On the Solutrean Hypothesis The Solutrean hypothesis, first proposed in 1998, is an alternative scientific theory about the settlement of the Americas that claims Europeans may have been among the earliest settlers of the Americas. Among its more notable proponents are Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter. This is in contrast with accepted theories that the North American continent was first populated by people from Asia, either by the Bering land bridge (i.e. Beringia), by maritime travel along the Pacific coast or by both.[citation needed] According to the Solutrean hypothesis, people of the Solutrean culture in Ice Age Europe migrated to North America, bringing their methods of making stone tools with them and providing the basis for the later Clovis technology that spread throughout North America. The hypothesis is based on proposed similarities between European Solutrean and Early American Clovis lithic technology. Although supporters of the Solutrean hypothesis refer to recent archaeological finds, their position has, in general, not been well received and many archaeologists have criticized the proposed similarities as insignificant and just as likely to be due to chance as to shared origins. As Professor of Prehistory David J. Meltzer, PhD, put it in 2009, Few if any archaeologists—or, for that matter, geneticists, linguists, or physical anthropologists—take seriously the idea of a Solutrean colonization of America. Recent DNA studies serve to weaken the case that Haplogroup X2A migrated to the Americas by way of the Atlantic. The thesis was popularized by a 2005 Discovery Channel docudrama.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 07:18:11 +0000