New species?

[jw1815]

Although there were bears in the road, of course: polar bears!

If only life were always as simple as you suggest. Polar bears prey on seals, sometimes scavenge whale carcasses. Seal habitats are sand dunes and rocky beaches where they feed on shallow water fish and crustaceans when they go out hunting (swimming under ice). The Atlantic is not shallow water.

But, IF there were seals in the mid Atlantic on the ice shelf edge, and IF they attracted polar bears, then the bears would probably also have gone after whale carcasses from Solutrean kills. This proposed small group of Solutreans would have been in competition with the polar bears for seals and whales, with little other wildlife to live off of.

Killing polar bears is far from easy or simple. Traditional Arctic Inuit used their sled dogs to corner polar bears while a team of hunters moved in for the kill. (Did solutreans have sleds and dog teams? They didn't show up in the Arctic until around 1500 to 1000 years ago.) Takes generations of special breeding and training of dogs to do that. And wood for sleds. Inuit used bows and arrows (not invented yet in the Solutrean period) and spears with stone points, unavailable to Solutreans in the mid Atlantic. Plus a whole array of stone tools for gutting and processing the polar bear kill.

[jw1815]

Min,

This guy is far from alone. One guy was in the middle of doing it when Hurricane Bill caused him to stop just last week.

Interesting, but to be really comparable to a proposed Solutrean experience, these modern “adventurers” would have to have sailed continuously in freezing and sub zero weather and hunted for everything they used or ate – the bones to make tools from, the skin to make the boats they sailed in, the materials to make and waterproof their own clothing. Then, once they had the materials, they’d have to have done the making – tools, boat, clothing. They’d have eaten nothing but what they hunted down or the fish they caught. No wood. No stone. No compass. No fresh water supply or equipment for extracting it from sea water. They’d get it from melting ice. They’d have to dodge icebergs. They’d repair their own tools, clothing, and boat as necessary with only the materials they could obtain through hunting at sea. They’d have to have taken their family with them, feeding and protecting children and obtaining enough food for everyone. They’d have stayed at sea for years. They wouldn’t know their destiny or even have one. There would be no emergency rescue team.

[jw1815]

Doubtlessly casualties among the hunters were high...but then again, they seem to have been high among those hunting land mammals.

But, we’re talking about a small group, aren’t we? Enough deaths or injuries and they can’t function as the cooperative hunting and manufacturing team necessary for survival. On land, people share common turf with animals. At sea, the turf belongs to the prey.

We can't assume that ancient Solutrean hunters simply decided one day to go for a boat ride.

But that’s my point, exactly. You don’t just one day go for a boat ride and settle down to living solely off the sea. It has to be an already existing lifestyle for you, with the necessary survival skills as an integral part of your material and social culture. Because, you’re not intentionally crossing an ocean. You’re just living a day to day life at sea. But, human beings just don’t do that. No matter how adapted to a marine lifestyle they are, human beings are always based on some land because we’re not aquatic mammals. Human beings have land bases that they set out from and return to. They don’t just park themselves in the ocean as a daily lifestyle. Not even recent Inuit people of the Arctic. Stanford’s analogy that Solutreans could live off of the ice shelf edge “just like Arctic Eskimos” all the way across the Atlantic doesn’t hold up because 1) Arctic Inuit have an established marine Arctic culture, but Solutreans were land hunters; and 2) Arctic Inuit have land bases to rely on and most of their aquatic prey are dependent on the shallow waters of nearby land. But ice age Solutreans in the Atlantic wouldn’t have had a land base underneath the ice. No tundra for grazing animals that would provide fur and hides as well as meat for Inuit. No shallow waters for seals and walruses. No wood. No stone. None of those things for 3000 miles.

[jw1815]

Nor can we be certain that they had not been hunting sea mammals.

But we can make some educated guesses from their archaeological sites. Was there a sea mammal habitat where Solutrean tools are found? Are there sea mammal bones at the arcaeological sites? Harpoons in the tool kit? Are there Solutrean tools with identifiable residue on them? (Sometimes detectable.) There’s no sea mammal evidence as far as I know, just shells that indicate some gathering of shellfish and probably fishing, like people living on a coast would do. There wouldn’t have been shellfish for them out to sea, though. There wouldn’t have been herds (deer, muskox, mammoths) to draw them onto the ice shelf. No food for herds to seek on a barren, snow-covered, windswept ice shelf. So, what would have drawn them to the uncertainty of living on the sea when there were still large and small game on land and they had the tools for hunting them?

Broken stone tools would be a problem but I don't recall anyone suggesting that the artifacts found at Cactus HIll were brought from Europe. So what has really been transported is the knowledge of how to make a Solutrean point. All that is needed is someone who knows how to do it and an appropriate piece of stone. I understand from knappers that a good point can be made in a couple of hours if you know what you are doing.

Adaptations from one lifestyle (land-based hunter-gathering) to another (ice and water-based sea mammal hunting) generally take a few generations. In a few generations, old technology gets lost as new technology replaces it and the old folks die off. If Solutreans took a few generations to adapt to a new ecosystem and lifestyle in crossing the Atlantic, who still had the knowledge to transmit it to the next generations on the American side? And why would they do it in the first place? They’d have been going from bad to worse, leaving behind a slightly better climate and food supply for a harsher climate and scarcer supply.

Now, again, I don't sense any great migration but it isn't required. The bigger question is, was there anyone here when they waded ashore? And, if so, where did they come from?

No, a great migration wouldn’t be necessary, just enough people to form a cooperative hunting and work team.

Who would have been here to meet them is a whole other direction. Wouldn’t want to hijack Frank’s thread even farther, but it would make a great thread of its own.

[jw1815]

DANNAN

jw1815 wrote: Sounds like a problem that’s been discussed regarding a few other geographical areas. The old coasts are submerged now. The inland technology wouldn’t be representative of a coastal people.

DANNAN wrote: So are many Mid-Atlantic islands

Were they high enough to rise above the ice shelf? Were they ice-free, with land plants and animals, or covered in ice and snow like the ocean these Solutreans would have been living on?

[jw1815]

Frank

My theory is that the "microlithians" from Asia bypassed north America because there were already people here. They moved further south, that's where you see more of it. Central and south America.

Interesting idea. Hadn’t thought about that

[Rokcet Scientist]

The ice shelf was 2 miles thick.

Forget it, jw: the ice shelf was sea ice!
Ice packs on land may get to 2 miles thick, and depress the land below it with their weight of billions of tonnes, as it does on the continent of Antarctica.
A floating sea ice shelf, though, in permanent contact with salt water, never gets to 2 miles thick! A couple hundred meters max.
Have a look at e.g. the Ross Ice Shelf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_ice_shelf

[Frank Harrist]

Frank

My theory is that the "microlithians" from Asia bypassed north America because there were already people here. They moved further south, that's where you see more of it. Central and south America.

Interesting idea. Hadn’t thought about that

Well, I AM a freaking genius.

[Frank Harrist]

The ice shelf was 2 miles thick.

Forget it, jw: the ice shelf was sea ice!
Ice packs on land may get to 2 miles thick, and depress the land below it with their weight of billions of tonnes, as it does on the continent of Antarctica.
A floating sea ice shelf, though, in permanent contact with salt water, never gets to 2 miles thick! A couple dozen meters max.
Have a look at e.g. the Ross Ice Shelf.

Good point, RS.

[Minimalist]

Who would have been here to meet them is a whole other direction. Wouldn’t want to hijack Frank’s thread even farther, but it would make a great thread of its own.

Let me worry about Frank. We're both mods.

I seem to recall Al Goodyear suggesting that people could have come "up from the south." Taking that idea and running with it...the crossing from Africa to Brazil looks infinitely more inviting than a crossing from almost anywhere else....including the north Pacific.

[Rokcet Scientist]

[...] ...the crossing from Africa to Brazil looks infinitely more inviting than a crossing from almost anywhere else....including the north Pacific.

Absolutely. And with the prevailing trade winds I'm sure that happened "all the time". Only getting back was a problem. Until they found out to sail north along the Americas to catch the easterlies to get back to the old world.

[jw1815]

Forget it, jw: the ice shelf was sea ice!
Ice packs on land may get to 2 miles thick, and depress the land below it with their weight of billions of tonnes, as it does on the continent of Antarctica.
A floating sea ice shelf, though, in permanent contact with salt water, never gets to 2 miles thick! A couple hundred meters max.
Have a look at e.g. the Ross Ice Shelf.

A couple hundred (200) meters is about 199.5 meters thicker than the Arctic areas where traditional Inuit men recently hunted seals. But, there are other options, e.g. hunting them directly in water, or while they bask on ice floes. And, since the Antarctic ice today is home to a few species of seals, I’ll concede that there might have been seals on the edge of the Atlantic ice shelf, if an ice shelf existed between Europe and North America. That seems to be in question now.

Based on a LGM model of a permanent ice shelf connection between Europe and North America, Stanford once suggested that Solutreans walked across solid ice to North America in a few weeks. When challenged, he modified it to a marine-adapted people from Iberia following the Atlantic ice shelf to America, living off the sea like recent traditional Arctic people of the last 3000 years. Most of us, including myself, have based our arguments, both pro and con, on Stanford’s suggestion that Solutreans started at the Iberian peninsula and ended up near the coast of Virginia, implying a connecting ice shelf at least somewhere near those latitudes.

But, newer information on glacial oceanography durring the LGM indicates Atlantic ice only in winter, and farther north than previously believed, with an open water channel between Europe and North America. In summer, according to the newer data, there was no Atlantic ice sheet. Land in northern Europe and northern North America on both sides of the Atlantic remained heavily glaciated and uninhabitable year round, except for parts of Iberia in Europe and land south of modern New Jersey and Pennsylvania in North America.

More information about the LGM ecosystem for this model is still being collected. Too soon to support or oppose the idea that a marine people from Europe would or could have followed an ice edge route from Iberia to 25 or 30 degrees north, crossed the open water channel, and then followed it 30 to 40 degrees south again on the North American side. Or that they crossed the open North Atlantic in a directly western route from Iberia to Virginia without following an ice shelf at all.

The following study discusses the newer, developing model. It's in technical jargon that’s beyond most of us (me, anyway), but the excerpt below from page 7 is more understandable. The CLIMAP Project that it mentions is the source of the old model.

http://courses.washington.edu/proxies/S ... 003.pdfink on the Antarctic ecosystem.

Applications of these threshold values to a set of more
than 60 well-dated sediment cores shows that the glacial
North Atlantic was characterized by an extreme seasonal
variability of climate. During glacial summers, sea ice
retreated up to the Arctic ocean and the western Fram Strait,
in contrast to the CLIMAP Project Members [1981] reconstruction
that postulated a complete perennial sea ice cover.
Accordingly, most of the Nordic Seas remained ice free,
leading to conditions that could support at least modest deepwater
convection. During glacial winters, sea ice extended to
the south of the Iceland Faroe Ridge. A small patch of ice
may also have lain near the (modern and glacial) center of
the Azores High. During the winter season, a broad meridional
ice-free channel 50_ to 60_N may have formed the site
of intensive upper North Atlantic Deep Water formation.
These new sea ice data sets will contribute to the initiation
and/or testing of paleoceanographic ocean circulation models
[cf. Paul and Scha¨ fer-Neth, 2003].

[jw1815]

Some of the different arguments, for anyone inerested in the pros and cons.

The Solutrean Hypothesis in Stanford’s and Bradley’s own words:

http://planet.uwc.ac.za/nisl/Conservati ... 202004.pdf

Critique link below of the Solutrean hypothesis, from leading opponents, Lawrence Straus, David Meltzer, Ted Goebel. It’s clearly written, easy to follow.
The main points are that 1) there are more differences than similarities between Solutrean and Clovis technology; 2) there’s no evidence of marine adaptation by people making Solutrean points; 3) pre-Clovis artifacts in America don’t show the full range and development of tools found at Solutrean sites in Europe, more like a transitional stage of independent development in America ; 4) pre-Clovis and Clovis sites don’t have Solutrean decorative art that you’d expect to find if they brought their technology and culture to America; 5) microliths in Asia demonstrate a bifacial knapping technique that could be a precursor to or contemporary of Clovis, but in smaller stones due to the limited resources available; 6) a factor in Stanford’s promotion of the Solutrean hypothesis might have been resentment of NAGPRA in the Kennewick Man controversy. (Claim a European origin for some prehistoric Americans and you can get around the law.) They outline some fallacies in the reasoning of Stanford and Bradley.

http://smu.edu/anthro/faculty/dmeltzer/ ... lantis.pdf

Jon Erlandson supports a Pacific coastal entry called the Kelp Highway. Not established fact yet, but a few sites support it. He discusses a Pacific coast entry near the end of the LGM, but recent glacial models suggest that the Cordilleran ice sheet didn’t extend all the way to the Pacific coast during the LGM. So an earlier coastal entry could have been possible.

http://www.uoregon.edu/featuredstories/ ... /erlandson

[jw1815]

Frank

Well, I AM a freaking genius

Whereas I’m just freaking, without the genius. I thought they just sort of faded away, overshadowed/replaced by Clovis. Did you see the link on challenges to the Solutrean theory? They discuss the microliths there.

[jw1815]

I seem to recall Al Goodyear suggesting that people could have come "up from the south." Taking that idea and running with it...the crossing from Africa to Brazil

Seems like one possible answer. Would fit with 50,000 year old dates from Brazil. If the dates in both places hold up as accurate and human.

In small numbers that died out or got absorbed into later mtDNA.

the crossing from Africa to Brazil looks infinitely more inviting than a crossing from almost anywhere else....including the north Pacific.

Definitely more inviting than a North Atlantic crossing, but almost anything would be. North Pacific - see above post on the Kelp Highway and limits of the Cordilleran ice sheet. Doesn’t look all that bad.