The Independent reportsthat:
We have a number of tools made in the same style as contemporaneous European tools at multiple sites and one tool made from French flint. This would completely re-write our understanding of the peopling of the Americas.
I’m still a bit sceptical. What do the rest of you think?
Very interesting, but I’m a bit wary of articles like this in newspapers. Will be interesting to see how this develops.
Nobody else seems to picking up this story, maybe because the two researchers have been pushing the Solutrean hypothesis for years without much support from from their peers. A cynic might say they’re making more noise about it to attract new funding. On the other hand, the clues are tantalizing and kind of fun to speculate on, but there have been no solid connections yet.
I attribute this recent wave of news articles to the fact that the two researchers, Stanford and Bradley, just released a new book on 2/28/2012.
I’ve always thought the idea of hopping and skipping along the edge of a frozen N. Atlantic made perfect sense, but I don’t recall if it really syncs up with the climate data for the period when this supposedly happened.
A cursory read suggests this hypothesis is better supported than, say, 1421 or the alternative Shakespearean authorship theories. However, the evidence is not strong, and the genetic evidence is disputed. It’s not that difficult to get an article like this into a newspaper, who are always on the lookout for something interesting to print. And hey, they’ve done their due diligence. After all, researchers have written a book about it. The Independent is doing it’s readers a disservice by ignoring the disputed evidence, which I was able to find with a quick Google.
Yes, it sounds entirely plausible, but it’s relatively easy to throw together a theory that scans. A number of writers have made entire careers doing this, without offering a shred of proof, and remaining blind to counter-evidence. I’m now wondering if Stanford and Bradley are of that ilk.
A story in The Washington Post gives a lot more details on the new finds, althouh there’s no mention of a spearhead made of European stone.
There are a lot of isolated cases of really old stuff being found in North America. Dating back hundreds of to thousands of years earlier than it should be. Archeologists are skeptical of this stuff because something isolated it not part of a pattern, which is how they do their bit.
Don Cornelius spent his life teaching us about the Solutrean culture, but did we listen?
It’s pretty weak evidence to find a stone knife and a mastodon tusk (admittedly butchered) out at sea, with no skeletons or anything else.
Maybe a culture arrived and died out before the Bering Strait crossing, or maybe a crazy storm swept somebody’s boat across the Atlantic and then it sank.
It’s actually pretty well established at this point that humans colonized the Americas before the spread of the Clovis culture around 13,000 years ago, which had previously been thought to represent the first arrivals. The Buttermilk site for one has yielded evidence going back to 15,500 years ago.
This evidence, however, would seem to make the Solutrean hypothesis even less likely. The Solutrean connection has generally been dismissed by mainstream archeologists. One of the big sticking points, beyond the difficulty of crossing the Atlantic across the edge of the ice sheet, was the big gap in time between the Solutrean culture in Europe, which existed from 21,000 and 17,000 years ago, and its supposed descendant culture, Clovis. The 4,000 year gap between Solutrean culture and Clovis was hard enough to explain. Having non-Clovis cultures at Buttermilk and else where at around 15,000 years ago would seem to rule out Clovis being a lineal descendant of Solutrean.
Aside from this gap, the biggest question about this idea is how the supposed trans-Atlantic migrants could have kept a stone-tool-making tradition going when they would have had no access to stone. Even if it were feasible to travel along the edge of the pack ice, the journey would probably have taken generations. They might carry stone tools with them for a time, but eventually they would all be lost through attrition. And even if they preserved a few, how could they pass on the tradition of how to make them without there being any opportunity to practice?
Well, FWIW, there was a guy on NPR’s "Science Friday " who was arguing that Europeans got to North America before the Clovis people last year, if that makes you feel any better.
Why would that make me feel any better?
So it seems we’ve got a bit of a fringe theory, albeit not totally nuts like the Gavin Menzies and Erik von Daniken’s of this world. It’d be interesting to see how the professional journals in the area review the book (or if they even deign to review it at all).
Good point. The new “evidence” is supposedly dated to around 20,000 years ago, all on the east coast, but of course, that has to be confirmed independently.
There’s something about the genetic evidence (besides being discounted by geneticists 
) that nags me. The X haplogroup markers are found almost excusively in the east. Once you start going west, their incidence falls off dramatically. That looks like the proposed Solutreans, who had several thousand years to expand and colonize the continent, stayed close to their landing spot, which doesn’t match up with other human migrations, like out of Africa into Asia and Europe, and from Asia to the Americas. Those migrants kept moving until they reached the oceans.
The advance across the Arctic by the Thule, who lived a similar lifestyle under similar conditions, was incredibly fast (although that was 20,000 years later).
Very interesting link. However, I don’t think the situations are comparable. The Thule already knew that Greenland existed, and that iron was to be found there. Their migration was evidently more like an invasion or a colonization than a dispersal.
The Solutreans would have had no idea that land existed thousands of miles away to the west. There would have been nothing driving them forward except population pressure, and that wouldn’t build up in an area for several generations. It’s hard to imagine them making a directional migration of thousands of miles in a few years when they would have nothing drawing them in that direction, or pushing them from behind.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about the south pacific islanders who traveled all the way to Easter Island?
No really a comparable situation either. The Polynesians took hundreds of years and many generations to spread across the Pacific, even though they had a culture of long distance voyaging and exploration. Their sailing canoes allowed them to cover vastly more distance per day than would have been possible to Solutreans in skin boats with paddles. Voyages of a 1000 miles at one go were possible for them; they would not have been for the Solutreans. And because the Polynesian islands were separated by large distances, they often had to make long voyages. The Solutreans would have been moving along a continuous environment with food all along the way. There would have been no reason for them to make big jumps.
Yes, it’s almost absurd to think any Solutreans would deliberately set out across an unknown ocean, even along the ice. For one thing, the relative absence of resources for shelter and weapons would make long-term habitation on ice floes difficult if not impossible. But just to cover all the bases, there’s the hypothetical possibility of a hunting group getting blown part of the way in their boats by a storm and maybe unable to return because of prevailing winds so they just kept going until they ran into North America. Still quite a long shot, though.