Hypothesis for ancient human migrations to the Americas
The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas is the claim that the earliest human migration to the Americas began from Europe during the Solutrean Period, with Europeans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean.[1][2][3] This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstream academic narrative that the Americas were populated first by people crossing the Bering Strait to Alaska by foot on what was land during the Last Glacial Period[4] or by following the Pacific coastline from Asia to America by boat.[5]
The Solutrean hypothesis posits that about 21,000 years ago a group of people from the Solutré region of France, who are characterized historically by their unique lithic technique, migrated to North America along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean.[6] Once they made it to North America, their lithic technique dispersed around the continent (c. 13,000 years ago) to provide the basis for the later popularization of Clovis lithic technology. The premise of the Solutrean Hypothesis is that the similarities between Clovis and Solutrean lithic technologies are evidence that the Solutreans were the first people to migrate to the Americas, dating long before mainstream scientific theories of the peopling of the Americas.
Proposed originally during the 1970s, the theory has received some support during the 2010s, notably by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter.[7] However, according to David Meltzer, "[f]ew if any archaeologists—or, for that matter, geneticists, linguists, or physical anthropologists—take seriously the idea of a Solutrean colonization of America."[8] The evidence for the hypothesis is considered more consistent with other scenarios. In addition to an interval of thousands of years between the Clovis and Solutrean eras, the two technologies show only incidental similarities. There is no evidence for any Solutrean seafaring, much less for any technology that could take humans across the Atlantic during an ice age. Genetic evidence supports the theory of Asian, not European, origins for the peopling of the Americas.[9][10][11]