Interesting Clovis-Pre Clovis Idea

[Minimalist]

Found this noodling around.

http://www.ele.net/art_folsom/preclvis.htm

The Theory
I propose that the first people to enter the New World did so before 20,000 BP and probably closer to 30,000 BP. They crossed the Bering Strait and gradually, very sparsely, populated both the North and South American continents. They were Homo sapiens and not Neanderthals. They did not make BLADES, spear points or arrowheads, but had a flake technology that was derived from the Middle Paleolithic. Sometime between 17,500 and 11,500 BP a few individuals from Europe, not a reproducible population, found their way into the New World. They did not bring a gene pool, but they brought the Solutrean lithic technology from which the indigenous population adopted the soft hammer percussion technique and the exquisitely made biface. The Clovis point was then invented almost overnight and it spread across the in place population in a very short time.

I was actually looking for ancient sea travel tales and this article did contain one.

Another question that the reader might ask, is how did the Solutrean people get across the Atlantic? I do not know, however I believe it is possible when one considers the first peoples to Australia crossed a 100 miles of open water at least 60,000 years ago. Plus, they must have done it several times because they brought over a reproducible population (> 125 people). In my theory, I only have to have one Solutrean person make it to the New World. They were only carrying ideas.

[Barracuda]

I would bet on something like that!

My bet would be people came to the Americas long before the popularly acknowledged time frame, but didn't survive for very long, and didn't leave any trace.


125 people would be a very large group for that time, when most people lived in extended family groups and clans

[Minimalist]

A little more on the topic.

http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/mt.php?a=47

The final hurdle was just too tall to be leaped. In 1997 a group of experts convened in Chile. After investigating the evidence firsthand, they agreed that the radiocarbon record of the Monte Verde site was accurate. Monte Verde, 10,000 km south of Colorado and New Mexico, is 1,000 years older than Clovis. The theory that the New World was colonized from Beringia southward didn't square with the prediction that Clovis was ancestral to Monte Verde. These developments have led specialists to rethink how the Americans were peopled.

The Clovis-First model wedded to the Beringian passage is, according to CSFA Director Rob Bonnichsen, "not only dead, but ready for burial!" But the Clovis culture still figures prominently in theories about the original peopling of the Americas.

So bury it already. The corpse is starting to stink.

[Digit]

One problem, the Solutreans did leave a gene pool behind. That is how the contact was first identified.
The support for dead ideas is not new, but the support of the professional establishment for them is getting worse. In 1948 Sir Arthur Keith published in Nature an apology to Raymond Dart, admitting that he was wrong and that Dart had been correct all along.
I doubt that sort of thing is likely to be repeated. It's almost as though Topper never happened.

[Frank Harrist]

Has anyone ever brought up that the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas all used microlith technlogy. It is possible that the people from the bering strait passage became the central and south americans and the solutrean bunch stayed in the north.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Has anyone ever brought up that the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas all used microlith technlogy. It is possible that the people from the bering strait passage became the central and south americans and the solutrean bunch stayed in the north.

Monteverde is 14,400 BP, if memory serves.
That doesn't help much, does it?

[Digit]

Hooray Frank, yes I think it was brought up quite a time back, and again makes a lot of sense. But it raises a number of questions, did they pass through NA and continue on south or did they by-pass NA?
Either way, why?
Also they worked gold and copper but appear not to have moved on to iron.

[Rokcet Scientist]

http://www.ele.net/art_folsom/preclvis.htm

The Theory
I propose that the first people to enter the New World did so before 20,000 BP and probably closer to 30,000 BP.

I propose we add at least one zero to those datings.

They crossed the Bering Strait and gradually, very sparsely, populated both the North and South American continents. They were Homo sapiens and not Neanderthals.

I propose they were Homo Erectus, and neither HN, nor HS(S).

They did not make BLADES, spear points or arrowheads, but had a flake technology that was derived from the Middle Paleolithic. Sometime between 17,500 and 11,500 BP a few individuals from Europe,

I propose they – Solutreans – were at least a few hundred. Possibly a few thousand.

not a reproducible population,

would read, in my version: a population whose reproduction never had enough time to get 'off the ground' in significant numbers before it's sudden disappearance.

found their way into the New World. They did not bring a gene pool,

They DID bring a gene pool!
Just look at the mtDNA markers!

but they brought the Solutrean lithic technology from which the indigenous population adopted the soft hammer percussion technique and the exquisitely made biface. The Clovis point was then invented almost overnight and it spread across the in place population in a very short time.

Subsequently, the technology seems to have slid partly into oblivion as points deteriorated to much worse quality than the original Clovis points.

Another question that the reader might ask, is how did the Solutrean people get across the Atlantic? I do not know, however I believe it is possible when one considers the first peoples to Australia crossed a 100 miles of open water at least 60,000 years ago. Plus, they must have done it several times because they brought over a reproducible population (> 125 people).

Those are both reasons why HE, imo, did NOT cross open water (especially not distances of 100 miles or greater...!) to Oz (nor America!), but WALKED instead. Sea levels were much, much lower then, and 'long distance travel' would have been exclusively skirting the coastlines of that era.

In my theory, I only have to have one Solutrean person make it to the New World. They were only carrying ideas.

In my theory, a few hundred Solutreans – at least – reached the New World, and explored it from east to west in a very short time. They left ideas and genes. You only have to look for them.
Because their gene pool was very small, and active for only a few centuries, it never made a deep impression on the overall general pre-Columbian gene pool that would be easily visible today.
OTOH: you only have to look at many indians to clearly see caucasian features. Try as I might, in these portraits I see caucasians. Not mongoloids/asians!

[Digit]

Accepting the above definition of flake versus blade can some one show me flake tech in NA please?
To me flake means microliths, as in Mongolia, or perhaps I'm getting confused.
Old age!

[Minimalist]

If there is any truth to the "Comets over Canada" hypothesis, then Solutrean DNA would have been blasted out of existence.