late Cretaceous, opening ceratopsians, troodontids and even tyrannosaurs from Asia to North America.
Nowadays, Beringia is submerged beneath sea level. As a result, North America has a different cast from Eurasia, the splits being listed as follows:
Telemetacarpal deer (whitetails, caribou, moose, deer that are more common in North America than in Eurasia) and plesiometacarpal deer (chitals, fallows, wapitis, reds, deer that are more common in Eurasia than in North America)
Peccaries and pigs
Hyenas and dogs
Old World porcupines (Hystricidae) and New World porcupines (Erethizontidae)
Pronghorns and antelopes (No, this is not a typo, as pronghorn aren't true antelopes)
Leopards and pumas/jaguars
American sparrows (Passerellidae) and Old World sparrows (Passeridae)
Condors and vultures
Pandas and raccoons
Now, in this speculative scenario, Beringia has been open for permanent business for at least five million years. Beringia would obviously homogenize the animals of the northern hemisphere, but from the list above, which side of each split would be more successful at colonizing both North America AND Eurasia at once?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/139133. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
The best choice isn't on your list:
Mastodons vs Woolley Mammoths. Both, unlike their Elephant cousins, do well in the cold. They represent two distinct species of the Proboscidean family.
From your list though, I'm gonna say..
Dogs.
Wolves are already native to the American side of Beringia. And there are Asian wolves as well.
The closest living relative of the dog is the gray wolf and there is no evidence of any other canine contributing to its genetic lineage. The dog and the extant gray wolf form two sister clades, with modern wolves not closely related to the wolves that were first domesticated...the earliest dogs arose in the time of human hunter-gatherers and not at the dawn of agriculture.
Where the genetic divergence of dog and wolf took place remains controversial, with the most plausible proposals spanning Western Europe, Central Asia, and East Asia. This has been made more complicated by the most recent proposal that fits the available evidence, which is that an initial wolf population split into East and West Eurasian wolves, these were then domesticated independently before going extinct into two distinct dog populations between 14,000-6,400 years ago, and then the Western Eurasian dog population was partially and gradually replaced by East Asian dogs that were brought by humans at least 6,400 years ago. (ref)
If wolves, dogs, and people were able to go back and forth between Asia and the Americas continuously for the entirety of their existence, the domestic dog would be on both sides and there would be more standardization. We know these species (and humans at least back in the last 50-100k years) can handle the cold weather of Beringia, unlike most of the animals on your list.
I am not sure where hyenas come in to this.
Although phylogenetically they are closer to felines and viverrids, and belong to the feliform category, hyenas are behaviourally and morphologically similar to canines in several elements of convergent evolution; both hyenas and canines are non-arboreal, cursorial hunters that catch prey with their teeth rather than claws. Both eat food quickly and may store it, and their calloused feet with large, blunt, nonretractable claws are adapted for running and making sharp turns. However, the hyenas' grooming, scent marking, defecating habits, mating and parental behaviour are consistent with the behaviour of other feliforms. ...
Although the dog-like hyenas thrived 15 million years ago (with one taxon having colonised North America), they became extinct after a change in climate along with the arrival of canids into Eurasia.(ref)
With Beringia continuously open, it is likely that more than one member of the Hyaenidae family would have made it to the Americas. And more of the same kinds could come over and replenish the population.
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