This week’s Nova presented a documentary titled America’s Stone Age Explorers. It is engages in a survey of theories and ideas that are undermining the “Clovis First” hypothesis (that is, that a band of hunters populated the entire continent about 12,000 years ago by moving south from Beringia through a ice-free corridor between the North America ice-caps). What you are witnessing right now is a paradigm shift, though it is more a replacement of a tight and parsimonious hypothesis with a grab-bag of ad hoc models, that is, there is no prime contender for the next establishment theory. A few years ago I read a book on the natural history of North America which stated explicitly that the holes is Clovis are starting to seem too gaping to close and explain, but nevertheless, the author would assume that Clovis was a viable model because there wasn’t anything out there to work with as a plausible alternative. I think we are still at that stage, and part of the problem is that Clovis will not be replaced by a simple and easily characterizable model, but rather a constellation of sub-hypotheses will be assembled in a modular fashion to reconstruct the peopling of the New World. If you read the blog regularly, you will know that I am of the opinion that much of paleoanthropology is going through this shift from simple and elegant models to more messy and complex constructions being driven by contradictory and confusing data. As they say, science is only provisional. It is the process, not the conclusions, that survive the test of time.
The show is probably going to be re-run all week, so check your local listings.
Addendum: The documetary presents genetic evidence that Europeans and Native Americans might share a relationship that ties them together, and so might support the Solutrean Model. But, I think the presence of same haplogroup among the Ket of Central Siberia serves as support for the contention that this was a line that simply was eliminated in Eastern Eurasia over the past few thousand years, and that the Solutrean Model doesn’t get the succor from this data point that one might think. I wish NOVA had talked to someone who could have pointed that out, because it would have made the genetic case for the Solutreans far weaker. The Solutrean Model is sexy, so I guess it makes sense that they wanted to give it a lot of face time.
Posted by razib at 02:37 PM