Marcia Bakry/Department of Anthropology/Smithsonian Institution
Iberia, Not Siberia? According to the Solutrean hypothesis, early Americans traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World via sea ice in the Atlantic Ocean. This map shows two possible routes.
A new book questions conventional wisdom by arguing that the Clovis culture derived from European, not Asian, immigrants. By David Malakoff
W
hile working in Alaska some years ago, archaeologist Dennis Stanford watched a small group of Inuit villagers set out to sea in an umiak, an open boat traditionally made of animal hides stretched over a wood or whalebone frame. “It had to have been 40 degrees below freezing that day, with
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the winds at 20 knots,” he recalled recently. Ice fringed the shoreline. “It might seem crazy to a lot of people, but they knew how to handle the climate.” Today, Stanford believes similarly frigid voyages some 20,000 years ago helped carry some of North America’s first
summer • 2012
