Were Europeans The Real "Native Americans?"

For a long time, anthropologists have told us that the first Americans walked across a land bridge from Siberia around 15,000 years ago. The style of toolmaking they brought with them became known as the Clovis culture and for eighty years it has been accepted as the oldest in North America. Now we have a new competitor in the "who's on first" debate. They are called Solutreans, a Stone Age people from Europe who fished and hunted their way west along the North Atlantic ice shelf and sea ice 20,000 years ago. Anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere have identified five pre-Clovis sites in the Mid-Atlantic states, including the Eastern Shore, featuring "blades, anvils and other tools" from the Solutrean culture. The artifacts match nicely with material recovered from dozens of sites in Spain and France.

Additional research - lots of it - must follow before the Solutrean hypothesis can be confirmed. Still it remains an exciting chapter in the history of human occupation and settlement that is being written in our own time.

For a perspective on why OTR loves the debate, readers are directed to an earlier post that, by the way, is one of the most popular to appear on this blog.