Synopsis of the Novel
Scientist on NPR discusses Solutrean Hypothesis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=&feature=player_embedded
From NPR: Hunting For Traces Of America’s First Inhabitants
Reporting in Science, researchers write of finding blades and spear points that pre-date Clovis tools — long thought to be the earliest evidence of people in the Americas. Archaeologist Michael B. Collins talks about how the discovery could change theories about the first inhabitants.
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Joining me now to talk about the research is one of the authors of a study that’s out in this week’s journal Science. Michael B. Collins is director of the Gault Archaeological Project. He’s also a research professor of anthropology at Texas State University in San Marcos.
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FLATOW: But why do you go deeper, where some other scientists might have stopped?
Dr. COLLINS: Well, we’re working against an inertia, two inertias, really, that one has said for very many years that Clovis was the oldest culture in the Americas, at around 13,000 to 13,200 or 13,300 years ago. And some people haven’t gotten over that, in spite of the fact for the last nearly 20 years we have had quite a few sites with strong indications of people being here before Clovis. And another thing – and that’s improving. More and more people are accepting the concept or are at least willing to investigate it. The other thing, the other inertia that we have, and it’s also improving rapidly and greatly: American archaeology has – grew up in the social sciences.
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FLATOW: There’s a hypothesis that the first Americans may have crossed over around 16,000 years ago not from the familiar Siberian land bridge that we’ve heard about but from Europe. [Emphasis Added] How does that hypothesis come about, and is there any evidence to support it? And how do you cross the Atlantic Ocean?
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Dr. COLLINS: Well, those are huge questions. And it’s a bold hypothesis that has been around for a while, but it’s currently being formulated and talked about and not enjoying a whole lot of acceptance. But if you look at the archaeological, the earliest archaeological materials that we know from the western side of the Western Hemisphere, all down the west side of North America and South America, there is a technology, a way of making stone tools that really has an Asian flavor to it. And it probably fits with genetic and other evidence that much of the ancestry of the Americas derived out of Siberia, biologically and technologically. On the other side of the continent, some of the earliest archaeological evidence that we have actually has a – and this includes Clovis – has a technological signature very similar to the Solutrean culture of primarily France and Spain that dates between about 21,000 and 16,000 years ago. Those – that technology is so similar that it’s awfully hard to imagine it having sprung up independently in two different places. [Emphasis Added] So then you have the question of: How do you bring a culture across the North Atlantic?
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FLATOW: Yet you say this theory is not very well accepted?
Dr. COLLINS: That’s true, but – and it’s because nobody has very thoroughly and systemically put together all the various lines of evidence. That’s about to change later this year. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of Exeter University in England have a book that’s in the final stages of editing at the University of California Press putting together the oceanographic, archaeological, ethnographic evidence that really tightens up that hypothesis. And they simply presented it as a hypothesis, but I find it a very compelling one. [Emphasis Added]
