Smithsonian Channel Slates Ice Bridge Special

Smithsonian Channel has lined up Ice Bridge: The Impossible Journey, an hour-long special that challenges scientists’ long-held theory about the first humans to inhabit North America.

Ice Bridge: The Impossible Journey premieres on Wednesday, April 18, at 8 p.m. on Smithsonian Channel. It has been widely believed for years that the first migrants to North America arrived approximately 14,000 years ago, having crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska in the west. However, new evidence suggests that there may have been a trans-Atlantic crossing 6,000 years earlier from mainland Europe to the eastern coast of North America. The film uses re-creation and state-of-the-art CGI to tell that story.

Renowned archaeologists Dennis Stanford from Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Bruce Bradley from University of Exeter gain special access to a private island off the east coast of Maryland, where stone artifacts, including bifaces, blades and projectiles believed to be 20,000 years old, have been discovered. Stanford and Bradley lead a team of international scientists on a mission to excavate the crumbling 20-foot cliff before the site is washed away by the rising tides. The new discoveries could change everything that is known about the earliest human inhabitants of our continent and how they arrived here.

Ice Bridge: The Impossible Journey also sees geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer and his team at Huddersfield University spend months tracing unique mitochondrial DNA found in many North Americans back to the Solutrean region. The team attains rare permission to work with a singular Native American tribe, the Huron-Wendat, and is granted an unprecedented exception to sequence the sacred remains of 40 pre-Columbian ancestors for a genetic study.

Ice Bridge: The Impossible Journey is a production of Yap Films for Smithsonian Channel in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, France Télévisions and Yesterday, UKTV. Robin Bicknell serves as director, with executive producers Elliot Halpern and Elizabeth Trojian. Executive producers for Smithsonian Channel are John Cavanagh, Charles Poe and David Royle.