Solutrean hypothesis
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The Solutrean hypothesis contends that stone tool technology of the Solutrean culture in prehistoric Europe may have later influenced the development of the Clovis tool-making culture in the Americas. Some of its key proponents include Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter.
In this hypothesis, peoples associated with the Solutrean culture migrated from Ice Age Europe to North America, bringing their methods of making stone tools with them and providing the basis for later Clovis technology found throughout North America. The hypothesis rests upon particular similarities in Solutrean and Clovis technology that have no known counterparts in Eastern Asia, Siberia or Beringia, areas from which or through which early Americans are known to have migrated.
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[edit] Characteristics
Solutrean culture was dominant in present-day France and Spain from roughly 21,000 to 17,000 years ago. It was known for its distinctive toolmaking characterized by bifacial, pressure-flaked points. Traces of the Solutrean tool-making industry disappear completely from Europe around 15,000 years ago, when it was replaced by the less complex stone tools of the Magdalenian culture.
Clovis tools are typified by a distinctive rock spear point, known as the Clovis point. Like Solutrean points, Clovis points are thin and bifacial; they share so-called "overshot" flaking characteristics that yield wide, flat blades. Clovis tool-making technology seems to appear in the archaeological record in North America roughly 13,500 years ago, and similar predecessors in Asia or Alaska have not yet been discovered.
[edit] Atlantic crossing
The hypothesis proposes that Ice Age Europeans could have crossed the North Atlantic along the edge of the pack ice that extended from the Atlantic coast of France to North America during the last glacial maximum. The model envisions these people making the crossing in small watercraft, using skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people, hauling out on ice floes at night, getting fresh water by melting iceberg ice or the first-frozen parts of sea ice, getting food by catching seals and fish, and using seal blubber as heating furl.
[edit] Transitional styles
Supporters of the hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia) indicate a transitional style between the Clovis and Solutrean cultures. Artifacts from this site are estimated to date from 17,000 to 15,000 years ago, although some researchers dispute their definitive age. Other sites that may indicate transitional, pre-Clovis occupation include the Page-Ladson site in Florida and the Meadowcroft rockshelter in Pennsylvania.
[edit] MtDNA Haplogroup X
The idea is also supported by mitochondrial DNA analysis insofar as the fact that some members of some native North American tribes share a common yet distant maternal ancestry with some present-day individuals in Europe identified by mtDNA Haplogroup X. Haplogroup X has not been found in eastern Asia or Siberia, unlike other Native American mtDNA Haplogroups A, B, C and D.
[edit] Challenges to the Solutrean hypothesis
Difficulties with this hypothesis include the challenges of crossing the Atlantic with the technology of the time as well as a temporal gap of millennia between the apparent end of the Solutrean culture and the earliest discovered Clovis tools.
Other problems with the hypothesis include an apparent lack of Solutrean-style artwork (like that found at Lascaux in France) among the Clovis people. In response, proponents point out that this style of art disappears in Europe by the time of Clovis, and that the Solutreans introduced a tool-making innovation and not necessarily cultural or artistic practices.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Coming into America: Tracing the Genes, PBS, popular presentation of the Solutrean hypothesis
[edit] References
- Greenman, E.F. 1963. "The Upper Palaeolithic and the New World", Current Anthropology, 4: 41–66.
- Stanford, Dennis, and Bruce Bradley. 2002. "Ocean Trails and Prairie Paths? Thoughts About Clovis Origins." In The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, Nina G. Jablonski (ed.), pp. 255-271. San Francisco: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, No. 27.
- Stanford, Dennis, and Bruce Bradley. 2006. "The Solutrean-Clovis connection: reply to Straus, Meltzer and Goebel." World Archaeology, 38(4): 704-714.
- Straus, Lawrence G. 2000. "Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality". American Antiquity 63: 7-20.
