WASHINGTON (AFP): Early Native Americans spent millennia living on the Bering Land Bridge now buried under water before they appeared in Alaska and the rest of the North America, researchers said Friday. The finding provides answers to a long-running mystery about where the people who first set foot on the New World survived the last Ice Age after splitting from their Asian relatives 25,000 years ago. “This work fills in a 10,000-year missing link in the story of the peopling of the New World,” said Scott Elias from the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway College.