In correspondence with Roger Painshill on Solutrean Culture in America. There are some big (and interesting) questions here, aren’t there? Apologies for coming late to the game, but it took a little while to assemble what I know (or believe) into a coherent summary. I offer this with the caution that there is so much research going into these topics, with suggestions and counter-suggestions appearing all the time, that unless you follow it closely your knowledge goes out of date rapidly. Nevertheless……….. The conventional view since the 1920’s has been that, diverse as Native Americans are, they all originated from eastern Asia, arriving in North America on foot, beginning around 11,300 years ago in three waves of migration over the Bering land bridge that once linked Siberia with Alaska. North America was buried under ice sheets over a mile thick during the Pleistocene ice age, but for periods between 10,000 and 75,000 years ago the sea level was over 150 feet lower. Enough to expose the Bering land bridge. However, as far as we know, the fluctuating size of the eastern and western ice sheets left only two windows of opportunity for passage through an ice-free corridor between them: before 20,000 and after 12,000 years ago. Since many Clovis sites have ages that cluster around 11,000 years, this suggested the Clovis people migrated into North America during the second window and has reinforced the “Clovis first hypothesis. In the 1980’s we had the “Greenberg hypothesis”. Stanford University linguist Joseph Greenberg, argued for three waves of migration beginning around 12,000 years ago, each giving rise to a distinct linguistic group. The “Na-Dene” (northwest coastal region plus a pocket of Apache and Navajo in the southwest); “Eskimo-Aleut” (northeast coastal region); and “Amerind” in the rest of the continent. The first two are accepted by most linguists, but Amerind remains controversial. The languages grouped here by Greenberg seem to be too diverse to be part of a single family in the view of his opponents. There has been an ongoing detailed study at Emory University of DNA from living Native Americans. Initially, four distinct lineages were found, termed A, B, C and D [Douglas Wallace, 1992]. These lineages are also found in Asian populations, but not in Europeans or Africans, which gave support to the theory that Native Americans have an ancestral link to Asia. Wallace found all four lineages in populations of Amerindian people; only lineage A in the Na-Dene group; and only lineages A and D in the Eskimo-Aleut group. This distribution is consistent with Greenbergs proposal of three waves of migration. Detailed analysis of the frequency of mutations suggested the times of migration for the three groups were 25,000 years ago for the Amerind and about 12,000 years ago for the Na-Dene and the Eskimo-Aleut. The dates fit very nicely with the estimated times of the two ice-free corridors, but the date for the Amerind is far too early to support Greenberg’s hypothesis completely. That probably doesn’t matter because the date is consistent with the amount of time required to produce the diversity of languages present in this group [Johanna Nichols, 1998] and acceptance of pre-Clovis sites no longer ties us to the second window for an ice-free corridor. The picture has grown more complicated as more data is gathered. Additional minor lineages have been found, so it’s not just four any more. All four major types - A, B, C and D - have been found in people from all three linguistic groups. However, lineages B, C and D are rare in the Na-Dene and lineages B and C are rare in the Eskimo-Aleut. This has led to the possible conclusion that there was a single migration, rather than three separate waves. A single group of genetically diverse people entered Alaska about 25,000 years ago, probably as a trickle of people over a period of a thousand years or so. Some of them headed south (the Amerinds), while others remained in isolated patches in the north. This latter group must have been living in a hostile environment surrounded by glaciers and their numbers shrank, but isolated populations persisted for thousands of years. These scattered groups finally bounced back and migrated to (mainly) northern regions. Their reduced genetic diversity would have produced the skewed distribution of lineages that we observe. [Andrew Merriwether, 1990’s]. Wallace disagrees. He suggests that low frequencies of lineages B, C and D in the Na-Dene, and of B and C in the Eskimo-Aleut, are the result of the later interbreeding with Amerinds. Lineage A in the Na-Dene is only 9,500 years old while in the Amerind population it is close to 30,000 years. If both groups were descended from the same population, the A lineages should be the same age. Further work from Wallace’s team, published in 1998 was a big surprise. He found a new lineage, called X, in Amerindians from the Central Great Lakes region. Lineage X is also present (albeit at low frequency) in EUROPEAN populations, but is absent in Asians. He has ruled out the possibility of this arising from interbreeding between Native Americans and Europeans “post-Columbus since no other European lineages were present. The same lineage has also been found in DNA from tooth enamel at a pre-Columbian burial site in Ilinois [Anne Stone, 1997]. Wallace concludes: It looks as if a European population moved up through Asia and was part of the wave of east Asian people who moved across the Bering land bridge. This must have occurred more than 30,000 years ago if the early date for entry into the Americas is correct. However, what he has not ruled out is the possibility that lineage X was indeed once present in Asian populations but has been lost via genetic diversity. If that were the case, we do not need to suppose that Europeans made it to the land bridge. Recent discoveries have added to the picture. The oldest evidence found of humans in North America came from the Paisley caves in Oregon [Dennis Jenkins, 2008]. Fossilised human poop(!!!), plus a few artefacts, were excavated from what seems to have been a latrine, carbon dated at 14,300 years old. Prior to that, the oldest human remains were bones from a couple of Clovis sites. The date is also broadly in line with the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, which is now generally accepted at around 14,600 years old, and suggests that humans certainly reached the Southern Americas around 1,200 years before the Clovis culture spread across North America. Dates for both sites have an uncertainty of a few hundred years, so they might well overlap, but it would have taken early settlers much longer to reach Monte Verde if they crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia. Although the pre-Clovis status of the Monte Verde site is no longer disputed and the site is rich in archaeological evidence (apart from the lack of human remains), it is important to remember that it is an isolated site. Only about thirty people lived on the sandy bank of a small creek in hide shelters in hunter-gatherer mode [Thomas Dillehay, 1977 through to 1985]. Jenkins had the poop from the Paisley caves DNA tested but was concerned about possible contamination during his excavations, despite the fact that it was buried several feet underground. He struck lucky. All 14 samples he submitted were positive for human mitochondrial DNA, but 6 of them contained two distinctive genetic markers called A2 and B2, present in Native Americans but not in Europeans – or any of his co-workers. That would suggest pretty conclusively that the first people in North America (that we know of) were primarily of east-Asian ancestry, not Europeans or Africans. There is also genetic evidence that Native Americans may be descended from a single population that lived near the Bering land bridge for some time [Kari Schroeder, 2008]. Schroeder took DNA samples from various populations around the world, including two from the eastern edge of Siberia, 53 from other places in Asia and 18 Native American populations. Some 1,500 people in all, including 445 Native Americans. Schroeder was looking for a distinctive, repeating sequence of DNA found in a non-coding area of chromosome 9, known as the 9RA mutation. He found it in at least one member of all the Native American populations tested, and in both populations from eastern Siberia. By contrast, it was absent in all of the other Asian populations, including those from other parts of Siberia, from Mongolia or Japan. Schroeder suggests this points to a common ancestry from a specific location not too far from the Bering land bridge. He doesn’t discount the possibility of multiple migrations thousands of years apart, as sea levels and ice margins fluctuated. The main problem (if we accept the dates for ice-free corridors) is that any pre-Clovis migration must have happened at least 20,000 – 25,000 years ago. There is no archaeological evidence to support this, but: Its a question of archaeological visibility… People entered a virgin land, rich in resources and space, and so they probably didnt stay in any one place very long, which is what you need to create archaeological visible sites… It could easily have taken 10,000 years or more before populations reached a level that would start to be detected on the radar screen” [David Meltzer, unknown date]. So, what of the Solutrean connection? Well, the first thing to remember is that the Solutreans were not a “people” as such. Solutrean refers to an “industry” – a way of making tools to support a particular lifestyle in a specific area. The period concerned is about 17,000 – 22,000 years ago and the area concerned is Solutre-Pouilly in France. The discovery of a couple of possible Solutrean industry tools in North America does not in any way imply migration into North America on a large scale, would be my feeling. It doesn’t even imply the presence of the people who made the tools. In Upper Palaeolithic Europe, there is much evidence of aggressive competition and some evidence of trading or sharing of technology during the rise of Homo sapiens to become the dominant species. I would fully expect that these competing populations acquired desirable or useful tools from one another by both fair means and foul. The Solutrean industry began in Spain and spread to several parts of France and a little bit of Northern England. The dates for the industry don’t look like a good fit for either of the two ice-free corridors. We either have to accept that some of the population went walkabout 22,000 years ago onto an inhospitable sheet of ice (or progressively canoed round the edge of it), at just the time when they were establishing themselves in cosier spots in France. Or, that the remnants of their population (for whatever reason) left France 17,000 years ago and took 5,000 years or so to make the journey to the ice-free corridor when there was a second window. Doesn’t seem very likely to me. How about?: the Solutreans gradually integrated themselves into other populations in France, taking their tools and skills with them. Trading or thuggery resulted in some of those tools (or very similar ones using borrowed technology) coming into the hands of populations closer to the land bridge who are mostly, but not exclusively of Asian origin. Those tools get taken on the journey to America when the second land bridge opens up. Seems more likely, I think. Or, there’s a coincidence in some similarities of tool technologies between Clovis and Solutrean. There are also large gaps in time between the end of the Solutrean industry and the beginnings of the Clovis culture. Many specific and innovative features of tools from the Solutrean industry are not present in Clovis technologies. There is no evidence of any Solutrean seafaring skills or inclinations. Roger
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:26:25 +0000