SOLUTREAN HYPOTHESIS | Facts and Details

SOLUTREAN HYPOTHESIS: THE FIRST AMERICANS WERE EUROPEANS?

The Solutrean hypothesis claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, during the Last Glacial Maximum. This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstream view that the North American continent was first reached after the Last Glacial Maximum, by people from North Asia, either by the Bering land bridge (i.e. Beringia), or by maritime travel along the Pacific coast, or by both. [Source: Wikipedia +]

According to the Solutrean hypothesis, people of the European Solutrean culture, 21,000 to 17,000 years ago migrated to North America by boat along the pack ice of the North Atlantic Ocean. They brought their methods of making stone tools with them and provided the basis for the later (c. 13,000 years ago) Clovis technology that spread throughout North America. The hypothesis is based on similarities between European Solutrean and Clovis lithic technologies. Supporters of the Solutrean hypothesis refer to recent archaeological finds such as those at Cactus Hill in Virginia, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, and Miles Point in Maryland as evidence of a transitional phase between Solutrean lithic technology and what later became Clovis technology. +

Genetic studies have ruled out the "Solutrean hypothesis" according to the 2021 Nature review. Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, told Live Science "recent genetic work on Solutrean human remains shows that they are not at all related in any way to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Thus, this hypothesis can be discarded." [Source: Charles Q. Choi, Live Science, August 13, 2023; Laura Geggel, Live Science, October 9, 2023]

History of Solutrean Hypothesis

Originally proposed in the 1970s, the theory has received some support in the 2010s, notably by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter. Guy Gugliotta wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: In their 2012 book Across Atlantic Ice, they suggest that these Europeans reached the New World more than 20,000 years ago, settled in the eastern United States, developed the Clovis technology over several thousand years, then spread across the continent. [Source: Guy Gugliotta, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013 /||]

“This theory is based partly on similarities between Clovis points and finely crafted “laurel leaf” points from Europe’s Solutrean culture, which flourished in southwestern France and northern Spain between 24,000 and 17,000 years ago. Stanford and Bradley argue that artifacts found at Page-Ladson, as well as other pre-Clovis sites, including the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in western Pennsylvania and the sand dunes of Cactus Hill in southeastern Virginia, have similarities to Solutrean technologies. /||\

“The Solutreans, whose territory on the European continent was apparently rather compact, may have been forced by encroaching glaciers and extreme cold to cluster on the Atlantic coast. At some point, Stanford and Bradley say, the stresses of overpopulation may have forced some Solutreans to escape by sea. They headed north and west beneath the Atlantic ice sheet to nudge into North America at the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. /||\

Brian Vastag wrote in the Washington Post: “Little is known about the Solutrean people. They lived in Spain, Portugal and southern France beginning about 25,000 years ago. No skeletons have been found, so no DNA is available to study. But the Solutreans did leave behind rock art, which showed a diamond-shaped flat fish in delicate black etchings. It looks like a halibut. A seal also appears, an arrow-headed line stabbing through it. [Source:Brian Vastag, Washington Post, February 29, 2012]

Evidence of the Solutrean Hypothesis

Guy Gugliotta wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “Stanford and Bradley say evidence for the Solutreans’ presence in America includes stone artifacts gathered by archaeologists at several sites on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, all producing dates more than 20,000 years old. Most of the dates were derived from organic material found with the artifacts. The exception was a mastodon tusk with attached bone and teeth netted by a fisherman in 1974, along with a laurel leaf-shaped stone knife. Stanford found the tusk to be 22,760 years old. Among other things, the Solutrean hypothesis provides context not only for the Clovis people, but also for North America’s pre-Clovis sites. And it does not rule out Bering Sea migrations—those could have happened, too. Solutrean evolved into Clovis over close to 13,000 years,” Stanford said, and the Clovis hunters began migrating westward when the cold snap brought dry, windy, inhospitable weather to the East Coast. [Source: Guy Gugliotta, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013 /||]

Brian Vastag wrote in the Washington Post: “At the core of Stanford’s case are stone tools recovered from five mid-Atlantic sites. Two sites lie on Chesapeake Bay islands, suggesting that the Solutreans settled Delmarva early on. Smithsonian research associate Darrin Lowery found blades, anvils and other tools found stuck in soil at least 20,000 years old. Displaying the tools in his office at the National Museum of Natural History, Stanford handles a milky chert blade and says, “This stuff is beginning to give us a real nice picture of occupation of the Eastern Shore around 20,000 years ago.” Further, the Eastern Shore blades strongly resemble those found at dozens of Solutrean sites from the Stone Age in Spain and France, Stanford says. “We can match each one of 18 styles up to the sites in Europe.” [Source: Brian Vastag, Washington Post, February 29, 2012]

“Stone tools recovered from two other mid-Atlantic sites — Cactus Hills, Va., 45 miles south of Richmond, and Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in southern Pennsylvania — date to at least 16,000 years ago. Those tools, too, strongly resemble blades found in Europe.” Stanford contends that the cave art produced by the Solutreans “proves that the Solutreans built boats — halibut are deep-sea fish — and knew how to survive at the edge of an ice cap that drooped deep into Europe. “The reason people don’t like the Solutrean idea is the ocean,” he said. No Solutrean boats have been found. But given that people arrived in Australia some 60,000 years ago — and they didn’t walk there — wood-frame and seal-skin boats were clearly possible, Stanford argues.”

Evidence of the Solutrean Hypothesis in the Chesapeake Bay

Brian Vastag wrote in the Washington Post: “When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp. Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here. [Source: Brian Vastag, Washington Post, February 29, 2012 ]

“In 2007, Lowery, who also teaches at the University of Delaware, was hired by a landowner to survey property on Tilghman Island, Md., at a place called Miles Point. Almost immediately, Lowery saw a chunk of quarzite jutting out of a shore bank. It was an anvil, heavily marked from repeated beatings, a clear sign that it was used to make stone tools. Lowery dated the soil layer holding the anvil and other stone tools with two methods, radiocarbon dating and a newer technique, optical stimulated luminescence. Both returned an age of at least 21,000 years. “We were like, geez .?.?. what the hell is going on here?” Lowery said. Another site, 10 miles south, Oyster Cove, yielded more Stone Age artifacts. Those too, came out of soil more than 21,000 years old.

“Lowery published the finds in 2010 in Quaternary Science Reviews, but the report made nary a ripple in the conservative world of archaeology, where new ideas tend to progress at a glacial pace. “People are going to think we’ve clearly gone off our rocker here,” Lowery remembers musing. One problem: The ancient dates came from the soil, not the artifacts themselves. It’s an indirect date,” Dillehay said. “You need a feature like a hearth or something that’s clearly human. But it’s still suggestive.”

“In 2008, Lowery toured a tiny museum on Gwynn’s Island, Va., at the southern end of the Chesapeake. He asked the curator if the museum had any stone tools. They did: The eight-inch blade, displayed next to a bit of mastodon tusk and a molar, recovered by the Cinmar. Lowery immediately called Stanford. “He got real excited,” Lowery said. Lowery also contacted the Cinmar’s captain, Thurston Shawn. The tusk and blade were so unusual that Shawn had made a point of marking the spot on his charts. It was 60 miles east of the Virginia cape, in 240 feet of water. At the end of the last ice age, when the oceans were low, that spot was land, on the coast.

“Stanford carbon-dated the mastodon to 22,760 years old. He and Bradley — two of the world’s foremost stone tool experts — also scrutinized the blade. It had not been smoothed by wave action or tumbling. They concluded the blade had not been pushed out to sea but had been buried where the Cinmar found it. “My guess is the blade was used to butcher the mastodon,” Stanford said. “I’m almost positive.”

Skepticism About the Solutrean Hypothesis

Guy Gugliotta wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “But the archaeological evidence found so far in support of a European migration more than 20,000 years ago has raised skepticism. And as is the case with the kelp highway, many sites that could prove or disprove the hypothesis are now underwater. Dillehay said he had found the idea of an Atlantic crossing worthy of further investigation, even though “the hard evidence is not yet there.” [Source: Guy Gugliotta, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013 /||]

“I’m not going to hang a completely novel interpretation of the peopling of the Americas from something dredged off the sea bottom 40 years ago and not properly documented,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, told the Washington Post. According to Meltzler (2009), "Few if any archaeologists—or, for that matter, geneticists, linguists, or physical anthropologists—take seriously the idea of a Solutrean colonization of America." The evidence for the hypothesis is considered more consistent with other scenarios. In addition to an interval of thousands of years between the Clovis and Solutrean eras, the two technologies show only incidental similarities. There is no evidence for any Solutrean seafaring, far less for any technology that could take humans across the Atlantic in an ice age. Recent genetic evidence supports the idea of Asian, not European, origins for the peopling of the Americas. [Source: Washington Post, Wikipedia]

Waters of Texas A&M, is also skeptical. “I’m looking for clean evidence,” he told Smithsonian magazine. “We’re past ‘Clovis first,’ and we’re developing a new model. You read the literature and you use your imagination, but then you have to go out and find the empirical evidence to support your hypothesis.” None of the doubts expressed by critics have stopped Stanford and Bradley, veterans of the Clovis wars, from pushing forward. “Solutrean people became more and more efficient in exploiting the rich sea margin resources,” they write in Across Atlantic Ice. “Eventually their range expansion led them to a whole new world in the west.” /||\

Brian Vastag wrote in the Washington Post: “His idea faces another challenge: At the end of the last ice age, the polar ice cap may not have extended all the way across the Atlantic, leaving iceberg-strewn gaps of open water for the Solutreans to navigate as they headed West for unknown reasons. [Source: Brian Vastag, Washington Post, February 29, 2012]

Very Old South American Artifacts and Solutrean Hypothesis

The oldest controversial human site in South America and the Americas period is Pedra Furada Brazil. The site has been dated to 41,000–56,000 years before present by radio carbon dating charcoal from the oldest layers. There are doubts about whether humans are indeed responsible for the tools and other purported human things found there. There are also issues with the dating. [Source: Wikipedia +]

Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: Stone tools found at the Toca da Tira Peia rockshelter, in Serra da Capivara National Park in central Brazil, have been dated to 22,000 years ago. At Pedro Furada, another rockshelter in the same park, excavators say they’ve found tools and fire pits dating back 50,000 years. If either claim is confirmed, it would suggest that the first Americans arrived in the southern hemisphere, possibly via boat from west Africa, where the Atlantic is at its shortest width, around 1,600 nautical miles. [Source:Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology magazine, September-October 2014]

“If there’s a new buzzword in the archaeological study of the peopling of the Americas, it is “boats.” Part of reimagining the settling of the New World is to stop considering traveling by land as the only way people could have arrived there. “We so radically underestimated the roles of boats and water transports for all time horizons, not just the more recent past,” Adovasio explains. After all, roughly 50,000 years ago aboriginal Australians completed the trip from East Africa to Oceania. More specifically, they got there via Asia, “and they sure didn’t walk,” says Collins. Evidence shows — and this is an important understanding to factor in when considering all of these migrations — that the “trip” took them 20,000 years.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except British Columbia footprints, Scientific American

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, and various books and other publications.

Last updated June 2024