Paper short abstract:

Evidence indicates that people arrived on the eastern seaboard of North America during the LGM, eventually developing into the continent wide Clovis Culture. This was based on the adaptation to and exploitation of the rich ice edge environments of the North Atlantic of the Solutrean Upper Palaeolithic Culture of southwestern France and northern Spain.

Paper long abstract:

The early peopling of the New World has been a topic of intense research since the early twentieth century. While the dominant theory that all people came through Asia is still generally accepted, evidence has accumulated over the past two decades indicating that the earliest origin of people in North America may have been from south-western Europe. In this presentation I outline a model of a Solutrean origin for pre-Clovis and Clovis culture in North America and discuss the archaeological evidence, both positive and negative, supporting this assertion. Beringian archaeology has only pushed back dating to around 13,000 years ago, a time when the Clovis Culture was already well established in North America. There is a growing body of evidence that people were exploiting the eastern seaboard from Maine to South Carolina as early as 22,000 years ago. The material culture from this time is extremely similar to the contemporary assemblages in south-western France and northern Spain and it is our contention that this was the result of a direct historical connection between the two regions. Evaluation of the conditions of the North Atlantic ice edge indicates it was a very rich biotic zone that would have been available to boat-using hunters. We envision a slow westward exploration that ultimately resulted in establishment of interacting populations on both ends of the ice front. This link was broken with the retreat of the glaciers and northward retreat of the ice front between 16,000 and 13,000 years ago.