If you look on a map, there's only 2 miles between Alaska and Russia. Why didn't people in Asia at the time see that earlier? It makes no sense to me because the two continents are that close and no one noticed it before
First, while Russia and Alaska are indeed about 2.4 miles (3.8km) apart, this is somewhat misleading, since this is the distance between Big Diomede (Russia) and Little Diomede (Alaska), two islands in the middle of the Bering Strait. The distance between the Siberian mainland and the Alaskan mainland is about 51miles (82km), and with the Diomede Islands roughly in the middle of this gap, a sea crossing of about 40km is required (or, if you miss the islands, 82km).
Second, what do you mean by your "earlier" in "Why didn't people in Asia at the time see that earlier?"? There has certainly been contact via the sea between Siberia and Alaska for about 2000 years, and possibly for much longer than that.
We can date certain contact to the Old Bering Sea culture (OBS). The OBS is usually dated as from about 400BC to about AD600, although it might have been present only on the Siberian side of the Bering Strait for the first few centuries of that time. By about the 1st century BC, if not before, they had reach the Diomede Islands and also St. Lawrence Island (part of Alaska; the closest mainland is Siberia, 58km (36 miles) away). If one insists on contact with the Alaskan mainland rather than Alaskan islands, this was reached by the OBS culture about the 2nd century AD, if not earlier.
Of course, there might have been contact via sea travel long before this. The OBS is simply the earliest known culture found on both sides of the Bering Strait. The OBS is the earliest proto-Inuit culture we know of, and is the earliest stage of the Thule Tradition (usually dated about 200BC to about AD1600), a culture connecting Arctic Asia and Arctic America.
Long before this, about 13,000 to 12,000 ago, there was contact between Asia and America via the Bering land bridge - when much water was tied up in glaciers during the last Ice Age, sea levels dropped, and the shallow Bering Strait was dry land (and in the time just noted, not blocked by ice). This allowed people to walk from Asia to America, and it appears that people did so (along with their dogs). While the land bridge was there, and for some time afterwards, material cultures in the adjacent regions of Asia and America were similar, indicating cultural connection. We don't know whether contact was maintained after the land bridge was submerged by rising sea levels.
This wasn't the first time that a practical land bridge existed between Siberia and Alaska - there had been a similar period of glaciation about 30,000 years ago which allowed contact, and it appears that people crossed from Asia to America at this time too.
It's possible that there was contact before the land bridge, by boat, perhaps about 40,000 years ago. If so, this would probably have been the first time that humans reach the Americas. Boats were old technology by this time - boats had been used by people to reach Australia possibly about 60,000-50,000 years ago, and even earlier by Homo erectus to reach Luzon, about 70,000-60,000 years ago.
I think those answers by u/kieslowskifan and u/poob1x may be of help
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9gyvse/with_alaska_so_close_to_russia_how_was_the/
To summarize - people in Asia near the Bering Strait knew about America (or at least about the land-beyond-the-straits), but those people themselves had almost non-existent contact with large Asian states (the distances involved are enormous), much less with Russia which in 15th century still did not control any territory east of the Urals
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!