đź”— Solutrean Hypothesis
The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, with Solutreans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstream academic narrative that the Americas were first populated by people crossing the Bering Strait to Alaska by foot on what was land during the Last Glacial Period or by following the Pacific coastline from Asia to America by boat.
The Solutrean hypothesis posits that around 21,000 years ago a group of people from the Solutré region of France, who are historically characterized by their unique lithic technique, migrated to North America along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. 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 behind 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 far before mainstream scientific theories of the peopling of the Americas.
Originally proposed in the 1970s, the theory has received some support in the 2010s, notably by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter. 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." 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, far less for any technology that could take humans across the Atlantic in an ice age. Genetic evidence supports the theory of Asian, not European, origins for the peopling of the Americas.