There is a little more to it than that, Chuck. There is a very fine book out called "The First Americans" by Chris Hardaker. Among his discussions he takes the time to outline a number of examples of career suicide or threats of career suicide against people who dared to question the establishment's Clovis-First paradigm.

It's sobering and a great example of what happens when science becomes dogmatic like religion. Anything needs to be questioned...freely and often.

(September 27, 2011 at 10:16 pm)Minimalist Wrote: There is a little more to it than that, Chuck. There is a very fine book out called "The First Americans" by Chris Hardaker. Among his discussions he takes the time to outline a number of examples of career suicide or threats of career suicide against people who dared to question the establishment's Clovis-First paradigm.

It's sobering and a great example of what happens when science becomes dogmatic like religion. Anything needs to be questioned...freely and often.

Genetic and linguistic evidence does not seem to strongly back Clovis first. They have been interpreted to suggest 3 pulses of migration into America. One quite ancient, maybe 30,000 years ago, and leaving islated gene population and linguistic descendants mainly in southern part of south America, the second corresponding roughly to Clovis, entering America around 12,000 years ago and making up the dominant gene and language source of almost all of native Americas from northern Canada to southern part of chile, while a third entered northern Canada and Greenland much more recently, around 5,000 years ago, and leaving genetic and linguistic evidence mainly in those regions.

What do you think of Dennis Stanford's Solutrean Hypothesis?

(September 27, 2011 at 10:58 pm)Minimalist Wrote: What do you think of Dennis Stanford's Solutrean Hypothesis?

I like it. For one thing it helps explain why the oldest Clovis sites found so far are east coast. Plus the similarities in the tools are hard to deny.

Well, similarities between stone tools aren't the best indicator of whether or not cultures are directly related. There are a whole host of concerns regarding the manufacture of said tools that amount to many cultures that we know for sure to be separate and without contact developing very similar tools. If I'm remembering correctly one of the main objections to this theory would be the absence of any sort of evidence for the type of boats that would be needed to make the crossing. There were other objections as well, no compelling similarities between the cultures beyond the style of their points etc.

(Maybe there has been something new on this front, I don't think I'm up to date on this stuff. Ex wife was an anthropologist, I'm no expert and I'd be lying if I said I trusted her word on anything anymore so I'm ready to be schooled on this one..lol)

Late Edit: I'm surprised that Mormons don't pimp this hypothesis out as the word of god himself. It could be construed as very strong evidence for the historical accuracy of their scriptures.

Yet another late edit: What might be more compelling, is if we could get some sequencing to back this up. Later waves of successive immigration into the Americas would muddy the waters, but if we were to isolate a marker in the population of the proposed parent culture and date it to a reasonably close time frame, and could then find this marker in some living descendants.....that would be much more compelling. It would be difficult, perhaps, but well within the realm of possibility.

(September 27, 2011 at 10:58 pm)Minimalist Wrote: What do you think of Dennis Stanford's Solutrean Hypothesis?

I think Solutrean hypothesis is quite an extravagant (primitive watercraft maker crossing the always very difficult GIUK gap without leaving any evidence of crossing any other far easier waterways) hypothesis with only a small amount of low quality support. As such it can't seriously challenge the prevailing Siberia hypothesis.

The small amount of support it has is low quality because the supposedly similar tool technologies found in Europe and America did not come close to overlapping in time. In fact, these technologies are only know to have existed in Europe for about 3000 years, and then they vanished for 3000 years before supposedly making a reappearance in America for another 2000 years. If we are to believe that these technologies not only existed during the 3000 year gap, but also made the very difficult jump across GIUK gap during that gap, then we can with equal, if not greater, ease also believe that a yet unknown culture in Asia also independently developed similar techniques within the same window, and made a much easier jump across the baring straits, or the technology was completely independently arose inside america, or even that the european technology migrated eastward through osmosis across Siberian to America rather than westward via migration directly to America.

There is an interesting article here that discusses some of issues. It talks about the tools, method of travel and even DNA evidence. It’s several years old though so some of what is in here may not be current.

We used to find points like those in the sugar sand and take them to UF. Eventually they sent folks out to dig. They were fairly thorough. Hadn't remembered that in decades..lol, thanks for the reclaimed memories AF.

But there is no similarity to the tool technology in Siberia, which was microblade.

As for the timing; when you get into narrow time frames it is always speculative. But the dates I've seen for Solutrean in Europe are between 15-20,000 and in one case 25,000 ybp. Stanford claims 16,000 ybp for the finds at Cactus Hill.

Since we can't ever be sure when we find the first or last example of a given technology it gets a little hairy when the dates are that close together.

But it is the idea of boats that really intrigues me.

Thor Heyerdahl did some amusing stuff with regards to boats and possible alternative paths of migration. (though admittedly nothing dating back to this sort of time frame)

Ever read The Ra Expeditions?