The best survey of literature and discussions about the possible connections during Solutrean time between

Europe and the USA. Also Web-published: http://www.wfu.edu

THE SOLUTREAN CONNECTION QUESTION by H.Blaine Ensor

HUNTERS IN THE EXTREMELY COLD SOLUTREAN ERA learned to stampede horse and cattle herds
over cliffs like later Paleo-Indiansl (who stampeded bison and elephants, occasionally camels; horses less
successfully). Solutreans responded to the Würm III Glacier with ingenuity, producing fine multi-barbed
bone harpoons and eyed needles but, above all, exquisite laurel- and willow-leaf projectile points, sometimes
fluted—as hafted hurled by hand or atlatl at large beasts of now-extinct species. (Fluting, i.e. grooved
partway up, both thinned and allowed better hafting.) Solutreans may have originated the bow and arrow,
which did not come into general use until the Maglemosian Mesolithic or, in North America till the 500-750-
A.D. interval between Hopewell and Mississippian. Besides France, Solutrean points have turned up notably
in Spain, Hungary, Russia, and United States.
Although first defined 1867 at le Solutré Village in the Sâone Valley near Mâcon—outside its les
Eyziés French matrix in the Black Périgord (“Black” for dense forest)—this culture derived untraceably from
Gravettian which, although defined at la Gravette Rockshelter in the Dordogne Couze Valley, centered
hundreds of miles ENE in Moravia, where it had evolved delicate flintwork bequeathed to Solutrean heirs
and, when glacier-forced from Central Europe, gravitated slowly east to the Black Sea and Russian steppe to
quicken culture in those regions, then double back again via the Mediterranean to Spain and France.2

ADVANCING ICE DEPOPULATED all western Europe by 18,050 B.C—Scandinavia, British Isles, Low
Countries, and France to 40 mi. below Paris. The glacier reached its maximum c.1650 B.C. unrelenting for
another 5,000-6,000 years to permit reoccupation of vacant North Europe. Survivors of innumerable ethnic
groups crowded into and south of Saint-Sulpice-de-Favières campsite in South France, particularly to the Bay
of Biscay and coasts all around the Iberian Peninsula.3

THIS HYBRIDIZING DENSITY in itself created physical and cultural vigor—with tension. Did any
dislodged groups, in constant view of the sea, feel impelled to coast the glacier while feeding on marine life
following migratory birds who foretold eventual land? Michael Johnson of Cactus Hill fame thought so.4
Solutrean mariners would have had additional guidance if Isaac Newton Vail’s 1874 theory were right that
disintegrating rings around the earth like Saturn’s left stratospheric ice crystals whose “canopy” reflected land
far ahead as late as the 4th millennium B.C.5

LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS at U. New Mexico, who wanted all precolumbian American population to hail
afoot from Asia, could not conceive of anybody crossing the vast North Atlantic in the Pleistocene.6. Ice
covered Britain, which mariners would not have had for a jumping-off place. But that shortened a journey up
the Bay of Biscay to skirt the glacier from a French shore 150 farther west, to the Newfoundland 250 mi.
farther east than now. Straus and his expert predecessor P.E.L. Smith found no Solutrean tradition of
seafaring, notwithstanding depicted boats. Venerable Emerson Greenman of U. Michigan found canoe,
kayak, and dugout types painted in red or black in Pleistocene Spanish caves La Pasiege, Castillo, and La
Pileta, which included the midship gunwale peak characterizing Beothuk watercraft of Newfoundland.
Greenman outrightly called Sandia points Solutrean, specifically of Solutrean Montaut, north of Dax in
extreme-SW France, noting most North American point-types between the end of the last glacial first and
second cold phases are present in the Solutrean of France and Spain.7
P.E.L. Smith, arguing fluted points “not so unique” in Solutrean France and Spain,8 confirmed
Solutrean precedent. His and Straus’ profound knowledge of Solutrean culture had nothing to do with their
hopes that Solutreans did not brave the North Atlantic. No actual skin or wood boats of course survived
12,000 - 20,000 years.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS were hung up on 7 doctrinal shibboleths: 1) precolumbian immigrants to America

came only by land via Beringia 2) during the last glacier, which lowered sea level to make a continuous
bridge, 2) all at once (perhaps only a single family) or in 2 or at most 3 waves, 3) and descended into
Canada and the U.S. through a hypothetical ice-free corridor, 4) reaching Canada and U.S. no earlier
(“undisputably”) than 9,500 B.C. 5) with Clovis points, or inventing them in the corridor on the way or
subsequently in North America, 6) European contact by sea out of the question.
With accumulating evidence directly contradicting all 6, including immigrants both before and after
the glacier, conventional anthropologists grasped at independent invention from scratch, parallel invention,
groundwater or coal contamination of radiocarbon samples, lightning and/or natural brush fires the cause of
concentrated hearth fires, and prejudged fraud—seeking why it could not be instead of why it is. Richard
Shutler spoke of U.S. anthropologists’ 9550-B.C. mental barrier,9 Niède Guidon of anthropologists’ bias
against any people earlier than 10,050 B.C. in South America.10
When it became inescapable that South American sites were dating older than North America’s oldest
(of those accepted), Stuart Fiedel said if these really do predate 10,000 B.C., archaeologists will have to
explain the absence of comparably old sites in America11—misassuming all precolumbian population of
South America funneled first through the Bering land-bridge and eventually the Isthmus of Panamá.
GEOGRAPHER CALVIN HEUSSER, relying on every kind of data including pollen and peat analysis on an
unprecedented scale, demonstrated refugia in unglaciated tracts along the North Pacific coast during and
between glacial periods which would have made greater travel facility by water, particularly through
archipelagoes, with marine food available, to reach California as early as 28,050 B.C.12 While
anthropologists were ignoring this, Geologist D.R. Crandell cast doubt on a “corridor” through the Wisconsin
Glacier, inhospitable to man or beast, along which no artifacts have been found, and large proglacial lakes
that dominated the environment would have presented insuperable deterrents during both advance and retreat
of the glacier. He doubted firstcomers were big-game hunters, with the attraction of marine-littoral resources
for simple watercraft.13 An archaeologist at last weighed in when K.R. Fladmark of Simon Fraser U. also
doubted the supposed ice-free corridor that was so discouraging for human occupation, and suggested
maritime adapters among the first to arrive south of Canada.14
He convinced Ruth Gruhn at Alberta U., whose influential monograph premised that greatest
language diversity signified longest residence; to favor coasting voyages to California, Mexico, and Peru—
still ruling out either Atlantic or open-Pacific sailing.15 Her premise does not always hold true, as for her key
analogy Australia16 and she uncritically agreed with Joseph Greenberg’s grossly untenable dogma that the
hundreds of California languages could have resulted only from a single migration, but realized all too truly
that the entrenched doctrine of Clovis primacy
requires that each and every New World archaeological site with evidence of an age greater
than 12,000 years has to be dismissed; an increasingly difficult and lengthy task17

The very earliest known settlement in America flourished on the Atlantic side, in SE Piauí State, NE Brazil,
where bedrock dated 50,050. The rockshelters on the Piauí River would have been accessible within hiking
distance via a branch of the Gulf Stream but impossible from Panamá even today afoot.
THERE WERE PERCEPTIVE INDIVIDUALS all along who entertained the possibility or probability of
primeval transatlantic colonizing. Thomas Jefferson, though having twice experienced the ocean’s appalling
immensity, said “a passage from Europe to America was always practicable, even to the imperfect navigation
of ancient times….”18 European resemblance of projectile points found in the Delaware Valley near Trenton
led C.C. Abbott to propound a European connection across the Atlantic 1877. W.H. Holmes, although
rejecting Abbott’s American Paleolithic, included European in his 1912 multiple waves theory to account for
numerous shared cultural traits. N.C. Nelson, curator of Prehistoric Archaeology at the American Museum of
Natural History, first specifically linked Solutrean to Paleo-Indians, 1919. By spring 1937, when Folsom
points had grown well known and Clovis points discovered but called “Folsom-like,” Nelson pondered their
possible Solutrean linkage—from Mongolia. Étienne Bernardeau Renaud, U. Denver, revived specific
comparison of Folsom to Solutrean points 1931, elaborated in his native French 1933 for the Paris Revue
Anthropologique, and reiterated in English 1934.
Frank Hibben, excavating (1936-40) 19 whole or broken Sandia points 2.4"- 3.3" long associated with
extinct mammoth, mastodon, camel, bison, and horse in the celebrated cave NE of Albuquerque, immediately
recognized their closer-than-Folsom resemblance to Solutrean points in the collection of Grant MacCurdy
published 1932 & 37 but could not “bridge Asiatic gaps of awe-inspiring magnitude,” conceiving European
influence but not across the Atlantic.19 John Witthoft 1952 saw chert fluted points excavated from 11 hunting
camps of immigrants from western-New York dotting the 20-acre Shoop Site in eastern Pennsylvania as
extending Old World Upper Paleolithic blade industry.20 He had in mind pre-Solutrean Aurignacian
models.21 Greenman realized (1960, 1962, 1963) Atlantic crossings would have been more feasible before
the glacier melted, making a continuous edge for skin boats or dugouts to skirt. Besides points, he found
Solutrean-type Beothuk boats and Upper Paleolithic designs in drawings by the last Beothuk, Shanawdithit,
at St. John’s, Newfoundland.22

IN A WATERSHED PAPER 1962 Anthropologist Ronald Mason of Lawrence College acknowledged Sandia
points possibly earlier than Clovis “by an unknown number of years.” Paleo-Indian fluted points, which he
asserted totally unknown in the Old World (not so), occurring “in the lowest discovered levels in North
America” (not so) “demands a prior history of man in America to allow for the development of this
distinctive artifact…at least 15,000-16,000 B.P.”23 (got the point) Though he favored the Beringia theory, he
admitted it speculative with no archaeological proof. Though Clovis points first became known in the U.S.
West, he noted their heaviest concentration in the East but confessed not having anticipated Greenman’s
theory. Hannah Marie Wormington, sensible curator of the Denver Museum of Natural History, commented
that fluted points occur not only oftener in the East but “in a far greater range of variation.”24 By Ruth
Gruhn’s criterion, that meant greatest age.

ARCHAEOLOGIST MICHAEL JOHNSON and team stopped digging after reaching the Clovis level at
Cactus Hill within a ridge of stabilized windblown sand 50 mi. south of Richmond, Va., presuming no
habitation of America earlier than Clovis but, returning 1997 to try deeper, found 2 metavolcanic-stone points
over 5,000 years older, plus cores for striking more points and a small assemblage of quartzite blades and
bladelets dated from associated charcoal 13,120 `70 & 14,050 `730 B.C. Johnson believed Solutreans could
have made it across the Atlantic along the glacier. Archaeologist Albert Goodyear, U. South Carolina, alss
had stopped digging at the Clovis layer of his Topper Site on the Savannah near Allendale, S.C. when, Spring
1999, he unearthed scored of blades and flakes below that layer at a yard depth.

ASYMMETRICAL “SHOULDERED” Sandia points— indistinguishable from

Solutrean—occurred in a pluvial period corresponding to the last glacial stadial,
Clovis points during a severe subsequent drought when mammoths and (mainly
at more eastern sites) mastodons remained the primary prey though already dying out with their drying water-
holes (as Haynes perceived) before Clovis hunters accelerated extinction. Fluted all the way up, Folsom
points perfected Clovis, which they overlapped but not till after mammoths (and mastodons) had disappeared,
leaving bison primary prey as the Pleistocene ebbed. Then Archaic Plano points, which dispensed with
fluting, targeted smaller species such as we have known since.
Sandia, Clovis, and Folsom were discovered in reverse order.

FOLSOM. A black cowhand, George McJunkin, one spring afternoon 1925 spied white-glistening bones
protruding from the side of Dead Horse Gulch on an intermittent Cimarron tributary 8 mi. west of Folsom,
N.M. c.165 mi. NNW of Blackwater Draw. His relic-collector friend Carl Schwachheim of Raton who, with
Fred Howarth, notified J.D. Figgins, curator of the prestigious Denver Museum of Natural History, who
discerned the bones extinct giant bison and an extinct deer, then a superior type point like nothing surface-
collected embedded adjacent to a rib. He named it Folsom 1926.25
Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History took over a 3-year follow-up excavation
that found another 40 to 50 skeletons of extinct bison, with “16 arrows of distinctive type,” which in the
discussion at the 1929 Geological Society meeting clarified as Folsom “spear points.”26 Well identified,
they were shortly found across the continent. Such had been found earlier at a denuded area, once a
Pleistocene pine forest, 28 mi. north of Ft. Collins, Colo., wind-and-water eroded from the grayish earth
along with a full range of Folsom tools besides points; so this site of a many-tribe rendezvous camp
superseded, named for its owner William Lindenmeier, Jr.
Judge C.C. Coffin and his son A.L., plus Colorado State College geologist Maj. Roy G. Coffin and his
brother with various friends had collected 83 Folsom points there since 1924 without knowing they were
Folsom till Prof. Renaud informed them. The 9 June 1934 Literary Digest reprinted a Smithsonian
announcement that D.I. Bushnell of the U.S. National Museum had discovered this distinctive point in two
collections gathered from various parts of Virginia the past May, provoking a letter flood that moved the
editors to solicit a clarifying statement from Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr., Bureau of Ethnology archaeologist who
had directed the follow-up dig at Folsom. His statement printed in the July 28 issue prompted Maj. Coffin’s
third letter to the U.S. Geological Survey’s John Reeside, Jr., who passed it on to the National Museum
anthropologist Henry Collins, Jr., who passed it to the Bureau of Ethnology, where Roberts replied and was
excavating at the Lindenmeier site Oct. into Nov. 1934, then in annual June-Sept. seasons through 1940, with
a 1935 complementary Denver Museum excavation directed by John Cotter, who had participated in and
reported the initial Blackwater Draw dig.
On both sides of Box Elder Creek Arroyo, excavation grew to more than 19,300 sq. ft. plus 23 test
pits, sometimes to a depth of 17', exposing 1½ x 1/8 mi., exhuming 10,000 to 20,000 bones, mainly antiquus
bison—no mammoths. Unearthed projectile points totaled 645—59 whole and fluted, a few fluted on only
one side, 79 whole or fragmentary unfluted, and 323 preforms (unfinished)—in addition to 20 surface-found
fluted and another 150 surface finds in private collections. Roberts’ initial report was his more important.27
His second showed him realizing Folsom ancestry in the Old World and venturing to link the points’
Solutrean pressure-flaking technique to Solutrean origin. Thinking this reached America as soon or sooner
than Europe, he postulated a Central Asian origin of Solutrean in his conventional bondage to exclusive land-
bridge entry of Paleo-Indians.28 Roberts died Feb. 1966 before compiling his final report, which the
Smithsonian assigned his doctoral student Edwin Wilmsen, who ultimately produced it.29 Picking up on
Roberts’ assumed Solutrean paternity, Wilmsen minutely measured 111 unmodified flakes from Aurignacian
V and Solutrean levels at Laugerie-Haute, confirming negligible differences from Lindenmeier, therefore
essentially identical tool production, yet concluded classical European types in America “best considered
accidents.”30 (Best for Smithsonian-endorsed mythology.)
Roberts and Cotter disregarded fire spots, hearths, and charcoal, whose future value they could not
foresee. Carbon samples from mostly upper levels gave dates inconsistent with Pleistocene fauna and flora.
Wilmsen advocated 9,250 B.C. `400 the soundest as also earliest date, noting early Lindenmeier occupation
overlappng Clovis.31
CLOVIS. Folsom points had turned up all the way to Virginia—also on dumps of Sanders Gravel Pit at
Blackwater Draw, 10 mi. north of Clovis, 7 of Portales, in a onetime marsh. An exposed blue-tinted Folsom
point dictated the spot where Edgar Howard directed digging into blue clay. His second day’s trenching, a
yard down, revealed mammoth bones and a Clovis point 3¼" long beneath a vertebra, fluted less than Folsom
points .78" on one side, 1.18" on the other, concave base. A second gray chalcedony Clovis point appeared in
the top of the speckled sand that underlay the blue clay, beneath a different mammoth, together with flakes,
an ungrooved point, and 2 cylindrical beveled-end bone artifacts. These 2 defined “Clovis,” although still
called Folsom-like just yet.
Miners had gouged 4 “true Folsom” points from an indefinitely later upper stratum reoriented to bison
hunting. A “Yuma” point like those of Clovis Lake bed lay on a dump surface. Bones (all within a 5' radius
of the initial Clovis find-spot) included those of the 2 mammoths, extinct bison, indeterminate deer and
rodent, plus turtle (carapace fragments). Varisized horses appeared only in the deeper, caliche bed.
Numerous blades and butchering/skinning detritus, together with absence of any chippping, attest this
a work station or series of stations adjacent to a waterhole ambush, occupied off and on into the Archaic,
Clovis level earliest.32 Excavation resumed here 1937-39, 51-52, 60, 62-64, & 66 under various auspices.
THREE CLOVIS POINTS, not yet so identified, had been discovered 1932 associated with mammoths on
the NE Colorado plains at Dent, when a railroad foreman, Frank Garner, spotted masses of large bones a
recent flood exposed 500 yards south of the Dent railway station, buried in a South Plate River formation
below its Kerry Terrace, which antedated the Wisconsin maximum. A mammoth mandible carbon-dated
9,250 `500 B.C.33 In a few years Clovis points were identified across the continent and up to Nova Scotia,
then down to Central and South America.

RESUMED GRAVEL QUARRYING at Blackwater Draw uncovered a cache of 17 complete and incomplete
punched blades Feb. 1962, and Archaeologist F.E. Green of Texas Tech discovered mammoth bones eroding
out of gray sand 40' NW of the first site, collecting 9 Clovis artifacts which he dated terminal Pleistocene,
11,050-9,050 B.C., detecting them flaked by indirect percussion to curve in prismatic cross section—like
Clovis points (distinguishing between blades for cutting and points for piercing, whereas Alex Krieger
categorized both knives and points blades). Green found more mammoths in gray sand above gravel bedrock
and more Folsom points with miscellaneous artifacts, but as yet no additional Clovis points, which still
totaled only 2 known from this Blackwater Draw.34
He directed the Portales El Llano Archaeological Society excavation of a 2475-sq.ft. bone bed in gray
sand (covered with white) on the Pleistocene pond’s NW margin, unearthing 4 mammoths and part of a 5th,
all lying on their right sides, heads pointed downstream. A haul of 166 Clovis artifacts included 39 scrapers
and 8 projectile points, the largest of which ran 4¼" long x 1" wide, triple-fluted like Shoop points. James
Warnica, who reported, saw a connection with cultures in Europe or Asia—Asia more in mind, as his
reference only to A.P. Okladnikov’s 1955, 1961 volumes on Siberia and Trans-Baikal betrayed.35
Vance Haynes collected enough charcoal from the bone bed 1963 to yield a date, 9220 `360 B.C.
Clovis artifacts found in situ at 6 High Plains sites, 5 dated, averaged 9,410 `360 B.C., confirmed by
overlying sediments dated later, 8,460 `190, and earlier underlying, 9,650 `400.36 He had pronounced in
Science that no Clovis points could predate 10,050 B.C. (and no humans provably predate Clovis). From the
Aubrey Site, less than 20 mi. north of the Lewisville, north of Dallas, came 11,450 B.C. for Clovis.37 Haynes
claimed Blackwater gray sand and blue clay both predated Clovis (and any other) artifacts, which he asserted
intrusive38 and elaborated this with Jeffrey Sanders, Dennis Stanford, & George Agogino respecting a
mammoth tusk that Green had discovered Nov. 1963 in the north bank of the stream and dated coeval with
Clovis artifacts. Carbonized plant remains Haynes had collected 18 Aug. 1963 from top and bottom of Unit
C in the north bank that dated 9,680 `500 B.C. at base, 9,040 `400 at top, postdating Unit C gray-sand of
Clovis that intruded Unit B pre-Clovis blue clay, whose lumates from decayed plants carbon-dated (bottom
up) 10,380 `110, 10,840 `160, & 9,450 `150 B.C. He took Ptolemaic pains to prove the blue layer, which had
lain atop speckled white sand of the initial dig, earlier than gray sand or Clovis existence (nevertheless were
dug from the once-marsh blue clay). Though along with his conservative colleagues trying to keep Clovis
from exceeding 9550 B.C., he acknowledged peck patterns to reduce the tusk the same technology as Upper
Paleolithic East Europe (avoiding any hint of transatlantic transmission).39

SANDIA. Treasure-hunting Boy Scouts of Albuquerque Troop 13 dug away a great quantity of fill that
blocked Sandia Cave entrance, 1927-28. Caliche concretion discouraged their attempted hole in the floor 7½
yards back, but this break-in allowed entrance to an Albuquerque cave explorer, Kenneth Davis, who Oct.
1935 brought the claw of an extinct giant ground sloth (Nothrotherium) with other Pleistocene faunal material
from the dark inside to evidently Wesley Bliss, a U. New Mexico anthropology graduate assistant; which led
to Dept head Donald Brand’s Nov. 7 appointment of the U. Museum curator Frank Cummings Hibben to
excavate Sandia Cave and Bliss neighboring Davis Cave (named for Kenneth) 50 yards north, which by
March 1936 proved sterile. (Three other limestone caves in the vicinity ran too small for humans.)
Amid “acetylene lamps and flickering torches”40 Hibben directed Sandia Cave excavation Feb.-June
1936, hampered less by darkness than by cement-hard caliche and cement-hard yellow ochre permeated with
calcium carbonate but, more than these, by silicon dust from quartz-based ochre that pervaded the cave. In
June the crew got rained out. Bliss directed his students in resumption at Sandia Cave Oct. 1936-Jan. 1937,
signed a joint report with Hibben 1 Feb. 1937, and that summer decamped to Canada, leaving no forwarding
address41. Proofs, sent to Albuquerque reporting his solo months never reached him. The American
Antiquity editor explained that Bliss’ manuscript lay more than a year in his files before publication42
Appearing in print took both Bliss, then at U. Pennsylvania, and Hibben by surprise. Hibben and Brand
(enraged at a “preempting” subordinate no longer associated with U.N.M.) unsportsmanly denigrated him and
his report, which Bliss circumstantially reaffirmed, focusing on whether rodents disturbed below the
stalagmite (caliche) layer in the cave’s front portion via a natural fissure. They certainly had, Bliss
contended, but in no way impugned Hibben’s meantime further and corrective findings.43
Hibben’s preliminary solo report44 said the tunnel-like cave did not permit abreast diggers (but Bliss
said the diameter averaged 16' and Hibben said 9 4/5'), so the excavation proceeded from both ends of a 127-
yard passage (Bliss’ figure, which Hibben amended to 150+45, working toward the middle, managing 7
meters in front and 5 in back the first season, to disclose a Sandia point of gray chert (which does not occur
in Sandia Mts.) nearly touching one of four 2½"-diam. limestone river pebbles arranged evenly around a
hearth on the native limestone, “practically on the virgin floor,” reported Bliss, during whose watch it
evidently was discovered.46
This first-encountered hearth lay at Meter 13 in Hibben’s grid from the cave front (numbered 7 the
first year of excavation). It measured 17.71" max. diam., nearly a foot deep, full of charcoal lenses with fine
ashes of oak and indeterminable resinous wood. Hibben did not mention in his 1941 final report a supposed
camel mandible found beside or on this hearth. Charcoal flecked the cave throughout. Next to another
fireplace at Meter 15 Hibben found a second Sandia point, sidenotched at base “after the Solutrean
manner.”47 (He unconventionally but correctly called these javelin points.)
With his volunteers he resumed 1938 & 39, then an American Philosophical Society grant 1940
enabled a motorized blower, which greatly ameliorated, as pickaxes and sledgehammers broke caliche crust,
Folsom-layer breccia, and yellow ochre layer, wheelbarrowed out. Many bone and artifact discoveries took
place in screening loads at cave mouth by daylight; which risked losing track of their exact meter
provenience. Looser (less consolidated) soil of the Sandia layer made meter locations of Sandia finds surer.
Residents of that layer were the cave’s first, on bedrock and basal clay 0-2' thick.

LARGEST OF MANY CAVES in Sandia Mts. north slope, Sandia opens 63+ yards above Las Huertas
Canyon floor on the precipitous east side, reachable via a ladder from a ledge 11' under the cave mouth, 20
mi. NE of Albuquerque (30 by road) c.3 SE of Placitas Village. Human camping, intermittent at all stages,
concentrated toward the front (facing west), Sandia people using only the first 15+ yards, but succeeding
Folsom 109+. The top layer consisted of inblown dust, bat guano, pack-rat dung, a deer antler, and Pueblo
Indian debris. Below that ran a caliche crust 10.8" thick, sealing a nearly 20" Folsom layer littered with stone
and bone fragments, also 2 complete classical Folsom points and 3 broken, plus 3 unfluted like those at
Blackwater Draw called Yuma, and an apparent spatula carved from ivory, together with gravers, scrapers,
knives, etc. Subsequent to Hibben’s final report, the 3 “Yuma” points proved respectively fluted Clovis,
Plainview, and Agate Basin,48 attesting a very long period for the Folsom stratum.
Beneath this ran the finely laminated sterile yellow ochre layer usually 9" thick but varying 2" to 2'.
Unconformably below that ran the c.13½" Sandia stratum. Krieger, who called Sandia Cave “an enigma
since the first reports,” mistakenly questioned a separate Sandia stratum and failure of Hibben to distinguish
strata of artifact recovery.49 Hibben clearly delineated the yellow-ochre layer sealing Sandia from Folsom,
and the lowest stratum unmistakably the one yielding 19 whole or broken Sandia points, of which the earlier
(Type 1)—larger and less finely wrought than long-later Folsom—exhibited typical Solutrean shouldered
asymmetry and pointing of both ends (rather than Clovis concave base), only one point fluted and basally
thinned.
Type 2 points recovered from a higher (later) Sandia level ran very elongated willow-leaf with parallel
sides but giveaway side-notch, some base thinning, and diamond cross section, matching Solutrean points à
cran (notched). It was this type found fluted elsewhere. A 2.4" fluted white specimen of Type 2 came to
light e.g. at the central-New Mexico Lucy Site, south of Lucy, N.M. in the Estancia Valley, where Hibben
excavated summer 1954. A dual Sandia period blurred when some of the points from Sandia Cave proved
hard to classify as one or the other. Two Sandias had been chipped from andesite, others from various flints,
chalcedonies, and cherts including a brown variety unlocatable in the immediate region, others identified
from the Texas Panhandle, obsidian from Jemez Mts. 45 mi. north of Albuquerque, and (usually) translucent
multicolored chalcedony from the Pedernal Mt. vicinity 65 mi. SE of Albuquerque. Folsom-stratum
specimens especially, used chert concretions jutting from the cave wall.
Three snub-nosed scrapers of Pedernal chalcedony exactly parallel such from very early levels of
Tierra del Fuego caves (as well as from the European and Chinese Neolithic). Junius Bird who with his wife
Margaret excavated two caves in the Rio Chico Valley south of the Argentine border, so confirmed to Hibben,
identifying 3 ground, grooved 2-oz. limestone balls of Sandia Cave as bolas. In Rio Chico caves bolas
appeared above the earliest level, when residents used large stemless triangular points before arrowhead
stage.50 Bolas also appeared at mastodon-butchering Monte Verde (lake country, east of Puerto Montt, South
Chile) and Archaic Poverty Point, Louisiana, etc., for entwining bird flocks in flight.
Two bones in Sandia Cave had been worked to resemble stone Sandia points, the better preserved one
a probable camel long bone. Hibben further found an ivory projectile shaft—all 3 anticipations of
Blackwater Draw bonework. Sandia-level bones included mammoth, mastodon (a rare instance of both
elephant genera in the same locale), excelsius horse, antiquus bison, and Camelops camel. The Folsom-layer
horse was a different species, near occidentalis, the bison a species slightly smaller that that found with
Folsom points at Folsom, mammoth again (surely misdiagnosed, recurring in no other Folsom context),
camel again, ground sloth, and wolf plus other carnivores unidentifiable. The caliche layer above this fielded
bones of wood rat, bat, mountain sheep, elk, mule deer, porcupine, bear, and again sloth—surprising in the
post-elephant/horse/camel era. Charles Hunt decided sloth bones belonged in the stalagmite layer below,
whence men or rodents transferred up.51 Poor preservation of bone fragments led Dominique Stevens &
George Agogino of Eastern New Mexico U. to question Hibben’s diagnosis of other genera and species,
particularly “mammoth” in the Folsom layer.52 The hunting-station cave contained no burials in any stratum.

CHEMIST WILLARD LIBBY had not yet discovered carbon dating at the time of this excavation, but
Hibben recognized a succession of wet/dry/wet/dry/wet eras. Kirk Bryan of Harvard U. correlated the yellow
ochre layer with the pluvial Wisconsin maximum that rendered the cave untenable, thus the Sandia stratum
early or pre-Wisconsin (earlier than 23,000 B.C.), with Folsom following in late Pleistocene.53 Return of
heavy rains flooded Folsom people out and created the caliche layer over their living-floor. Hugo Gross of
Bamberg, Germany approved Bryan’s geology, by which the yellow ochre layer corresponded to the
European Höhlenlehm (cave loam) that accumulated up to nearly 22 yards thick, intercalated between frost-
formed lower breccia containing Mousterian artifacts and Upper Paleolithic breccia, in turn corresponding to
the Göttweig loam, both formed during the long Würm I/II temperate interstadial dated c.40,050-26,050 B.C.
The 16,000-year American equivalent separated Early Wisconsin from Main Wisconsin contemporary with
the European Altwürm and Hauptwürm stadials.54 Solutrean followed after 23,050 B.C.
Hibben 1948 transmitted 2 hearth-charcoal specimens Bryan had collected (the only saved) to Libby
at U. Chicago, who allegedly read respective dates 15,050+ and 18,050+ B.C., knowing the samples
inadequate for solid-carbon measurement of the time. Bryan, though having correlated a much higher date
range geologically, so feared carbon-dating error, according to Hibben, that he emphatically discouraged
publication. When Frederick Johnson (Peabody Foundation, Andover, Mass.) found no record of such dating
at Chicago or other lab,55 Hibben replied he had no idea where or how Bryan (who died 22 Aug. 1950) had
so dated.56 Hibben further said the dates he had given in his lecture Early Man in North America 17 July
1951 at Erlangen U.—17,000 B.C. for the Sandia layer and 9,000 B.C. for the Folsom—derived from Bryan’s
geological analysis.57 Bryan, however, had dated the Sandia level just before and the Folsom just after
23,050 B.C., as Gross, who had attended the Erlangen lecture, reminded Hibben.58
Meanwhile, 1952, H.R. Crane at U. Michigan Randall Lab carbon-dated 2 ivory samples Hibben
produced from 2 different tusks out of the Sandia level, both exceeding 20,000 years,59 even though his tests
registered 35,000 or more. In 1954 Hibben supplied him a 3rd ivory sample. Bowing to convention, Crane
concluded for all 3 c.9,050 B.C., safely 500 years within Haynes’ boundary, though admitting he believed
18,050 B.C., Hibben at least 5,000 years earlier.60 Caliche above the hard gray Sandia context at Lucy dated
12,350 `650 B.C.61 Both 1 & 2 Type Sandia points, fluted and unfluted, occurred at Lucy together with bone
artifacts like those Hibben found in Sandia Cave. Roosa thought both Sandia types and the lone Clovis at
Lucy were used in killing and cutting a single Proboscidean, two Type 1 Sandia “points” hafted as knives.62

WHEREAS FOLSOM POINTS once identifiable, “turned up over an alarmingly wide area” in existent
collections and in plowing, said Hibben, he could count only 38 “reasonably certain” Sandia points by the
end of 1945—from SE New Mexico and adjacent West Texas counties including Abilene region; Texas
Panhandle, central Oklahoma, West & South Missouri, South Iowa, and extreme East Colorado, after having
thought in 1941 that Type 1 occurred sporadically throughout the Mississippi Valley and to the eastern
seaboard, Type 2 restricted to SE New Mexico and adjacent portions of Texas.63 Marie Wormington noted
specimens she regarded genuine and would add to Hibben’s 38—3 collected in eastern Alberta by Russell
Johnston, a specimen Harold Klein reported 1953 from NE Alabama, and a surface find Keith Dixon reported
1953 from Long Valley, Mono County, Calif. near the shore of an ancient lake.64. I would add 3 Type 1 that
N.Y. State Archaeologist William Ritchie found at the Reagan Site, Vermont in association with fluted blades,
and 4 Roosa found 1960 at Gowanla Creek, NW New York with ailerons like those from Parpallo Cave, SE
Spain,65 which might bear out Hibben’s 1941 estimate of Type 1 spread after all.
Dr. L.S. Cressman found a rather large Type 1 in Oregon “under very suggestive circumstances,”
whatever Hibben meant by that as he threw it out and others doubtless authentic but of uncertain origin.
Fourteen of his certain specimens had been found with bones of extinct animals, others at considerable depths
plus additional indications of great a0ntiquity. He called the known distribution scanty, spotty,
unconcentrated66—as we would expect of a less numerous pre-Clovis culture.

FIVE THOUSAND YEARS separated Solutrean from Clovis, Straus insisted as an argument rendering a
Solutrean connection untenable, reacting to a casual remark of Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian that
Solutrean and Clovis were not so far apart. Frédéric Sellet computed 6,000-7,000 apart from Straus’ 1990
carbon dates.67 Whatever the interval, Bruce Bradley of Cortez, Colo. found a perfect match of a Laugerie-
Haute Solutrean flake with a Clovis flake from Blackwater Draw.68
Stanford who, as late as the Society for Archaeological Sciences symposium April 1981 at San Diego,
yeomanly deconstructed peopling of America before 10,050 B.C.,69 nevertheless found Clovis points
clustered in the U.S. Southeast while finding none on either side of the Bering Strait. At the Santa Fe
anthropological conference Clovis and Beyond Oct. 1999 he announced a probable east coast origin of both
Clovis and Solutrean points transatlantic. He noted Clovis and Solutrean projectile points wider, flatter,
thinner than Asian, therefore exhibiting a stronger Atlantic than Pacific connection of the same 20,000 year
range (practically doubling his 1981/83 estimate). “Not every thing in Solutrean is found in Clovis, but
everything in Clovis is found in Solutrean,”70—strangely ignoring Sandia points. “We’ve never found Clovis
points in Siberia,” while those in Alaska seem to have come north from the U.S. below Canada. With the
technology already existing in Europe, it is easier to believe it brought over than developed independently,
considering also “There was no antecedent, boom, it appears, fully developed….a quantum jump,”71 his prior
specification East Europe unexplained.
Jack Hoffman, U. Kansas, saw Clovis weapons too good, their wielders too numerous too quickly and
widely—over much of the hemisphere—to have been pioneers, rather surely learned from people already
here.72 Because Clovis points show aesthetic care beyond utility, Fiedel inferred their culture “perhaps
rather flamboyant.”73

DID THE VAST FAST SPREAD of Clovis points imply as Mason said, “most of the continent…devoid of
other human beings”?74
Let us consider three candidates for transatlantic settlement before this Clovis explosion
which, if unrelated to Solutrean, at least show a possibility of European colonizing that early or much
earlier.

Pedra Furada (Perforated Rock)

THE MAYOR of remote, drought-stricken São Raimundo Nonato in SE Piauí State, NE Brazil on a rare visit
to São Paulo 1963 apprized the Paulista Museum staff of pre-Portuguese cliff paintings near his town. The
assigned archaeologist, Niède Guidon, returned from Paris and made an initial survey by mule 1970, to
behold 275 rockshelters in towering cliffs for 120 mi. along Rio Piauí, 186 bearing murals in red, yellow,
black, gray, & white (often on ceilings as well as walls, and more art engraved or pecked than painted). She
tabulated 15,000 motifs—animals (including armadillos, caybara (world’s largest rodent), ostrich-like rheas,
et al.), trees, people, crabs, and abstract symbols, not till 1973 discovering her Site 1: Toca do Boquierão do
Sítio da Pedra Furada, a nearly 77-yard sandstone shelter, 10-40' deep at canyon mouth 20.7 yards above the
plain in 300' south cliffs of the Serra Talhada.
With an interdisciplinary team she commenced excavating 1978. All layers had hearths, usually
circled with cliff-chunks. Carbon dates of charcoal ran 3,000 B.C. to 30,210 `1000 B.C. by Level XIV Oct.
1986, in consistent sequence. Projectile points turned up plentifully from 31,000 B.C., scrapers and other
flaked tools by c.23,000, earliest murals 30,000-25,000 B.C. Five deeper levels XV-XIX yielded a large,
varied assortment of primitive tools flaked from small quartz and quartzite pebbles in association with
hearths. By July 1991 came a bedrock date 48,500 B.C. (AMS redating of samples yielded yet higher dates.)
Anthropologists scarcely heeded this site until 1986 when prestigious Nature published Guidon’s
32,000 stage, the earliest they have since begrudged, notwithstanding human occupation layers with hearths
deeper and deepr.
Today desert, this imposing Périgord-type urban-dense-rockshelter region bordered forested
mountains and grassy prairie in the Pleistocene. Its murals appeared to follow styles from Aurignacian to
Spanish-Levantine Mesolithic in tandem with France and Spain. Depopulating desiccation in the Neolithic
left no sign of residents’ fate.
 Fiedel found absence of Pleistocene faunal remains disquieting, as if unaware that mammoths,
mastodons, bison, and horses never reached Pleistocene Brazil. He also adduced a 4' gap of nonhabitation
15,000-6400 B.C. unreflected in the natural stratigraphy; although others may see nothing amiss in a natural
accumulation of a yard and a foot during an 8600-year vacancy. David Meltzer, James Adovasio, & Tom
Dillehay, among hasty visitors to the awesome cliffs Dec. 1994, reacted as had anthropologists to their own
pre-Clovis sites. They rejected a Pleistocene age in defiance of overwhelming evidence and announced
Clovis primacy of American settlement unshaken! (which they themselves had shaken at Monte Verde and
Meadowcroft). It is hard to miss green grapes at an outdistancing competitor, especially since they raised
none of their objections at the site, subject to immediate test.
They misstated facts, e.g. placed Pedra Furada on the valley floor instead of 65+' above it, suggested
natural fires of caetinga (happening to occur only in hearths), unaware that this vegetation which grows
nowhere but Piauí does not burn, etc. Exasperated Guidon with 4 of her major specialists exposed false
allegations one by one. In defiance of defamers she had managed to get access roads built and to
memorialize the entire rockshelter length as a national park.75

Hueyatlaco

JUNE 1933 A PUEBLA PALEONTOLOGIST Juan Armenta Camacho discovered a huge mammoth leg bone
with embedded flint spearpoint eroding from a stream bank in Aleseca Arroyo of high mountain Valsequillo
Valley 2 mi. south of Puebla, Mexico. In the next 30 years he located more than 100 partial skeletons of
mastodons and mammoths alone, together with extinct camel, horse, antelope, et al., many of the bones
sharpened as tools, broken for marrow, or engraved. One mastodon bone was engraved Magdalenian style
with large feline leaping upon or crisscrossed over a mastodon.76
Despite government confiscation of his fossil collection, Armenta with Anthropologist Cynthia Irwin-
Williams, discovered 4 sites in this region that disclosed fossil bones and stone artifacts, leading to 1964 &
66 excavation of Hueyatlaco, highest, youngest, and thickest-overlain (nearly 6 yards deep) with sediment
cover and volcanic ash and pumice layers on a gravel formation of Tetela Peninsula, now submerged in a
reservoir. Geochemist Barney Szabo of the U.S. Geological Survey dated shells and bones associated with
stone artifacts 19,850 `850 B.C. by Carbon14, and 18,050 `1500 to 20,050 `2000 B.C. by uranium-thorium
series, but a butchered camel-pelvis fragment uranium-dated 178,050 & 243,050 `40,000 B.C., and a tooth
from a butchered mastodon at neighboring El Horno 152,050 B.C. by Carbon14, 278,050 by uranium series.
Harold Malde of the U.S. Geological Survey, Roald Fryxell, & Virginia Steen-McIntyre returned for further
excavation 1973, which verified artifacts in beds passing beneath bluff sediments. Geochemist Chuck Naeser
of the U.S. Geological Survey dated newly recovered ash and mud-pumice by microscopic fission-tracking
368,050 `200,000 (Hueyatlaco ash) and 598,050 `340,000 B.C. (Tetela mud-pumice).77
Michael Waters of Tucson voiced the typical dismissal of Hueyatlaco: conflicting and confusing
fission-track and uranium-thorium dates and, though artifacts lay in association with extinct fauna, we do not
know when they became extinct in Mexico.78 Such uncertainties have excused rejection.

Meadowcroft

MERCYHURST COLLEGE PROF. James Adovasio and team excavated a pre-Clovis unfluted point from
the 76½-yard-thick lower stratum of 3-strata IIa (earliest with evidence of human habitation, at Meadowcroft
Rockshelter, whose associated prismatic blade technology, like related Cross Creek sites’, resembles that of
Upper Paleolithic West Europe and Clovis.79 Nearly 260' high over a 77¾ sq.-yard area, the
rockshelter faces south with west-wind ventilation in a cliff rising another 62' 7.45 mi. east of the Ohio River
2½ mi. NW of Avella, Pa. 29.2 crowfly mi. SW of Pittsburgh, on the north bank of Cross Creek (which flows
7½ mi. west into the Ohio); 1/3 excavated through the middle between an old and recent large roof fall,
dividing into 11 well-defined natural strata, all but the lowest (#I) containing evidence of intermittent human
occupation with 104 charcoal samples yielding 52 dates, all but 4 internally consistent in absolute
stratigraphic sequence from the 33rd millennium B.C. (31st, calibrated calendar) to 1265 `80 A.D., processed
by 4 labs. Fire pits and fire floors (large burnt areas), ash and charcoal lenses, refuge storage pits, and
concentrations of stone and bone manufacturing (points unfluted), knives, scrapers, bones from meals, and
edible-plant remains, hackberry seeds above all, imply a hunting/collecting/food-processing station.80
Michael Collins discerned 2 overshot flake scars on one face of a Lower IIa blade (which he
ultraconservatively dated between 10,850 `800 & 10,350 `700 B.C.). He observed the blade technology of
Meadowcroft and related sites generally smaller but similar to Clovis (why not compare to Sandia?) and
reiterated Upper Paleolithic West European affinity.81 Michael Waters, dubious of dates crossing the
Pleistocene/Holocene boundary, thought protracted lower IIa should have shown more stratigraphic breaks.82

GEOCHRONOLOGIST HAYNES visited the site for 2 hours 1976 and fantasized possible pluvial sediment
rendering it uninhabitable till after stream subsidence 11,050-10,050 B.C. (slightly bending his upper
boundary for humans in America). He failed to note that the shelter stood 16½ yards higher than Cross Creek
51.57 mi. south of the Wisconsin maximal glacial southern reach, not an open site subject to periodic
sedimentation but closed with continuous, and abundant signs of occupation in the “uninhabitable” period.
During human occupation Cross Creek flowed probably 5½ to 11 yards higher than today, thus closer and
easier of access.83 To discredit a Pleistocene age for lower IIa, Haynes further imagined coal and
groundwater contamination of carbon samples that raised dates too high. But no coal seam runs in or near the
site—nearest outcrop 5 m. north.84. Coal or groundwater contamination would have thrown the series of
carbon dates out of order. Haynes accepted dates above the middle third of IIa but, on no evidence of
anomaly, charged only those below conflicted with the other data; e.g. flora and fauna of a Holocene
deciduous forest. What they conflicted with was his 1969 dogma that middle-Paleo-Indian evidence failed to
meet his stringent criteria, early Paleo-Indian hypothetical.85 He had been more tolerant 1964, admitting
“good indications” of cultures in the New World earlier than 10,050 B.C., his maximum possible age for
Llano (= Clovis) culture, which he said had no undisputable progenitor.86
Dismissing Adovasio’s 1978 14,050-11,050 B.C. “prefluted point populations,” he pronounced the
basal archaeology of Meadowcroft probably no older than Clovis if that old.87 Yet Haynes must have been
the unnamed critic who confided to Adovasio Sept. 1987 that he had not meant to impugn IIa carbon dates,
only suggest they be examined.88 Dillehay’s Jan. 1997 demonstration of the Monte Verde campsite complete
with bolas and child’s footprint appears at last to have converted Haynes among those present to human
habitation of the New World before Clovis points.

THE SMITHSONIAN’S 17,650 `2400 B.C. carbon date of carbonized cut-barkbasketry in IIa lower stratum
looked too conservative via a different process at a different lab, Dicarb Radioisotope (Gainesville, Fla.), on
charcoal samples from immediately below the basket but above charcoal without cultural associations:
19,430 `800 and 19,120 `475 B.C. (Either date fell in the Solutrean/Protomagdalenian era.) Irene Stehli of
Dicarb reported absolutely no contamination of any sort.89 After 20 years’ carbon-date testing and
retesting Adovasio could reiterate 1993: “absolutely no evidence whatsoever for particulate or
nonparticulate contamination.”90 Another geologist, Jim Mead of North Ariz. U., acknowledged the
carbon dates did indicate occupation at Wisconsin glacial height but repeated the discrepancy of recovered
fauna and flora with the Wisconsin period.91 Fiedel, uncritically honoring Haynes and Mead’s strictures,
expressed surprise at a deciduous forest 50 mi. from the Laurentide ice sheet.92
“Yes Virginia, It Really Is That Old: A Reply to Haynes and Mead” blistered Haynes’ “learned,
pedantic, and innocent” critique, his anachronistic, futile “Clovis primacy syndrome,” his supposing coal
where none existed, naïve notice of local sedimentation and geology, and failing to see exact match of lower
IIa flora and fauna with local Wisconsin-age flora and fauna, when climate approximated the present.93
Stratum IIa in 16,940 years `2400 accumulated 76 yards, divided from earlier Stratum I by a sterile
layer and carbon lenses, the latter 29th & 20th millennia B.C. A series of 7 lower-IIa carbon dates range
17,650 `2400 B.C. - 11,290 `1010 B.C., thus Pleistocene. A roof spall sealed it from middle IIa that spanned
11,000-9,000 B.C. (10,850 `870 - 9350 `700, thus terminal Pleistocene. Another roof spall sealed middle
from upper, which ended 6060 `110, wholly Holocene.94
Just when the Meadowcroft controversy seemed forever settled, Kenneth Tankersley & Cheryl Ann
Munson teamed up to impugn IIa age again, asserting “vitrinized wood” = coal, present and potentially
contaminative, raising carbon dates. Quaternary wood which natural wildfires turned charcoal, they
elaborated, is difficult to distinguish from coal “in some instances.”95 To which Adovasio, Donahue, &
Stuckenrath worldwearily replied: No vitrain had ever been observed “anywhere near the site”; all of 2
recorded fragments of vitrinized wood lacked any evidence of woody-cellular structure; and no one, they
repeated, conjectured contamination for any of the sequence except IIa, whose aberrance would be unlikely.96

THE PIAUÍ ROCKSHELTERS do not of course prove a Solutrean connection but do prove probable
transatlantic transit more than early enough—perhaps two-way communication over a very long period to
have so closely duplicated Perigordian stages of lithics, hearths, and murals. Hueyatlaco could have derived
ultimately from Beringia or across either ocean, but its Magdalenian-style engraving favors Atlantic also, and
early enough for Solutrean even if only carbon dates are counted. Meadowcroft, too, looks likelier Atlantic
than Pacific, not only early enough for Solutrean but with a tantalizing possibility it was. Fifty miles from
the glacial advance would not have bothered Solutreans, a probable place to ensconce until they could follow
caribou with the glacier’s slow retreat, ultimately to Hudson Bay. The quadruple argument against a
Solutrean connection, that it was too early for American habitation, too far, too cold, and pre-seafaring, falls.

Genetic touch

A FURTHER ASSUMPTION has been falling with it, viz. that Asian Paleo-Indians were ancestors of all
modern Indians. That many Indian groups and individuals already exemplified hybridizing when 16th-19th-
century Caucasians encountered them should make us less doctrinaire. Straus, reminded that certain Paleo-
Indian skulls look European or Indonesian instead of Mongoloid, carelessly contended that that long ago
everybody looked more or less European—showing that scientists outside their specialization can sound like
ordinary ignorant laymen..
Buhl Woman of Idaho, 8750 B.C., clearly resembles modern Indians—round head, wide face, while a
younger Nebraska and pair of Minnesota skulls ranging 6850 & 5950 B.C. look either European or South
Asian. Spirit Cave Man, 7450 B.C., discovered in the western Nevada desert near Fallon 1940 and retrieved
from a museum on the outskirts of Carson City by Douglas Owsley of the American Museum of Natural
History 1944, looks Mediterranean. Wizards Beach Man of Nevada, 7250 B.C., seems an
India/Polynesian/Norse cross. Younger Kennewick Man, 6050 B.C., whom two college students watching a
hydroplane race 28 July 1996 found eroding out of a bank on the Columbia River in Washington State, was
taken for a 19th-century trapper until a CAT scan revealed a Paleo-Indian spear point in his hip—probable
cause of death and apparent sign of Mongoloid-invader exterminators. He looked like an Englishman to
some or an Ainu/Polynesian cross to others. His dentition was Sudnadont, not Sinodont.
When the dental expert Christy Turner II said 1981 that all Paleo-Indians known to him exhibited
North Asian Sinodonty, he did not know of not-yet-discovered Kennewick Man.. Sinodonty he coined 1979,
meaning shoveled or double-shoveled incisors, single-root upper first molars, 3-root lower first molars, etc.,
which to him confirmed Siberian-origin/Bering land-bridge theory, contrasted with Sudnadonty of Archaic
Caucasoid SE Asian and European Atlantic-coast to Lake Baikal west-coast (Carabelli’s cusp [ridge on mesial
lingual surface of upper permanent first molars], Y-grooved lower 2nd molars, etc.).97 Everybody did not look
European in the Late Pleistocene, but earliest Paleo-Americans evidently did. Their replacement by
Mongoloid Paleo-Indians of Asia appears genocidal, unless epidemics co-accomplished the same result, as
bubonic plague carried from Norway and Iceland appears ultimately to have wiped out long-later Vikings
who extensively settled Newfoundland, Ontario, Manitoba, New England, Ohio Valley, Michigan, Minnesota,
Iowa, and the Dakotas.
South American anthropologists have been as surprised as North American to find their Pleistocene
skeletons also looking other than Siberian, Mongolian, or North Chinese. Mitochondrial DNA studies
confirm South China or Indonesia ancestry of much of the present aboriginal population in South America.
The typical surprised reaction of anthropologists to Pleistocene Brazilian skulls is that they resemble no
current race. Skeletons of mastodon-hunters in Peru look neanderthaloid, totally unlike native Peruvians
today.98

Language coda

THE CLINCHING EVIDENCE of a possible Solutrean connection transatlantic is pre-Indo-European

Pleistocene speech persisting in the earliest dialects (th, n, & y) of Algonquin Cree, cognate with West-
European Euskera before its Indo-Europeanization as modern Basque. Before dispersing across Manitoba
and Saskatchewan to Alberta, Cree centered on Hudson Bay and its southern extension James Bay. Original
speakers in America would not initially have colonized this arctic region during the severe glacier, but
campsites on rivers in, say Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, even Mexico.
Paula Baker Sten of Atlantic Mine, Mich. has been recovering this primeval lingual connection and
should be the one to expound it.
1Ralph Solecki, “The Old World Paleolithic,” The Old World: Early Man to the Development of Agriculture, ed. Robert Stigler et al.
(St. Martin”s 1974), 66
2cf. Olga Soffer, “Upper Paleolithic Adaptations in Central & Eastern Europe & Man-Mammoth Interactions,” chap. 4 in From
Kostenki to Clovis, ed. Soffer & Nikolai Dmitrievich Praslov (July 1989 symposium at Leningrad with subsequent revisions) (Plenum
Press 1993), 45; & Paul Dolukhanov, “The Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary: Environmental Processes & Social Adaptations,” chap. 14
in ibid., 195
3Michael Jochim, “Late Pleistocene Refugia in Europe,” chap. 20, The Pleistocene Old World: Regional Perspectives, ed. Soffer
(Plenum 1987), 321-22; Soffer & Praslov, “Fluted Points & Female Figurines—Understanding Late Paleolithic People of the New &
Old Worlds,” chap. 1, From Kostenki to Clovis, 4; & L.G. Straus, “Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality,”
American Antiquity LXV/2 (April 2000), 220-21
4Quoted in Sharon Begley & Andrew Murr, “The First Americans,” Newsweek (26 April 1999), 57; & cf. Karen Wright, “First
Americans,” Discover XX/2 (Feb. 1999), 52-63; Sasha Nemecek, “Who Were the First Americans?” Scientific American
CCLXXXIII/3 (Sept. 2000), 83; Kenneth B. Tinkersley, “Who Were th0e First Americans?” Archaeology LIII/5 (Sept./Oct. 2000), 72-
75; Frédéric Sellet, “The French Connection: Investigating a Possible Clovis-Solutrean Link,” Current Research in the Pleistocene
(Center for the Study of Early Man, U. Me.) XV/x 1998), 67-68; Mark K. Stengel, “The Diffusionists Have Landed,” Atlantic Monthly
CCLXCV/1 (Jan. 2000), 35-48; Robson Bonnichsen & Alan L. Schneider, “Battle of the Bones,” The Sciences XL/4 (July-Aug. 2000),
40-46; Constance Holden, “Were Spaniards Among the First Americans?” Science CCXXCVI/5444 (19 Nov. 1999), 1467-68; Douglas
Preston, “The Lost Man,” New Yorker (16 June 1977), 76; Jerome Burne, “Perspectives: Goodbye Columbus, Hello Solutreans, ”
Financial Times (London) (2 Sept. 2000), 3; Anon., “Who Was Kennewick Man?” Wilson Quarterly XXIV/4 (Autumn 2000, 112-13;
Anon., “Did First Humans in America Come from East Europe?” Seattle Times (21 March 1992), A6 & reprinted AIAR Institute
Newsletter VIII/3-4

(March-April 1992), 2; & Michael Parfit, “Hunt for the First Americans,” National Geographic (Dec. 2000), 40-67].
5Donald Cyr, “A Short Summary of the Vailian Canopy Theory,” Midwestern Epigraphic Journal IX/1 (1995), 23-25, “Hidden Halos
of Stonehenge” & “The Hidden Halo Hypothesis,” Stonehenge Scrolls (Stonehenge Viewpoint 1987), 67-102, & “The Crystal Veil:
Avant-Garde Archaeology,” Stonehenge Viewpoint 1995), 160 ff, combining articles serialized 1986-87
6 “Solutrean Settlement of North America?” op. cit., 219-26
7“The North Atlantic & Early Man in the New World,” Michigan Archaeologist VI/2 (1960), 19-39; “The Upper Paleolithic & the
New World,” Current Anthropology IV/1 (Feb. 1963), 42, 53, 61, 86; & Reply to Mason, “The Paleo-Indian Tradition in Eastern North
America,” ibid. III/3 (June 1962), 253; Félix Mascaraux, “Les Silex de Montaut (Landes).” Revue Anthropologie XXII (1912), 156-64,
& Station Humaine et Gisement de Silex Taillés à Montaut (Landes) (Dax: H. Labeque 1890)
8“A Fluted Point from the Old World,” Am. Antiquity XXVIII/3 (Jan. 1963), 397-99
9“Dating the Peopling of America,” Early Man in the New World, ed. Richard Shutler, Jr. (Beverley Hills/New Delhi/London: Sage
Pubs. 1983), 123
10Guidon & B. Arnaud, “The Chronology of the New World: Two Faces of One Reality,” World Archaeology XXIII/2 (Oct. 1991), 168
11Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge U. 1987), 80
12Late-Pleistocene Environments of North Pacific America: An Elaboration of Late-Glacial & Post-Glacial Climatic, Physiographic,
& Biotic Changes (Am. Geographical Society Special Pubs. 35, 1960), 209-10 & passim
13“The Glacial History of Western Washington & Oregon,” in The Quaternary of the U.S., ed. H.E. Wright & D.G. Frey (Princeton U.
1965), 641-53].
14“The Feasibility of the NW Coast as a Migration Route for Early Man,” paper presented at 13th Pacific Science Congress,
Vancouver 1975, pub. in Early Man in America from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, ed. Alan Lyle Bryan (Edmonton: Archaeol.
Resources International 1978), & “Routes: Alternative Migration Corridors for Early Man in North America,” Am. Antiquity XLIV/1
(Jan. 1979), 55-69].
15“Linguistic Evidence in Support of the Coastal Route of Earliest Entry into the New World,” Man XXIII/1 (March 1988), 77-100,
particularly 80, 91-93
16Robert Bednarik, “On the Pleistocene Settlement of South America,” Antiquity LXIII/238 (March 1989), 101, 109-110
17Gruhn, 90
18Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XI
19“Evidences of Early Occupation in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, and Other Sites in the Sandia-Manzano Region,” Smithsonian
Miscellaneous Collections XCIX no. 23 (15 Oct. 1941), 40
20Proceedings Am. Philos. Society XCVI/4, 474
21Am. Antiquity XIX/3 (Jan. 1954), 271-72
22”The Upper Paleolithic & the New World,” 41-43 & pl 3, 49, 51 pl 5, & 65
23“The Paleo-Indian Tradition in Eastern North America,” Current Anthropology III/3 (June 1962), 246
24“Early Man in the New World 1970-1980,” concluding chap. 14, Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 195
25“The Antiquity of Man in America,” Natural History XXVII/3 (1927), 232-34
26“Folsom Culture & its Age,” in “Proceedings of the New York Meeting,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America XL (1929),
128
27A Folsom Complex: Preliminary Report on Investigations at the Lindenmeier Site in Northern Colorado, Smithsonian Miscellaneous
Collections XCIV no. 4 (20 June 1935), 1-3
28Additional Information on the Folsom Complex, Smithsonian Misc. Colls. XCV no. 10 (1936), 1-38; see also N.C. Nelson’s review,
“Notes on Cultural Relations between Asia & America,” Am. Antiquity II/4 (April 1937), 267
29Wilmsen & Roberts, Lindenmeier, 1934-1974: Concluding Report on Investigations, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology no.
24 (1984)
30Ibid. 179-80
31p. 175
32John Lambert Cotter, “The Occurrence of Flints & Extinct Animals in Pluvial Deposits Near Clovis, New Mexico. Part IV,—Report
on Excavation at the Gravel Pit, 1936,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 1937, 1-15; Edwin Wilmsen,
Lithic Analysis & Cultural Inference: A Paleo-Indian Case (U. Ariz. 1970), 22, 78-79; & James Hester, Ernest Lundelius, Jr., & Roald
Fryxell, Blackwater Locality No. 1; A Stratified Early Man Site in Eastern New Mexico, Ranchos de Taos, Ft. Burgwin Research
Center #8 (SMU 1972)
33 Figgins, “A Further Contribution to the Antiquity of Man in America,” Proceedings of the Colorado Museum of Natural History XII
(1933), 4-8; C. Vance Haynes, Jr , “Fluted Projectile Points: Their Age & Dispersion,” Science CXLV/3639 (25 Sept. 1964), 1408
34Green, “The Clovis Blades: An Important Addition to the Llano Complex,” Am. Antiquity XXIX/2 (Oct. 1963), 145, 149-50, 152,
154, 157
35Warnica, “New Discoveries at the Clovis Site,” Am. Antiquity XXXI/3 (Jan. 1966), 345-57
36“Fluted Projectile Points,” 1408-13
37Fiedel, “The Peopling of the New World: Present Evidence, New Theories, & Future Directions,” Journal of Archaeological
Research VIII/1 (March 2000), 53
38“Fluted Projectile Points,” 1008
39“A Mammoth Ivory Semifabricate from Blackwater Locality No. 1, New Mexico,” Am. Antiquity LC/1 (Jan. 1990), 112-16; Green,
“Comments on the Report of Worked Mammoth Tusk from the Clovis Site,” ibid. LVII/2 (April 1997), 331-37; & Haynes, Sanders, &
Agogino, “Reply to F.E. Green’s Comments on the Clovis Site,” ibid. 338-44
40“Sandia Man,” Scientific American CLXIII/1 (July 1940), 15
41Douglas Byers, “Concerning Sandia Cave,” Am. Antiquity VII/4 (April 1942), 408-09
42as “A Chronological Problem Presented by Sandia Cave, New Mexico,” Am. Antiquity V/3 (Jan. 1940), 200-01, including inserted
page of photos, front & back
43Donald Brand, “Regarding Sandia Cave,” ibid. V/4 (Oct. 1940), 339; Hibben, “Sandia Cave,” ibid. VI/3 (Jan. 1941), 266; Bliss,
“Sandia Cave,” ibid. VI/1 (July 1940), 77-78
44“Association of Man with Pleistocene Mammals in the Sandia Mts., N.M.,” Am. Antiquity II/4 (April 1937), 260-63
45Anon., “Sandia Man,” TIME XXXV (6 May 1940), 67, & Hibben, Evidences of Early Occupation in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, and
Other Sites in the Sandia-Manzano Region, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections XCIX no. 23 (1941), 8
46“Sandia Cave” (July 1940), 77
47“An Association of Man,” 263 & fig. 2 opposite
48William Roosa, Reply to Mason, 263
49Reply to Mason, 257
50“Human Artifacts in Association with Horse & Sloth Bones in Southern South America,” Science LXXXVI/2219 (9 July 1937)
51Pleistocene-Recent Boundary in the Rocky Mt. Region, Geological Survey Bulletin 996-A (Gov’t Printing Office 1953)
52Sandia Cave: A Study in Controversy, Eastern New Mexico U. Contributions in Anthropology VI/1, ed. Cynthia Irwin-Williams
(E.N.M.U. Paleo-Indian Institute 1975), 35-36
53“Ancient Man in America,” Geographical Review XXVII (1937), 507-09, & “Correlation of the Deposits of Sandia Cave, New
Mexico, with the Glacial Chronology,” appendix to Hibben, Evidences of Early Occupation in Sandia Cave
54“Age of the Sandia Culture,” Science CXXVI/3268 (16 Aug. 1957), 305-06
55“Radiocarbon Dates for Sandia Cave, Correction,” Science CXXV/3241 (8 Feb. 1957), 234
56Ibid. 235
57Ibid.
58“Age of the Sandia Culture,” 305
59University of Michigan Radiocarbon Dates I,” ibid. CXXIV/3223 (5 Oct. 1956), 670
60Ibid. /3224, 664-72; Hibben, “Specimens from Sandia Cave & Their Possible Significance,” ibid. CXXII/3172 (14 Oct. 1955), 688-
89; & Crane, “Antiquity of the Sandia Culture: Carbon-14 Measurements,” ibid. 698-90; Krieger, “News & Notes,” Am. Antiquity
XXII/4 (April 1957), 435-36; & Stevens & Agogino, Sandia Cave, 18-22. Subsequent sources debating Sandia dates added no new
data.
61Roosa, “The Lucy Site in Central New Mexico,” Am. Antiquity XXI/3 (Jan. 1956), 310
62Reply to Mason, 263
63“The First 38 Sandia Points Industry,” Am. Antiquity XI/3 (Jan. 1946), 257-58; & Evidence of Early Occupation in Sandia Cave, 32
64Ancient Man in North America, 91. Cf. Roy L. Carlson (who seconded Krieger’s view of Sandia points as enigmatic), “The Far
West,” chap. 6 in Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 83
65Emerson, “The Paleolithic and the New World,” 60
66“The First 38 Sandia Points Industry,” 257-58
67“The French Connection,” :67
68Preston, “The Lost Man,” 76
69“Pre-Clovis Occupation South of the Ice Sheet,” chap. 5, Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 65-72
70Quoted in Parfit, “Hunt for the First Americans,” 61
71 Quoted in “Did First Humans in America Come from East Europe?” A6
72 Quoted in Burne, “Goodbye Columbus, Hello Solutreans,” 3
73“The Peopling of the New World, 83
74“The Paleo-Indian Tradition in Eastern America,” 245
75Guidon & G. Delabrias, “Carbon-14 Dates Point to Man in the Americas 32,000 Years Ago,” Nature CCCXXI/6072 (19 June 1986),
769-71; Guidon, “Les Premières Occupations Humaines de l’Aire Archéologique de São Raimundo Nonato-Piauí-Brasil,”
L’Anthropologie XXXXVIII/2 (May 1984), 263-71, “On Stratigraphy & Chronology at Pedra Furada,” Current Anthropology XXX/1
(Dec. 1989), 641-42, “Las Unidades Culturales de São Raimundo Nonato—Sudeste des Estado de Piauí—Brasil,” in New Evidence for
the Peopling of the Americas, ed. Bryan, 157-71; “The First Americans: Cliff Notes,” Natural History XCVI/8 (Aug. 1987), 6, 8, 10,
12; Robert G. Bednarik, “On the Pleistocene Settlement of South America,” Antiquity LXIII/2 (March 1989), 101-07; Paul Bahn,
“Dating the First American,” New Scientist CXXXI (22 July 1991), 26-28; Warwick Bray, “Finding the Earliest Americans,” Nature
CCCXXI/6071 (19-25 June 1986), 726; Fiedel, “The Peopling of the New World,” 51, & Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge U
1987), 79; Meltzer, Adovasio, & Dillehay, “On a Pleistocene Human Occupation at Pedra Furada, Brazil,” Antiquity LXVIII/261 (Dec.
1994), 695-714; Guidon, A.-M. Pessis, Fabio Parenti, Michel Fontugue, & Claude Guérin, “Nature & Age of the Deposits in Pedra
Furada, Brazil: Reply to Meltzer, Adovasio & Dillehay,” ibid. LXX/268 (June 1996), 408-21; Guidon & B. Arnaud, “The Chronology
of the New World,” 167-78; etc.
76 A photo made newspapers internationally at the time. Kerby Smith’s photo appears in Thomas Y. Canby, “The Search for the First
Americans,” National Geographic CLVI/3 (Sept. 1979), 350
77Cynthia Irwin-Williams, “Associations of Early Man with Horse, Camel & Mastodon at Hueyatlaco, Vasequillo (Puebla, Mexico),”
in Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause, ed. P.S. Martin & H.E. Wright, Jr. (Yale U. 1967), 337-47, “Summary of Evidence
for the Vasequillo Region, Puebla, Mexico,” in Cultural Continuity in Mesoamerica, ed. David L. Browman (Mouton 1978), 7-22, &
“Commentary on Geologic Evidence for Age of Deposits at Hueyatlaco Archaeological Site, Vasequillo, Mexico,” Quaternary
Research XVI/2 (1981), 258; Virginia Steen-McIntyre, “Quarter Million Year-Old Human Habitation Site Found in Mexico,” address
at Ancient American’s Western States Conference, Salt Lake City, 4 July 1997, Ancient American III #19-20 (Sept.-Oct. 1997), 72-78;
Dina L. Dincauze, “An Archaeo-Logical Evaluation,” 288; Shutler, “Dating the Peopling of North America,” 122-23; Fiedel, “The
Peopling of the New World,” 48, & Preshistory of the Americas, 54-55; etc.]
78“Early Man in the New World,” in Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 133
79Adovasio, “The Ones that Will Not Go Away: A Biased View of Pre-Clovis Population in the New World,” chap. 15 From Kostenki
to Clovis, 206 fig. 2; 212 fig. 6; & 214
80 Adovasio, A.T. Boldurien, & Ronald C. Carlisle, “Who Were These Guys?” Americans Before Columbus: Ice-Age Origins,
Smithsonian symposium 26 Sept. 1987), ed. Carlisle, Anthropological & Ethnological Monographs 12 (U. Pittsburgh 1988), 45-61;
Adovasio, Jack Donahue, & R. Stukenrath, The Meadowcroft Rockshelter Radiocarbon Chronology 1975-1988. Some Ruminations
(Society for Am. Archaeology 53rd annual meeting Phoenix 27 April-1 May 1988); Adovasio, Carlisle, K. Cushman, Stuckenrath, &
P. Wiegman, “Meadowcroft Rockshelter & the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition in Southwestern Pennsylvania,” Quaternary
Vertebrate Paleontology…Memorial to John E. Genoways & Mary R. Dawson, Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Philadelphia)
Special Pubs. 8 (1988), 347-69; Adovasio, “The Ones that Will Not Go Away,” 205-15; Dincauze, “An Archaeo-Logical Evaluation
of the Case for Pre-Clovis,” chap. 5, Advances in World Archaeology, ed. Fred Wendorf & Angela E. Close (Academic Press 1984), III
286-87; “On the Meadowcroft Papers…,” Quarterly Review of Archaeology II (1981), 3-4; Adovasio, Donahue, Stuckenrath, & J.D.
Gunn, “The Meadowcroft Papers: A Response to Dincauze,” ibid. II/3., 14-15; Adovasio, Gunn, Donahue, & Stuckenrath,
“Meadowcroft Rockshelter, 1977: An Overview,” Am. Antiquity XLIII/4 (Oct. 1974), 632-51; Adovasio, Gunn, Donahue, Stuckenrath,
John E. Guilday, & Kenneth Lord, “Meadowcroft Rockshelter,” in Early Man in America from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, ed.
Bryan, 149-80; Richard Shutler, Jr., “Dating the Peopling of the New World,” in Environments & Extinctions: Man in Late Glacial
North America, ed. Jim I. Mead & David J. Meltzer, Peopling of the Americas series (U. Maine at Orono: Center for the Study of
Early Man 1985), 122-23; Adovasio, Carlisle, Kathleen A. Cushman, Donahue, Guilday, William C. Johnson, Lord, Paul W. Parmalee,
Stuckenrath, & Paul W. Wiegman, “Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Washington County,
Pennsylvania,” in ibid., 73-119; Adovasio, Donahue, & Stuckenrath, “The Meadowcroft Rockshelter Radiocarbon Chronology 1975-
1990,” Am. Antiquity LV/2 (April 1990), 348-53; Adovasio, Donahue, Cushman, Carlisle, Stuckenrath, Gunn, & Johnson, “Evidence
from Meadowcroft Rockshelter,” chap. 13 in Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 163-89; etc. ad inf.]. Marie Wormington’s
survey of a decade’s scholarship adjudged Meadowcroft investigations “very impressive” {“Early Man in the New World: 1970-
1980,” in Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 194; etc.
81Clovis Technology: A Comparative Study of the Kevin Davis Cache, Texas (U. Texas 1999), 180. Overshot, common of Clovis
blades, was a fracture that split a flake from parent core clean across, taking away part of the far edge.
82“Early Man in the New World,” ed. Shutler, 133
83Adovasio et al., “Evidence from Meadowcroft Rockshelters,” 165
84Adovasio et al., “The Meadowcroft Rocshelter Radiocarbon Chronology,” 349 & chart 350
85“The Earliest Americans,” Science CLXIV #3906 (7 Nov. 1969), 714
86“Fluted Projectile Points,” 1411
87“Paleoindian Charcoal from the Meadowcroft Rockshelter: Is Contamination a Problem?” Am. Antiquity XLV/3 (July 1980), 582-85
88Adovasio, “The Meadowcroft Rockshelter Radiocarbon Chronology,” 353
89 Shutler, “Dating the Peopling of North America” 123; Adovasio et al., “Evidence from Meadowcroft Rockshelter,” 188
90“The Ones that Will Not Go Away,” 207
91“Is It Really that Old?” A Comment about the Meadowcroft Rockshelter ‘Overview,’” Am. Antiquity XL/3 (July 1980), 579-82
92Prehistory of the Americas, 53
93Adovasio, Gunn, Donahue, Stuckenrath, Guilday, & K. Volman, Am. Antiquity XL/3 (July 1980), 588-95
94Evidence from Meadowcroft Rockshelter,” 170-71
95“Comments on the Meadowcroft Radiocarbon Chronology & the Recognition of Coal Contamination,” Am. Antiquity LVII/2 (April
1992), 321-26
96“Never Sa0y Never Again: Some Thoughts on Could Haves & Might Have Beens,” ibid., 327-31
97“Dental Evidence for the Peoplng of the Americas,” chap. 11 in Early Man in the New World, ed. Shutler, 147-57
98 C.L. Brace & D.P. Tracer, “Craniofacial Continuity & Change: A Comparison of Late Pleistocene & Recent Europe & Asia,” in The
Evolution & Dispersal of Modern Humans in Asia, ed. T. Aleazawa et al. (Tokyo: Hokusensha Publishing 1992), 439-72; D.G. Steele
& J.F. Powell, “Paleobiological Evidence of the Peopling of the Americas,” in Method & Theory for Investigating the Peopling of he
Americas, ed. Bonnischen & Steele (Ore. St. U: Center for the Study of the First Americans, Dept. Anthropology 1994), 261-73;
Claude Chaucat & Jean Paul Lacombe 1984; Paul Ossa 1973, 1978; Chaucat 1988; etc., ad inf.