The first inhabitants of North and South America could have been fishermen from Japan who traveled there in small boats, according to research in the latest edition of New Scientist magazine.

The new work casts doubt on the traditional theory that the “first Americans” were hunters from Asia who traveled to the continent on foot via the Bering ice bridge in Alaska some 13,500 years ago.

Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist from the University of Oregon, believes the first people to arrive were probably fishermen who followed a near continuous belt of kelp forests in the coastal waters of the Pacific Rim, from Japan to Alaska and southern California.

His research, which will be published soon in another academic journal, is based on discoveries of ice-age sea voyages in Japan, a study of human DNA and investigations of prehistoric marine ecosystems.

“I think they were just moving along the coast and exploring. It was like a kelp highway,” Erlandson told the weekly science journal.

Coastal researchers who spoke to the magazine believe the seafarers could have arrived in the New World some time after 16,000 years ago when the massive glaciers started to retreat from the outer Northwest American coast.

The conventional theory is that hunters came to the North American continent, much of which was covered in ice, from Siberia, and made their way south through a relatively narrow passage in the ice.

However, since the 1950s there has been growing evidence that America might have been discovered by ancient ice-age seafarers.

This alternative view has been buoyed by indications that the coastline of Northwest America was not as inhospitable as previously thought during the late ice age and could have sustained seafaring communities.

And in the 1990s, evidence emerged of a community living on shellfish on an island off the Chilean coast around 14,850 years ago. There was also a study that suggested that the ice corridor, through which the earliest Americans are thought to have traveled, was blocked by ice until some 13,000 years ago, making it impassable.

Erlandson was intrigued by this growing evidence and decided to investigate further.

First, he found evidence indicating that inhabitants of Honshu set out across the North Pacific more than 20,000 years ago to Kozushima, an island in the Izu chain 50 km south of the present Tokyo, to collect a type of volcanic glass to make tools.

Erlandson believes they could have done this in boats made from animal skins.

And he believes it is perfectly possible for them to have journeyed northward from there to the Kuril Islands, then the Kamchatka Peninsula, and on to the island-studded shore of the Bering land bridge and beyond to the New World.

He told New Scientist it would have been a very tough trip in treacherous waters but “what was once imponderable now seems entirely conceivable and increasingly likely.”

Another researcher interviewed by the magazine said the earliest direct evidence of seafaring in the New World comes from California’s Channel Islands.

Experts have found the remains of one seafarer there that puts him at between 13,000 and 13,200 years old. Obviously, the experts are not sure from where the mariner originated, but it raises the possibility he could have come from Japan.

Other research shows that what is thought to be the oldest form of DNA ever recovered from the New World — around 10,300 years old — is common in type to that found in Japan and Tibet. And similar DNA has been found in American Indians all the way down the west coast of North and South America.