View Single Post
Old January 31st, 2007 #2
Live Free
Terry Phillips
 
Live Free's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Havana, FL
Posts: 792
Default

From Wikipedia:

Characteristics
Solutrean culture was dominant in present-day France and Spain from roughly 21,000 to 17,000 years ago. It was known for its distinctive toolmaking characterized by bifacial, pressure-flaked points. Traces of the Solutrean tool-making industry disappear rather abruptly from Europe around 15,000 years ago, when it was replaced by the somewhat cruder tools of the Magdalenian culture.

Clovis tools are typified by a distinctive rock spear point, known as the Clovis point. Like Solutrean points, Clovis points are bifacial and "fluted" on both sides. Fluting facilitates mounting or hafting the point to a spear shaft more securely. Clovis tool-making technology seems to appear in the archaeological record in North America roughly 13,500 years ago, and similar predecessors in Asia or Alaska have not yet been discovered.


[edit] Atlantic crossing
The hypothesis proposes that Ice Age Europeans could have crossed the North Atlantic along the edge of the pack ice that extended from the Atlantic coast of France to North America during the last glacial maximum. The model envisions these people making the crossing in small watercraft, using skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people, exploiting relatively plentiful maritime resources.


[edit] Transitional styles
Supporters of the hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia) indicate a transitional style between the Clovis and Solutrean cultures. Artifacts from this site are estimated to date from 17,000 to 15,000 years ago, although a consensus has not been reached among researchers on their definitive age.


[edit] MtDNA Haplogroup X
The idea is also supported by mitochondrial DNA analysis insofar as the fact that some members of some native North American tribes share a common yet distant maternal ancestry with some present-day individuals in Europe identified by mtDNA Haplogroup X. Haplogroup X has not been found in eastern Asia or Siberia, unlike other Native American mtDNA Haplogroups A, B, C and D.


[edit] Challenges to the Solutrean hypothesis
Difficulties with this hypothesis include the challenges of crossing the Atlantic with the technology of the time as well as a temporal gap of millennia between the apparent end of the Solutrean culture and the earliest discovered Clovis tools.

Other problems with the hypothesis include an apparent lack of Solutrean-style artwork (like that found at Lascaux in France) among the Clovis people. In response, proponents point out that the Solutreans introduced a tool-making innovation and not necessarily cultural or artistic practices.
__________________
Kith, kin, and kind. First, last, and always.