There are two realities that must be considered here. The first is
that seamanship was well developed and boat building was already
quite skillful and certainly good enough to consider a summer trip
into the unknown.
The second reality was that the sea level was three hundred feet
lower. This meant that the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea were both
Plains and so were the Grand Banks. That alone cut a large chunk of
distance out of the equation by at least a third. It is also
possible that some portion of the Mid Atlantic Ridge was also in
place as a transit point.
It is obvious that a large open skin boat as was used by the Inuit
would easily allow movement along the Ice Edge and the ability to
hunker down in the face of bad weather on the ice itself. At the
same time, plenty of seals would provide ample ready supplies.
Sooner or later, someone would be brave and go and do it. Recall
also that this movement was against an incoming current, thus a rapid
retreat was completely possible.
The evidence for large skin boats date back at least 20,000 years on
both the Atlantic side and the Pacific side. Neither trip was easy,
but the capability existed and in both cases it demanded working with
ice fronts. Yet this certainly feasible and we have the additional
knowledge from archeology in Siberia that upper body strength was the
most robust ever noted. This is a sure sign of aquatic adaptation.
Radical theory of
first Americans places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years
ago
Bonnie Jo Mount/Post
- Smithsonian Institute anthropologist Dennis Stanford, left,
and University of Exeter archeologist Bruce Bradley examine knives
from the last Ice Age.
By Brian
Vastag, Published: February
When the crew of the
Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the
deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark,
tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.
Forty years later,
this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a
radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got
here.
Archaeologists
have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about
15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska
and then moved down the West Coast.
But
the mastodon relic found near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay
turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting that the blade was
just as ancient.
Whoever
fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.
Its
makers probably paddled from Europe and arrived in America
thousands of years ahead of the western migration, making them the
first Americans, argues Smithsonian Institution
anthropologistDennis Stanford.
“I
think it’s feasible,” said Tom Dillehay, a prominent
archaeologist at Vanderbilt University. “The evidence is building
up, and it certainly warrants discussion.”
At
the height of the last ice age, Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age
European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap
jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting
seals and seabirds.
The
Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says,
hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the
later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.
When
Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999,
colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist
suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away.
But
now, 13 years later, Stanford and Bruce Bradley, an
archaeologist at England’s University of Exeter, lay out a
detailed case — bolstered by the curious blade and other stone
tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic — in a new book, “Across
Atlantic Ice.”
“I
drank the Solutrean Kool-Aid,” said Steve Black, an
archaeologist at Texas State University in San Marcos. “I had
been very dubious. It’s something a lot of [archaeologists] have
dismissed out of hand. But I came away from the book feeling like
it’s an extremely credible idea that needs to be taken
seriously.”
Other
experts remain unconvinced. “Anyone advancing a radically
different hypothesis must be willing to take his licks from
skeptics,” said Gary Haynes, an archaeologist at the University
of Nevada-Reno.
At
the core of Stanford’s case are stone tools recovered from five
mid-Atlantic sites. Two sites lie on Chesapeake Bay islands,
suggesting that the Solutreans settled Delmarva early on.
Smithsonian research associate Darrin Lowery found blades, anvils
and other tools found stuck in soil at least 20,000 years old.
Displaying
the tools in his office at the National Museum of Natural
History, Stanford handles a milky chert blade and says, “This
stuff is beginning to give us a real nice picture of occupation of
the Eastern Shore around 20,000 years ago.”
