Who really discovered America? The Solutrean hypothesis is the latest in a long line of theories about the discovery of the New World

Skeptic, Fall, 2005 by Jason Colavito

PITY POOR NORTH AMERICA, A LAND whose history can never be her own. For centuries scholars, prophets, and cranks have tried to prove that the continent did not belong to the native peoples who populated it when the European explorers first arrived. Instead, America's ancient monuments were assigned to a "lost race," her people declared a lost tribe of Israel, and the continent's first discovery credited to ancient Europeans, Atlanteans, or space aliens--anyone but the native Americans themselves.

Today, a pair of archaeologists believe that they have found evidence that finks ancient Noah America to Stone Age Europe. Since 1999, Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution has been the most prominent spokesperson for the "Solutrean hypothesis," a theory that claims the first people to arrive in the New World came from prehistoric Spain and brought with them a distinctive way of making stone tools. In a paper presented in 2004, Stanford and his colleague Brace Bradley outlined the proposed route the Spaniards took on their trek to the Americas. (1) However, a closer look at the Solutrean hypothesis shows that the idea does not prove what its authors claim.

The Traditional View

The peopling of the Americas has been a controversial subject since Columbus. But scholars reached a rough consensus in the 20th century that nomadic hunters from eastern Siberia came to Alaska across the Bering Strait some 14,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, a time when sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge. These hunters followed herds of wooly mammoths and other large prehistoric animals (the wonderfully-named paleomegafauna). They traveled through an ice-free corridor in the Canadian Shield, between massive glaciers, into the heart of North America. From there they spread out across the unpeopled landscape and thereafter gave rise to the people we know as the American Indians.

Support for this idea came from an unexpected place--Clovis, New Mexico. In that out-of-the way corner of the desert in the 1930s, archaeologists discovered a distinctive type of stone point, known afterward as the "Clovis point." It was a spear tip, worked on both sides ("bifacial"). Clovis points had very distinctive characteristics. They were much taller than they were wide, had a concave base, and a long groove carved up the middle of both sides, called "fluting." This fluting allowed the point to be wedged into a slit in a wooden or bone shaft to create a spear. This innovation separated the Clovis point from nearly all other contemporary stone tool technologies, a magnificent accomplishment for the people who used these points between 10,500 and 9,000 BCE.

Clovis points were found throughout North America, although more often in the east. For over a millennium, it seems much of the continent used the same tools and hunted the same way. This became known as the Clovis culture, though whether it represented an actual cultural homogenization or just a sharing of a useful toolkit is not known. Because in the early 20th century Clovis points were the oldest artifacts discovered, it was argued that the Clovis people were first to inhabit the New World and that America's first human inhabitants were big game hunters--exactly what the Bering crossing hypothesis suggested.

The Solutrean Hypothesis

"Clovis-first" was the default position for most of the 20th century, and it still has supporters today. But as early as the 1930s, some began to propose that Clovis technology was not an American development. Archaeologist Frank Hibben noticed the similarities between Clovis points and the stone points made by prehistoric European people called the Solutreans. They had arisen in modern France and Spain around 25,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, and were famous for their finely-worked flint tools and their art. They were replaced by the Magdalenian culture, whose stone tools were less sophisticated.

While other cultures simply hit one stone with another to chip away flakes by percussion, the Solutrean and Clovis peoples manufactured stone tools by a distinctive technique called "pressure flaking," which used a sharp instrument for precision knapping of the stone. The Solutreans developed this technology around 20,000 BCE and spread across Western Europe before disappearing around 14,500 BCE (the dates vary slightly depending on whom you ask). Hibben believed the similarities with the later Clovis points showed that the Solutreans had peopled North America and brought their tools with them. (2) Strangely, however, little else of the Solutrean lifestyle, such as their art, came to the Americas with them.

Not long after the Solutrean hypothesis was proposed, however, archaeologists dismissed the idea with three arguments: (1) though both cultures used pressure flaking, Solutrean points were not fluted like the Clovis points--many Solutrean tools had a roughly diamond shape while Clovis points often had a concave bottom; (2) the Solutreans, who had no boats, had no way to get to North America; (3) most important, there was a gap of thousands of years between the latest Solutrean points and the earliest Clovis points--it seemed chronologically impossible for the Solutreans to have given rise to Clovis.