Solutrean

Solutrean tools, 22,000-17,000 BP, Crôt du Charnier, Solutré-Pouilly, Saône-et-Loire, France

Homo Sapiens in Europe: Solutrean distribution map

The Solutrean toolkit includes the world's earliest identifiable sewing needles.

The Solutrean industry is a relatively advanced flint tool-making style of the Upper Palaeolithic, from around 22,000 to 17,000 BP.

Details

"Solutrean" is named after the type-site of Crôt du Charnier at Solutré in the Mâcon district, Saône-et-Loire, eastern France, and appeared around 21,000 BP. 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 lithic reduction percussion and pressure flaking rather than cruder flintknapping. Knapping was done using antler batons, hardwood batons and soft stone hammers. 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 Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, England. The industry first appeared in modern-day Spain and disappears from the archaeological record around 17,000 BP.

The Solutrean hypothesis in North American archaeology

Main article: Solutrean hypothesis

The Solutrean hypothesis builds on 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. Archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley suggest that the Clovis point derived from the points of the Solutrean culture of southern France (19,000BP) through 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. Supporters of this hypothesis believe it would have been feasible using traditional Eskimo techniques still in use today, while others argue that the conditions at the time would not have made such a journey likely.

The idea of a Clovis-Solutrean link remains 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.

Arthur J. Jelinek, an anthropologist who noted similarities between Solutrean and Clovis styles in a 1971 study, noted that the great geographical and temporal separation of the two cultures made a direct connection unlikely. He also noted that crossing the Atlantic with the technology of the time would have been difficult if not impossible, an observation repeated by Lawrence G. Straus, who wrote that "there are no representations of boats and no evidence whatsoever either of seafaring or of the ability to make a living mainly or solely from the ocean during the Solutrean". However, Straus excavated Solutrean artifacts along what is now a coastline in Cantabria, which was not coastal at the time of Solutreans, finding seashells and estuarine fish at the sites, but no evidence of exploiting deep-sea resources. In addition, the dates of the proposed transitional sites and the Solutrean period in Europe only overlap at the extremes.

Another challenge to the hypothesis involves the apparent lack of cultural or artistic practices passed on from Solutrean culture to Clovis culture, for instance the style of Solutrean artwork found at Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France. In response, Bradley and Stanford contend that it was "a very specific subset of the Solutrean who formed the parent group that adapted to a maritime environment and eventually made it across the north Atlantic ice-front to colonize the east coast of the Americas" and that this group may not have shared all Solutrean cultural traits. A carved piece of bone depicting a mammoth found near the Vero man site in Florida has been dated to 13,000 to 20,000 years ago. It is described as possibly being the oldest art object yet found in the Americas, and may provide support for the Solutrean hypothesis. Art historian Barbara Olins has compared the Vero mammoth carving to "Franco-Cantabrian" drawings and engravings of mammoths. She notes that the San of southern Africa developed a realistic style of depicting animals similar to the "Franco-Cantabrian" style, indicating that an independent development of such a style in North America is possible.

In a 2008 study of relevant oceanographic data from the time-period in question, Kieran Westley and Justin Dix concluded that "it is clear from the paleoceanographic and paleo-environmental data that the LGM North Atlantic does not fit the descriptions provided by the proponents of the Solutrean Atlantic Hypothesis. Although ice use and sea mammal hunting may have been important in other contexts, in this instance, the conditions militate against an ice-edge-following, maritime-adapted European population reaching the Americas."; taking the position that according to their analysis of the evidence they examined (primarily the believed location of the ice shelf at the time in question), they do not believe the Solutrean culture or elements of it could have undertaken any transoceanic crossing into North America utilizing the glacial ice-sheets. It is however difficult to draw any definitive conclusions from studies undertaken thus far, as the most conclusive evidence on this question would be found in coastal settlements from the time-period, but the overwhelming majority of the coastline from the time-period is now submerged under the Atlantic Ocean and at present inaccessible to intensive archeological research. As such there has yet to be any reliable proof from either proponents or opponents of the theory, and it remains an unresolved issue in the field of archeology.

See also

Preceded by Gravettian

Solutrean 22,000–17,000 BP

Succeeded by Magdalenian

The Stone Age
↑ before Homo (Pliocene)
Paleolithic Lower Paleolithic Early Stone Age Homo Control of fire Stone tools Middle Paleolithic Middle Stone Age Homo neanderthalensis Homo sapiens Recent African origin of modern humans Upper Paleolithic Late Stone Age Behavioral modernity, Atlatl, Origin of the domestic dog Mesolithic Microliths, Bow, Canoe Natufian Khiamian Tahunian Neolithic Heavy Neolithic Shepherd Neolithic Trihedral Neolithic Pre-Pottery Neolithic Neolithic Revolution, Domestication Pottery Neolithic Pottery
↓ Chalcolithic

• Synoptic table of the principal old world prehistoric cultures
• Franco-Cantabrian region
• Gravettian

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• Clovis and Solutrean: Is There a Common Thread? by James M. Chandler
• Stone Age Columbus BBC TV programme summary
• "America's Stone Age Explorers" transcript of 2004 NOVA program on PBS
• Images of Solutrean artifacts