Controversy: Solutrean Hypothesis

Position: ?

* Colavito 2006 p55

"For the moment there is no clear evidence relating Solutreans to the Clovis people -- or any earlier people of North America. Anthropologist G.A. Clark makes a compelling case that the similarities between the two cultures are coincidental, the result of two independent peoples stumbling across similar solutions when faced with similar problems in hunting ancient big game. ...

"As anthropologist Lawrence Guy Straus told National Geographic, "One of the great failings of archaeology ... is a continuous falling back on the notion that if a couple of things resemble one another, they have to have the same source. But these similarities appear and reappear time and again in different places.'

"The Solutrean hypothesis is simply the latest in a long string of ideas that have sought the ultimate origins of American history in other lands. Since the first explorations of the New World, researchers have tried to tie the continent's history back to Europe, as if to fulfill a need to own America's most distant past as well as its present."