Stone Age Columbus?

Incredible write up about the first people in North America. I was so excited I had to post the entire thing! Here's the link if you'd like to see the original site and photos.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/columbus.shtml


Stone Age Columbus - Who were the first people in North America?
From where did they come? How did they arrive?

The prehistory of the Americas has been widely studied. Over 70 years
a consensus became so established that dissenters felt uneasy
challenging it. Yet in 2001, genetics, anthropology and a few shards
of flint combined to overturn the accepted facts and to push back one
of the greatest technological changes that the Americas have ever
seen by over five millennia.

The accepted version of the first Americans starts with a flint
spearhead unearthed at Clovis, New Mexico, in 1933. Dated by the
mammoth skeleton it lay beside to 11,500 years ago (11.5kya), it was
distinctive because it had two faces, where flakes had been knapped
away from a core flint. The find sparked a wave of similar reports,
all dating from around the same period. There seemed to be nothing
human before Clovis. Whoever those incomers were around 9,500BC, they
appeared to have had a clean start. And the Clovis point was their
icon - across 48 states.

"The best way to get beaten up, professionally, is to claim you have
a pre-Clovis site", Michael Collins, University of Texas

An icon that was supremely effective: the introduction of the
innovative spearpoint coincided with a mass extinction of the
continent's megafauna. Not only the mammoth, but the giant armadillo,
giant sloth and great black bear all disappeared soon after the
Clovis point - and the hunters who used it - arrived on the scene.

But from where? With temperatures much colder than today and
substantial polar ice sheets, sea levels were much lower. Asia and
America were connected by a land bridge where now there's the open
water of the Bering Strait. The traditional view of American
prehistory was that Clovis people travelled by land from Asia.

This version was so accepted that few archaeologists even bothered to
look for artefacts from periods before 10,000BC. But when Jim
Adavasio continued to dig below the Clovis layer at his dig near
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he found blades and blade cores dating back
to 16,000BC. His findings were dismissed as erroneous; too
astonishing to be credible. The Clovis consensus had too many
reputations behind it to evaporate easily. Some archaeologists who
backed Adavasio's conclusions with other similar data were accused of
making radiocarbon dating errors or even of planting finds.

"The first migration was 20,000 to 30,000 years ago", Douglas
Wallace, Emory University

Decisive evidence would have to come from an independent arena.
Douglas Wallace studies mitochondrial DNA, part of the human
chromosomes that is passed unchanged from mother to daughter. It only
varies when mistakes occur in the replication of the genetic code.
Conveniently for Wallace's work (piecing together a global history of
migration of native peoples) these mistakes crop up at a quite
regular rate. The technique has allowed Wallace to map the
geographical ancestry of all the Native American peoples back to
Siberia and northeast Asia.

The route of the Clovis hypothesis was right. The date, however, was
wrong - out by up to 20,000 years. Wallace's migration history showed
waves of incomers. The Clovis people were clearly not the first
humans to set foot across North America.

Dennis Stanford went back to first principles to investigate Clovis
afresh, looking at tools from the period along the route Clovis was
assumed to have taken from Siberia via the Bering Strait to Alaska.
The large bifaced Clovis point was not in the archaeological record.
Instead the tools used microblades, numerous small flint flakes lined
up along the spear shaft to make its head.

Wallace's DNA work suggested migration from Asia to America but the
Clovis trail contradicted it. Bruce Bradley stepped in to help solve
this dichotomy, bringing with him one particular skill: flintknapping
and the ability to read flint tools for their most intimate secrets.

He spotted the similarity in production method between the Clovis
point and tools made by the Solutrean neolithic (Stone Age) culture
in southwest France. At this stage his idea was pure hypothesis, but
could the first Americans have been European?

The Solutreans were a remarkably society, the most innovative and
adaptive of the time. They were among the first to discover the value
of heat treating flints to increase strength. Bradley was keen to
discover if Solutrean flintknapping styles matched Clovis techniques.
A trawl through the unattractive flint offcuts in the storerooms of a
French museum convinced him of the similarities, even though five
thousand kilometres lay between their territories.

The divide was more than just distance; it crossed five thousand
years as well. No matter the similarities between the two cultures,
the possibility of a parallel technology developing by chance would
have to be considered. More evidence emerged from an archaeological
dig in Cactus Hill, Virginia. A bifaced flint point found there was
dated to 16kya, far older than Clovis. Even more startling was its
style. To flintknapper Bruce Bradley's eye, the Cactus Hill flint was
a technological midpoint between the French Solutrean style and the
Clovis points dating five millennia later. It seemed there is no
great divide in time. The Solutrean flint methods evolved into Clovis.

"[Stone Age] people crossing the Atlantic would be perfectly normal
from my [Eskimo] perspective" , Ronald Brower, Inupiat Heritage
Center, Barrow, Alaska

If time could be discounted, Bradley's critics pointed to an obstacle
that was hardly going to go away: crossing the Atlantic Ocean in
small open boats. How could Stone Age people have made such an epic
journey, especially when the Ice Age maximum would have filled the
Atlantic with icebergs.

Dennis Stanford returned to his earlier hunch, looking for clues
among the Arctic Eskimo peoples. Despite the influx of modern
technologies, he was heartened to discover that traditional
techniques endured. Clothing makers in Barrow, Alaska, recognised
some Solutrean bone needles he showed them as typical of their own.
The caribou skin clothing the Inuit still choose to wear could
equally have been made by people in 16,000BC. And for Eskimo peoples
the Arctic is not a desert - but a source of plentiful sea food. If
the Solutreans had the Clovis point it would have made a formidable
harpoon weapon to ensure a food supply. Would modern Eskimo ever
consider a five thousand kilometre journey across the Atlantic?

The answer it seems is yes - they have undertaken similar journeys
many times.. Most encouraging was the realisation that Inuit people
today rely on traditional boat building techniques. 'Unbreakable'
plastic breaks in the unceasing cold temperatures whereas boats of
wood, sealskin and whale oil are resilient and easily maintained. The
same materials would have been available to Solutrean boat builders.
Even if the Stone Age Europeans could make those boats, would it
survive an Atlantic crossing?

"DNA lineage predominantly found in Europe got to the Great Lakes,
14,000 to 15,000 years ago", Douglas Wallace, Emory University

Stanford believes the boats' flimsiness is deceptive. With the
Atlantic full of ice floes it would be quite possible for paddlers in
open boats to travel along the edges, always having a safe place to
haul out upon if the weather turned in.

All this evidence was still essentially circumstantial, making the
Solutrean adventure possible not proven. Douglas Wallace's DNA
history bore fruit once more. In the DNA profile of the Ichigua
Native American tribe he identified a lineage that was clearly
European in origin, too old to be due to genetic mixing since
Columbus' discovery of the New World. Instead it dated to Solutrean
times. Wallace's genetic timelines show the Ice Age prompted a number
of migrations from Europe to America. It looks highly likely that the
Solutreans were one.

The impact of this new prehistory on Native Americans could be grave.
They usually consider themselves to be Asian in origin; and to have
been subjugated by Europeans after 1492. If they too were partly
Europeans, the dividing lines would be instantly blurred. Dr Joallyn
Archambault of the American Indian Programme of the Smithsonian
Institute offers a positive interpretation, however. Venturing across
huge bodies of water, she says, is a clear demonstration of the
courage and creativity of the Native Americans' ancestors. Bruce
Bradley agrees. He feels his Solutrean Ice Age theory takes into
consideration the abilities of people to embrace new places,
adding, "To ignore this possibility ignores the humanity of people
20,000 years ago."