WAAAAAY back in my 4th video in June 2020 I said I would talk about the Solutrean Hypothesis and then I promptly decided I wasn't that interested in putting that much time and energy into researching a topic that wasn't really that interesting to me. Years passed and I wound up becoming internet bros with the Ancient Americas channel. (check him out. He's got my favorite Youtube archaeology channel    / @ancientamericas  ) Pete kindly agreed to help me research, write, and present this episode, so the style is going to be completely different from what I normally do.

The basic premise is that Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford considered it unlikely that the Paleoamerican cultures like Clovis and the eastern PreClovis complexes were the product of immigrants from Siberia, because Siberian material culture doesn't resemble Paleoamerica at all. Paleoamerican material culture looks much more like material from western Europe between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago, and that led them to suggest that a group of Solutrean migrants following sea mammals across the Atlantic eventually made it to the Tidewater region of North America. This was a compelling hypothesis and it got a lot of attention from academia and the popular press. I was taught about it in undergrad and we were encouraged to take it seriously as a potential model for the peopling of the Americas. It has not aged well however. Were the Solutreans Graham Hancock's Lost Advanced Civilization? No. Of course not. Don't be ridiculous.

Instagram:   / nfosaaen_archaeology  

Sources:
Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley 2012: Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture

Jennifer Raff 2022: Origin: A Genetic History of The Americas

J. David Kilby 2019: A North American perspective on the Volgu Biface Cache from Upper
Paleolithic France and its relationship to the “Solutrean Hypothesis” for Clovis origins
https://www.academia.edu/en/24273014/...


Kilby 2008: AN INVESTIGATION OF CLOVIS CACHES: CONTENT, FUNCTION, AND TECHNOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION
https://www.academia.edu/2311773/An_i...

O'Brien, M.J., Boulanger, M.T., Collard, M., Buchanan, B., Tarle, L., Straus, L.G., Eren,
M.I.,
2014 On thin ice: problems with Stanford and Bradley's proposed Solutrean
colonization of North America. Antiquity 88, 606–624.


Related Content:

Eske Wilerslev presentations on archaeogenetics.
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