Clovis - Solutrean Connection Theories...

[Mojave]

Many people believe there is some connection between the Solutrean Industry of Upper Paleolithic Europe and the Clovis Technology. Uniface, among others, brought it up here ((Paleo?) Uniface Tools) with the reference (Immigrants From The Other Side (Clovis Is Solutrean?)).

This supports the theory that the Clovis point evolved out of the Solutrean techniques, which implies the Europeans migrated to North America across the Atlantic. There are MANY similarities between some of the artifact examples, but there are many differences too. This is a fascinating subject to discuss and I invite opinions. Personally, I don’t believe it. I’ll try to explain some of my reasons why. Much of it comes from my observations that many opinions are very emotional. Some people, professional archaeologists are no exception; believe what they want to believe, regardless of the facts.
Many people support the theory based on the belief that the earliest humans could have come across via boat. They make the argument that the earliest Australians did it which is obviously true. That is an interesting theory, but it is nothing more than a theory. You can’t support a theory with another theory. Adding up a lot of “couldas, wouldas, and shouldas” doesn’t add up to one single “they did.” I’m not saying they didn’t, I’m just saying you can’t claim that they DID without some physical evidence.
Much of the evidence provided for the theory is based on the concept of “outre passé flaking.” This is a technology that was first observed in Solutrean artifacts and was employed on many Clovis points as well. Here is an interesting quote from the above referenced article:

“On Archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley of Kent State University seconds Stanford and Bradley's opinion: "There are only two places in the world and two times that this technology appears--Solutrean and Clovis."”

This statement is patently false. I agree that Solutrean was likely the first and Clovis was possibly the second, but there are many independently repeated examples of it. To say they were the only two cultures that ever did it is extremely misleading. I’ve seen it many times on many different time periods and cultures. Here are a couple points I have personally found. One is an Andice point from Texas. Another is a Silver Lake from Nevada.



Here is one of the two famous Solutrean blades that were found intact that folks point to as examples of outre passé. This is the smaller of the two famous ones in my hand for scale (it is a cast from Lithics Casting Labs).



These don’t look anything like Clovis. I wish I took pics of the profiles. These are amazingly THIN blades. Solutrean period people made many different kinds of points. Many were unifacial. Some were narrow and lenticular. Some were triangular and basally thinned and have an outline similar to Clovis. ….So were a lot of things. The next picture is a 19,000 year old point from France.

It does not show outre passé flaking. It is very narrow and lenticular. You know what else it is nearly identical to? Haskett! You know what else it is nearly identical to? El Jobo! What else? Common points throughout Siberia in the time leading up to Clovis. So was this an Asian point that made it to France or was it a French point that made it to Asia and then on to,… South America? Via the Atlantic Ocean?? It just doesn’t add up. Either all THESE points are coincidental, or, Solutrean/Clovis similarities are coincidental. It is one or the other, right? Perhaps both? Two paleo cultures got here at roughly the same time, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic? Here is another interesting quote:

“Archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley concluded that the Clovis point did not derive from any stoneworking tradition from Asia known from the archaeological record.”

What archaeological record were they looking at? This is an example of folks looking only for what they want to see. I am convinced that someday this will be blindingly obvious. If you want to believe Clovis came from Solutrean, you’d have to consider the possibility that these points, that are yielding more and more pre-Clovis dates, became Hasketts and El Jobos. That would require Solutrean to cross Asia AND Beringia.
Ultimately, the main thing for me is that the similar Asian points are roughly equal to (or just prior to) Clovis and are found from Alaska to South America all along the western portion of the continent. The Solutrean points are roughly 6,000 years older than Clovis. If one did come from the other, where is all the evidence that would obviously exist throughout the Americas from that intervening 6,000 years? Unless you believe the theories on the “thermonuclear event” that screwed us all up and Clovis really is 19,000 years old. But that would be another thread.
Here is another pic of some Solutrean points from France that look amazingly similar to Cactus Hill points.

It is either a coincidence, or there is a connection with nothing to show for the 6,000 year gap, or ALL our dates are biased by 6,000. I’m in the camp that believes coincidence.
JMHO

[blueovalfever]

mojave you are a wealth of information and i love reading these posts. i agree that too many theories are biased by emotion. i also think that most of the people forming these theories are very closed mind people who cant ask themselves to look outside of their personal beliefs and see if there is more than one answer to the question. it sure seems so many theories exist without true scientific proof,and its sad that they get mistaken for the truth by some people. i too think that alot of the clovis technology is coincidental.i dont see early man during the clovis time crossing the rough seas and following ice formations in boats that were supposedly a wood frame covered with animal hides. seems like they wouldnt get far on the sea like that.if we could only go back in time and prove without a doubt what really did or didnt happen! keep up the posts,they are great and full of information

[mootsman]

Coincidence is the operative word for me. I completely agree with all your points and the lastest DNA studies simply don't support the Euro connection in any shape fashion or form. I know the argument is that the European immigrants influenced the lithic technology but did not survive long enough to influence the gene pool -- guess they had a round trip ticket or something. Just seems like a huge stretch and 6,000 year gap? Pretty hard to imagine given the work that has been recently done with radiocarbon dating including calibrating it with tree ring studies, etc. But, hey, those two guys got huge publicity out of the theory...even making it to pop TV shows etc. As long as folks are stating their beliefs, I'll drop mine and it's no more than a layman's ruminations. I think the first Americans populated north and south America well before clovis and set the groundwork for Clovis technology to spread once it was invented in the West, the SE, Alaska or wherever. I think the pre-Clovis sites have been discovered by amateurs and professionals but have gone unrecognized for a host of reasons. I also believe that most fluted points are contemporaneous and reflect only regional variations, etc.
OK, I've run my string out. This is fun.

[Mojave]

Originally Posted by mootsman

I think the first Americans populated north and south America well before clovis and set the groundwork for Clovis technology to spread once it was invented in the West, the SE, Alaska or wherever. I think the pre-Clovis sites have been discovered by amateurs and professionals but have gone unrecognized for a host of reasons. I also believe that most fluted points are contemporaneous and reflect only regional variations, etc.
OK, I've run my string out. This is fun.

I agree with the populated thing.
Sites have been discovered. They are beginning to be recognized. Mostly in South America though.
I also agree this is fun.

[erb]

Don't have much to contribute but wanted to say thanks for taking the time to share your research and thoughts. I am completely fascinated by this stuff.

[Maumee Bay]

Well I wouldn't agree they did influence the gene pool the Ojibwa tribe was DNA tested
and can be traced back to Solutrean France .I think them coming across the Atlantic and hunting the ice flows is very feasible it was 300-400 miles smaller then.I know you guys are old enough to remember Thor Heyerdahls journey on the Kontiki the reed raft he sailed across the pacific from Polynesia to Hawaii back in the early 60's living off the ocean as they went.I used to have the book when I was a kid.I think the more they find in south and central America the more clues we are going to get.We are going to find there are more than one migration to North America
Paul

[mootsman]

I got this from a genetics testing site that specializes in Native American DNA

"The identification of 4 haplo-groups found in Asia confirmed earlier evidence that Native American populations had Asian origins. Yet in several studies of modern Native American mtDNA, several sequences appeared that did not fall into one of the four known lineages. Undoubtedly, some of these represented post contact admixture."

I think when we are doing current DNA studies of Native-Americans as opposed to studies of ancient material we will never be able to rule out post contact mixing.

[uniface]

One of the most striking insights into human nature I ever encountered is in Bere****h Rabbah, the oldest surviving commentary on the Book of Genesis. At Gen.11:2 (And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there), it notes, "They found a plain in the land of Shinar because they were looking for a plain in the land of Shinar."

People tend to find what they want to find (think evidence for "global warming" by the people pushing that notion). And they tend to ignore, overlook and discredit evidence that contradicts their cherished assumptions. This is obvious from the accounts of the Red Paint People of Scandanavia, who show up, lock stock and barrel, in New England and the Maritimes, somewhere (from memory) around 6,500 BC. In Europe, it's widely accepted that they sailed to the New World early in time, because it's obvious from the evidence they left. Here, where archaeological conclusions are controlled by agendas that are other than scientifically disinterested, the official version is that the Red Paint Culture was a local development by an indigenous population, completely unrelated to anything anywhere else at the same time.

It's the same story with the genetic studies. As one writer summarised the data picture they're drawing their conclusion from,

M = Mother's DNA
F = Father's DNA
L = Lost

First generation : M + F

Second generation : (M + L) + (L + F)

Third Generation : (M + L) + (L + L ) + (L + L) + (L + F)

Run this back over thousands of years, count the number of unknown, un-recoverable "L"s involved, and you can see what a crock genetic conclusions based on this procedure are. If you liked Global Warming, you're really gonna love Asian Origins.

[uniface]

You can see the same pattern in the arguments over lithic technology. This is another area where people are not "getting" points they don't want to "get," finding what they want to find, and misconstruing its significance in the bigger picture.

As far as outrepasse flaking technology goes, this can be found in the Western part of the country LATER IN TIME -- possibly continued by the descendants of the Clovis people, who were either supplanted elsewhere by people who showed up in greater numbers, or by locals who moved on technologically. This is irrelevant to the point of the argument, which is that AT THE TIME IT FIRST APPEARS, outrepasse flaking is unique to Solturean in Europe and to Clovis in America. It has the same HISTORICAL significance that the fact that automobiles first appeared in Western Europe and the USA does. That Japan is full of cars today has no bearing on where they came from originally.

What's also routinely ignored or misconstrued is that the outrepasse flaking procedure is not the whole story, or what the comparison depends on. I'm pretty sure this has been posted before, but since it's easy to lose track of facts in a snowstorm of them, let's put this back into the context of the other parallels these two (?) cultures -- uniquely in their time -- have in common:

thin projectile points
very long, thin bifaces
red ochre
gouge-eyed needles
bone and ivory projectiles points
bevelled ivory foreshafts
decorated bone rods
limestone palettes
heat-treating flint
pressure flaking
large prepared-core-&-blade technology
caches of finished artifacts and of toolstone
utilisation of outrepasse removals as toolform blanks
identical "bone wrenches"

In other words, it isn't the little, myopic detail that's significant so much as the big picture it appears in.

Hope this helps some.

[Mojave]

All very good points Uni.
Saying that outré passé FIRST appeared in the Americas on Clovis points is not the same as saying that Clovis points were the first points in the Americas either. What bothers me (my personal opinion) is the seemingly constant push by various people that point to various similarities as evidence they were the same.
I am curious though as to part of your post. Do you believe because of the “big picture” of all the other things you listed, there IS a connection? Or, do you think these too are examples of people seeing what they want to see?
The reason I ask is that in areas I am studying (the Far Western North America) there appears to be two distinct Clovis point styles. One, possibly earlier (??), is very thick compared to what is generally recognized as Clovis. They are also short, although it can easily be argued the small numbers all represent heavily reworked points. The second type is much more typical of Clovis from the rest of the country. These are observations that may turn out to mean absolutely nothing but at the moment I think it is significant.
As far as ochre is concerned, it has been used by pretty much everybody everywhere throughout time. I might be wrong but didn’t Neanderthal make extensive use of ochre?
Many of the other examples I don’t have first hand knowledge of. I suspect there are other similarities that haven’t been discovered too. But to say there is significance in the fact that they both decorated bones, heat treated flint, made bone and ivory points, etc isn’t necessarily all that meaningful in my mind because all of those things would have been common sense practices all over the world for many thousands of years. The bone wrench seems compelling however. I agree there are similarities and perhaps the preponderance of evidence in the “big picture” will help explain a connection, but I just can’t get past a few of the details like the thousands of years between them with no record, the knowledge that people’s personal beliefs bias the theories they publish, and the fact that many of the “similarities” are actually expected and thus explainable, and the rest being nothing more than coincidence.
It reminds me of the long and impressive list of Lincoln/Kennedy parallels or the Hank Aaron number 4 parallels. I haven’t heard it in a long time but something to the effect the #44 hit #714 towards the 444 ft mark at 10:44 pm on the 4th pitch of the 4th inning of the….
I’m sure some of that is wrong but it was impressive.
Like you say, people make connections where they WANT to make connections.