Tonight, the CBC is showing a ‘documentary’ called Ice Bridge.
CBC’s science show The Nature of Things is set to air a documentary that purports to prove the first humans in the New World came across the ocean from Europe and not, as most scientists think, via a land bridge from Asia.
It’s about the Solutrean hypothesis. As you might guess from the description, it’s part of that old school of anthropological thought that tries to claim that Europe is the wellspring of all human progress, spreading outward to bring enlightenment, or at least better weapons, to the more barbarous regions of the world. It’s not impossible that some ancient Europeans, painting themselves blue with woad and bundled up in furs while waving pointy sticks, might have stumbled across arctic ice to Iceland and Greenland and then to North America, but it was damned unlikely. “Not impossible” is insufficient argument to support an idea, however; I suppose it’s also not impossible that little green men landed in England and helped the druids erect Stonehenge with their anti-gravity rays. I’m going to insist on more evidence than pointing and saying, “Well, that’s a mighty big big rock, innit? It’s heavy. How else would the Druids have lifted it? Magic? Hur hur hur.”
This idea that Solutreans from Europe actually colonized and spread across the Americas before Asians got there is of similar quality. It is based entirely on flint tools found in America having a resemblance to flint tools found in Europe. That’s it. The key thing is that Solutrean tools were made by pressure flaking rather than just bashing rocks together — a technique in which you use, for instance, a bit of antler to apply controlled pressure to the edge of a flint tool and snap off smaller flakes, allowing more precision in shaping. Apparently Asians and Indians were incapable of figuring this out.
But there is nothing else to support the Solutrean hypothesis.
There is, for example, no evidence of Solutrean seafaring, and no evidence of their cave art in North America, which would be unusual for a people known for the elaborately painted Cave of Altamira in Spain. There have also been no discoveries in North America of Solutrean human remains. It is just as possible that the American flint blades that look Solutrean were made by ancient Native Americans, and the similarity is just coincidence, or that the blades are not as old as they appear.
Still, the CBC documentary sympathetically casts the two main advocates of this fringe theory as brave resisters against a blinkered scientific orthodoxy. They will “never give up searching for the truth,” says narrator David Suzuki.
It sounds like a miserably bad documentary with a skewed perspective that promotes a couple of fringe scientists. Shame on you, Canada. But at the same time I’m finding this out via Canada’s National Post, a newspaper that leans conservative, and that article isn’t at all shy about pointing out the huge problems with this ‘documentary’.
One major issue is that, while there is no evidence to support it, it is fervently supported by racists, a concern that the documentary actively avoids, while the National Post article discusses it.
One prominent example is the book White Apocalypse by Kyle Bristow, which fictionalizes the theory with a story about the “Solutrean Liberation Front” and their modern-day battles, and argues that ancient Solutreans were exterminated in North America by more recent migrants of Asian background — the ancestors of modern Native Americans.
Paul Fromm, a leading Canadian white supremacist organizer, called the book a “soaring inspirational dramatization of our people taking our continent back from the Third World invaders.”
It is “extremely irresponsible” for the scientists to keep pushing their own lifelong passion in this racist context, Moreno-Mayar said. He mentioned online discussion of the “outdated” Solutrean theory.
“It’s crazy horrible what you see there. You see basically all of these racist ideas that are justifying colonialism, and justifying this super racist way of thinking,” he said. “Most people supporting this are associated with this racist way of thinking, that Native Americans are not really Native Americans.”
The new documentary does not address the issue of racism at all. Bicknell said she was aware of it, but did not address it because she “didn’t want to give it a lick of airspace… It’s just such crap.”
White nationalists love to justify European genocide of the Indians by claiming that they did it first — we were just getting even for all the Imaginary White People slaughtered by Imaginary Barbarous Red Hordes. See also the mythology of the Book of Mormon for further examples. All it’s based on is superficial similarity of some stone tools and several hundred years of White European bias. It is grossly irresponsible of the documentary to bury this association, because you know the show is going to be used by the kinds of ignorant people who get all their information from TV to rationalize further bigotry.
And worst of all, the Solutrean hypothesis is contradicted by the genetic evidence. Not only is the hypothesis built on froth and fantasy and bigotry, it goes against the massive amounts of solid evidence that shows that the native peoples of the Americas are descended from Asian ancestors.
That must have been a terribly hard call at the National Post.
The choice: push a racist story, or paint the CBC in a bad light. They chose to crap on the CBC.
Particularly disappointing is David Suzuki’s seeming endorsement of this. His standing in Canada as a science educator is possibly comparable to Carl Sagan. He definitely would recognize that giving similar airing to global warming deniers wasn’t helpful to the search for truth.
specialfrog@#2: That’s what occurred to me. What the hell was/is he thinking?
“painting themselves blue with woad and bundled up in furs while waving pointy sticks, ”
Just how does that advance the argument? Would they be more able to cross the ice if they were painted red, had no furs and carried stone axes? I would have thought the furs, at least, would be an advantage.
Speaking as a Canadian: Oh Fuck.
#4: See thumbnail from the ‘documentary’ at top right.
This doesn’t look good. But I’m going to wait until I see the documentary before accusing the CBC of racism. As I understand it, there is so little evidence for this “first” European migration (and so MUCH evidence for the Asian migration via Beringia) that it is doubtful that The Nature of Things (which has hitherto been a pretty responsible science journalism program) would go so far as to endorse it. Examining the evidence for an idea that racists have co-opted for their own uses does not make you a racist also, UNLESS you are being deliberately one-sided in your analysis so as to help said racists propagate their foul ideology. After all, truth is truth: to determine the truth of an idea one must examine the evidence for it. Nonetheless, if your purpose is purely the discovery and dissemination of truth it is wise to be aware of the ways in which your research may be misused, and act with due caution to mitigate this eventuality.
Anyone remember the tedious glibertarian Africangenesis, who posted here for quite a while until banhammered? He favoured the equally evidence-free speculation that the first Americans came from Australia, and the later immigrants from Asia exterminated them – rather obviously for no other reason than that this enabled him to say “Well they did it first”, thus “justifying” European settlers’ land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Next they’ll be promoting a couple of fringe historians who claim Jesus is a purely mythical figure!
I haven’t watched it, but I think the original speculation didn’t necessarily have racist intent. In fact, I first learned of the Clovis points in Maryland/Virginia from some very honorable Basque separatists. We know that Magellan didn’t circumnavigate the globe, but was killed in a foolish greedy raid in The Philippines, while his Basque navigators actually made it the whole way. We know that when Hudson encountered Inuits for the first time they referred to cod as bacalao. So the concept of Basque mariners making it around the ice to the Atlantic coast is not THAT far-fetched. They knew of America a thousand years before Columbus, and certainly traded with the Greenland colonies.
But the DNA evidence is damning. It’s like those huge Toltec heads in Veracruz. Yes, they look remarkably like Shaquille O’Neal, but there’s no evidence of some African Kon-Tiki genes in the blood of modern Atlantic coast Mexicans. It’s just a similarity. Whereas Pacific trade may well have happened in pre-Colombian times. Mexican chickens have Asian DNA and Polynesian chiles have Mexican DNA.
Still, it’s sad that Basque maritime pride has been hijacked into white supremacist codswallop.
@9: Yeah, when it was first proposed, it wasn’t a terrible idea… There was no evidence for pre-Clovis development of this type of pressure-flaked lithic technology in North America, and it was generally believed that the people who had migrated via Beringia had a very different technological suite based on microliths. At the time, it seemed like Clovis appeared in the archeological record out of nowhere, and already fully-developed.
However, since then, more evidence of the development of Clovis technology has been found. Between that and the genetic evidence, it is now an ex-hypothesis.
Which means the little green beings also time-travel, as the druids didn’t exist at the time Stonehenge was built. The druids first appeared somewhere about 300 BCE, Stonehenge was built around 2000 years earlier. It was quite possibly already a ruin in druid-ish times, and also quite possibly not used by the druids (other than, perhaps, as a site to plunder?).
(Yes, I realise poopyhead was quite possibly being ironic.)
The Solutrean hypthesis is nothing to do with Basque mariners. The Solutrean culture dates from around 22,000 – 17,000 BP. Do you think they had ships anything like the Basques had just half a millennium ago? There’s no evidence that the Basques “knew of America a thousand years before Columbus”, either. That’s just another of the “X got there before Columbus” tales also told of the Welsh, Irish, West Africans, Chinese, etc. etc. The only pre-Columbus European voyagers to the Americas for which there is any evidence were Vikings.
As a tangent while we’re talking about ideas linked to white supremacy like Solutreans and ancient aliens, I was wondering about sasquatches. Are they just a bit of nonsense folklore or are they also tied to racism? Because the idea someone would ignore all the apes and fossils related to our origin in Africa, and instead insist there must be a missing link in the US, seems off but I’ve never seen it linked to anything else.
@10
I was thinking, really speculating without any evidence, how those “more advanced” tools could have shown up without any genetic evidence which is the case. That it could have been just a very few who made the journey and brought the advance in technology and not a large scale colonization. I have not looked into it but will take it as true that more of the developmental steps have been found which fits better with all the other stuff that has been found. The mind does like to make up stories to fit and stuff is very hard to find that has lost in the dirt for thousands of years. cool
uncle frogy
has been lost that is
sometimes my mind sees stuff that should be there but isn’t
uncle frogy
@14: I’d be careful about describing Clovis as “more advanced”, because it carries value connotations that aren’t necessarily true. It’s true in the narrow sense that Clovis developed from earlier technologies, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. People who’ve done experimental archeology with various different lithic toolsets tend to argue that there isn’t really that much practical difference in terms of how well they work, and that they all have different strengths and weaknesses. The changes in lithic technology probably have at least as much to do with fashion as they do with “progress” in any practical sense. In fact, there are cases where tools are replaced with different styles which don’t work any better, but are much more difficult and time-consuming to make, because they become a means of indicating social status. Clovis points look fantastic, and they may possibly be somewhat better for big-game hunting, but microlith composite blades are repairable and make vastly more efficient use of materials.
Well, on the plus side, Blue Planet II is premiering next Saturday on BBCAmerica.
That, at least, ought to be a good documentary.
@#4 PZ Myers
I laughed when I saw that thumbnail at the top of the post again. The solutrean hypothesis is nonsense (the genetic evidence is overwhelming), but even if pre-neolithic humans had crossed over from Europe in enough numbers to show a genetic trace in the resulting population, they wouldn’t have been Europeans As We Know Them. Those folks came from Neolithic migrations thousands of years later, and from a major set of migrations 5000-ish years ago that brought Corded Ware culture and what ultimately became the Indo-European languages to Europe. The pre-Neolithic modern humans in Europe were completely swamped and have almost entirely disappeared in genetic terms.
The Solutrean hypothesis is also rather old. I to goes back to the 1940s. So it lacks originality among other things. In the documentary they apparently use the evidence of Haplogroup X, which is found among some Europeans has evidence for the Solutrean Hypothesis in so far has some native groups, (A very small percentage.), in North America have it. It appears the documentary ignores that it appears it actually doesn’t support the Solutrean hypothesis. (For example Haplogroup X is found in Asian populations.)
Further it appears that DNA testing of Human remains found in association with Clovis tools shows no sign of European genetic ancestry.
Also there is a c. 5000 year gap between the last of Solutrean culture remains in Europe and the emergence of Clovis in North America. There is also the problem of the lack of maritime tools etc., among the Solutrean remains in Europe. I could go on about how the tool kits are different etc.
If past Nature of Things programs are anything to go by David Suzuki has a soft spot, as indicated by throw away lines in various programs, for diffusionistic speculation.
Obviously the purpose of the program is support the old cliché about the brave, heroic outsiders who are bravely taking on a hidebound establishment with new exciting ideas that the mainstream is unwilling to fairly evaluate. The bottom line is that the Solutrean hypothesis is in fact very unlikely and is now more unlikely than it was 10 years go, 20 years ago, 30 years ago.
Those Solutrean tools found off the east coast of N. American came in with ships’ ballast, which was dumped there, as newly loaded goods started to weigh down the vessels. Ballast had been scooped up in, and along the estuaries of, European rivers to help stabilize ships for the journey to the New World. So there. There goes that hypothesis..
The motivation that the racists have for pushing this is stupid too. You can’t justify genocide by claiming that the long-dead ancestors of your victims did something similar to an offshoot of your own ancestors.
I also don’t see how they get from “proto-europeans migrated to the Americas and then died out” to “so obviously the ancestors of amerindians slaughtered them all”. The racists seem to have taken the limited, debunked evidence they have and invented an elaborate story out of whole cloth to go with it.
I think I might have found the link for this on this blog anyways – but thought I’d share just in case. It is an article from the Southern Poverty Law Centre detailing “alt-history” claims such as these, and how their roots comes from racism and racist ideas.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/02/close-encounters-racist-kind
Paleo-DNA is useful. For instance, only 10% of Brit DNA comes from the Stonehenge builders. They nearly went extinct, probably because of disease brought by the steppe people that entered Europe during the bronze age.
The latter took advantage of the
depopulated lands to establish themselves all over western Europe and merging with the survivors.
Monad @ 13.
Don’t the Sasquatch stories predate the discoveries in Africa?
Oh man, not David Suzuki.
OK, finally looked it up on wikipedia.
So the claim is that a toolset used in parts of Spain and France popped up in North America 5,000 years later, with no archaeological evidence of a continuity in between? People spent time actually investigating this claim?
birgerjohansson @23: The phrase “not so fast” is often applicable to such claims.
Pffff. Are we sure about the hue of their skin? Blue like in Avatar, perhaps?
By the way, whatever happened to the Liberation Front of Solutrea, let alone the Front for the Liberation of Solutreans?
Green. The green gene has been dormant for a while, but who knows when it’ll crop up again?
monad @13: I don’t know that I’d make a direct claim of racism regarding Bigfoot, since it’s generally supposed to be just some sort of undiscovered ape species rather than a human ancestor.that somehow proves that humans didn’t evolve in Africa.
Well, that’s pre-historical archaeology for you… It’s like trying to reconstruct a 1000-piece jigsaw from 10 pieces, most of which are damaged. At the time, the alternative (more mainstream) hypothesis also had a very large gap (actually, a much larger gap, IIRC), and that gap also was assumed to contain the development of a radically different tool-making culture.
Oh, no !! Not the David Suzuki who co-authored Genetic Analysis ?!! Tell me it ain’t so !!!
They are merely pinching my idea that Rochester, NY (where I was living at the time) was founded a long while ago by Irish Monks led by Abbot Ginn of the Rocks, well before the so-called ‘Native Americans’* arrived (led in their turn by a certain Mr Watha), and that further so-called Christopher Columbus was actually a descendant of Mr Watha who was actually called Go-Lum-Bus and his voyages were merely a rather sad attempt to get home after he had been left behind during a European vacation because of a political difference with the cruise director.
See my BEING THE TRUE AND ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE CITY OF HROFÆSCÆSTRA, NOVVM EBORACVM for details.
____________
* or whatever you’d like too so-call them.
The most important tool for refuting white supremacy: the mirror. The poor, inbred, imbecilic nature of white supremacists is self refuting to their hypothesis.
“Oh man, not David Suzuki.”
My husband is a marine biologist, and considered a world-class expert in his field. Mention “David Suzuki” to him or other marine biologists and you get a solid round of groans. I don’t know about Suzuki’s work (documentaries) in other fields but in marine biology he just makes people with actual knowledge of the field cringe at the inaccuracies and false blanket statements.
numerobis @26:
The claim presented in the programme was that tools found in 20,000-year-old deposits at Chesapeake Bay were identical to contemporaneous tools in Europe. I don’t recall the programme discussing a link with the much later Clovis culture, but maybe I missed it.
My overall impression of the doc was “why did they bother?”. The Chesapeake tools were an interesting tidbit. But the show made it quite clear, several times, that most archaeologists and geneticists think the hypothesis (specifically the genetic claims) are nonsense. So why do it? That’s modern science journalism, I guess. Go for the Big Story, even if it’s crap.
@36
“The claim presented in the programme was that tools found in 20,000-year-old deposits at Chesapeake Bay were identical to contemporaneous tools in Europe. I don’t recall the programme discussing a link with the much later Clovis culture, but maybe I missed it.”
Thank you for telling me that the program is not worth watching. The entire idea of the Solutrean hypothesis emerged because of the similarities between Clovis and Folsom points and certain Solutrean tools. Ignoring that does not speak well for this documentary.
We do have pre Folsom tools and they do not resemble Solutrean tools very much. As for the Chesapeake Bay stuff. It is to put it mildly dubious.
I know that in the last decade or more David Suzuki has become the Canadian environmentalist god-king, but he gets the science details wrong on pretty much everything. it’s not just marine biology, as mentioned by Jeanette above, it’s every field. My mom encouraged us to watch The Nature of Things back in the early 80s until they ran a program on something she knew about and was aghast at what was presented. In short, their researchers aren’t very good, and they don’t have experts vet the scripts before producing. But damn, they are good at marketing and branding.
/snark
Shut up SHUT UP SHUUUUTTTTT UUUUPPPP!!!!
Do you have any idea how MUCH fundraising you are screwing up with your “facts” and “evidence”?
Charlatans everywhere work very hard to fleece racist rubes of their filthy lucre – they don’t need YOU queering the pitch.
God, is it SO HARD to just let criminals take advantage of idiots? It’s like you think people should be accurately INFORMED or something.
The Business of America in the 21st Century is Fraud. Please stop interfering with Business.
/end snark
Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe: “A recent Canadian documentary promoted a fringe idea in American archaeology that’s both scientifically wrong and racist”.