The Solutrean toolkit includes the world's first identifiable
needlesThe
Solutrean industry is a relatively advanced flint tool-making style of the Upper
Palaeolithic.
Details
Solutrean is named after the type-site of
Solutré in the
Mâcon district,
Saône-et-Loire, eastern
France, and appeared around 19,000 BCE. The Solutré site was discovered in 1866 by the French
geologist and
paleontologist Henry Testot-Ferry (second son of
Napoleon's famous cavalryman, General
Claude Testot-Ferry, Baron of the Empire). It is now preserved as the
Parc archéologique et botanique de Solutré.
The industry was named by
Gabriel de Mortillet to describe the second stage of his system of cave chronology, following the
Mousterian, and he considered it synchronous with the third division of the
Quaternary period. The era's finds include tools, ornamental beads, and bone pins as well as
prehistoric art.
Solutrean tool-making employed techniques not seen before and not rediscovered for millennia. The Solutrean has relatively finely worked, bifacial points made with
pressure flaking rather than cruder
flint knapping. This method permitted the working of delicate slivers of flint to make light projectiles and even elaborate barbed and tanged arrowheads. Large thin spear-heads; scrapers with edge not on the side but on the end; flint knives and saws, but all still chipped, not ground or polished; long spear-points, with tang and shoulder on one side only, are also characteristic implements of this industry. Bone and antler were used as well.
The Solutrean may be seen as a transitory stage between the flint implements of the Mousterian and the bone implements of the
Magdalenian epochs. Faunal finds include horse, reindeer, mammoth, cave lion, rhinoceros, bear and
aurochs. Solutrean finds have been also made in the caves of
Les Eyzies and
Laugerie Haute, and in the Lower Beds of
Cresswell Crags in
Derbyshire, England. The industry first appeared in modern-day
Spain and disappears from the archaeological record around 15,000 BCE.
The Solutrean Hypothesis in North American archaeology
The
Solutrean hypothesis claims similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later
Clovis culture /
Clovis points of
North America, and suggests that people with Solutrean tool technology crossed the Ice Age
Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge, using survival skills similar to that of modern
Eskimo people. The migrants arrived in northeastern North America and served as the donor culture for what eventually developed into Clovis tool-making technology. Sites such as
Cactus Hill,
Virginia, have yielded artifacts which appear to bridge the temporal and technological gap between Solutrean and Clovis cultures.
James M. Adovasio found stone blades and cores near
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania which he dated to 16,000BP
. Archaeologists
Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley concluded that the
Clovis point did not derive from any stoneworking tradition from Asia known from the archaeological record. Instead, they traced a line of stone artefact development starting with the points of the
Solutrean culture of southern France (19,000BP) to the
Cactus Hill points of Virginia (16,000BP) to the
Clovis point. This would mean that people would have had to move from the
Bay of Biscay across the edge of the Atlantic ice sheet to
North America. This journey appears to be feasible using traditional
Eskimo techniques still in use today, technology which would have been available to the Solutrean people.
In addition, certain
mtDNA anomalies in pre-Columbian Amerind populations leave open the possibility of alternate migration patterns into the Americas. Geneticist
Douglas Wallace of
Emory University, studying the
mitochondrial DNA of Native Americans, found an mtDNA type called X. Geneticist
Stephen Oppenheimer reports that X occurs 'only among Europeans and Native Americans, with a single report from southern Siberia, but the link between the Old and New Worlds is up to 30,000 years old'. However, the most recent study of complete genomes suggests a single founding population, including type X, arriving via the Beringia route from Asia.
In short, the idea of a Clovis-Solutrean link remains rather controversial and does not enjoy wide acceptance. The hypothesis is challenged by large gaps in time between the Clovis and Solutrean eras, a lack of evidence of Solutrean seafaring, lack of specific Solutrean features in Clovis technology, and other issues.
See also
