Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The idea that the ancient peoples of the Americas migrated not from the steppes of east Asia, but from prehistoric France, seems at best like a bad joke, and at worst like a radical misinterpretation of almost all available evidence.
However, there is a surprising amount of evidence which suggests what is known as the “Solutrean Hypothesis” might actually be a possibility. The claims that the Americas were first populated by settlers from Europe who traveled across pack ice to cross the Atlantic Ocean should not be dismissed so quickly.
It is a theory that massively contradicts the current academic thinking that people traveled from Asia across the Bering Strait to Alaska, to be sure. But one we go back that far, almost everything is extrapolation, if not outright guesswork.
The Solutrean Hypothesis claims that around 21,000 years ago, people from the Eastern region of France migrated to North America and brought with them their unique lithic (stoneworking) techniques. These were dispersed across the Americas and developed into the Clovis lithic technique made famous in the Americas.
