The Solutrean navy

Right-wing thumb suckers are still trying to bruit about that the Solutrean people Crossed Atlantic Ice, bringing their toolkit to what's now Clovis, NM.

I'd have thought that this was debunked on several levels: that Clovis tech has antecedents just southeast of the Clovis area itself; that genetically the region had already separated into an "Ancestral-A" genome distinct from the "ANC-B" then inhabiting the north Atlantic, who should have met Europeans first. But let's not get into all that today; I've done it before. Let's get into logistics.

Ahoy, mateys! All Aboard, the Solutrean Navy!

That part of Solutrean Culture which was Atlantic-facing belongs to Lisbon, the Basques, and the Vendée 20kBC-15kBC; they had a further presence all up and down the Spanish Med, and what's now Marseilles. It is Palaeolithic hunter-gathering still, during the harsh Ice Age, which is why they overhauled their stone implements. It fits temporally between Gravettian [UPDATE 5/5/22 in the west] and Magdalenian, seguing into the latter. Genetically the Magdalenian type elsewhere in Europe (where DNA this ancient is preserved better) looks to be Aurignacian throwbacks. Karen Bojs had them as refugees into North Africa reclaiming their homes. Magdalenian then, in the Mesolithic, genetically becomes Western Hunter Gatherers; the farmers would push them all the way to Scandinavia, before the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas. (I hate to belabour the point but none of this proto-WHG crops up in the Americas until Columbus.)

That the Solutreans hugged the coasts, and that that they seem to have skipped wide coastlines of Portugal and northern Spain, demands some means of travel between them. Internally Spain's climate works much like central India's, thus allowing - demanding, in fact - some nomadism by foot in the more-clement months. Still, their arrival from Africa, and their domination of the whole calmer Med side of the Strait, implies that the Solutreans did own a fleet, at least on the western side. Possibly even a fishing-fleet although I expect their main seafood diet will have been mollusc-gathering and spear-fishing.

At to what the fleet looked like: rafting will have been a necessity to cross unbridged rivers, and maybe large populations rafted the Strait. But nobody is skirting Atlantic glaciers on a raft.

A rowboat can navigate ocean currents more accurately. The Pesse dugout canoe is admittedly Neolithic and Atlantic but its dugout plan was surely available to the Palaeolithic Med. I won't be surprised to see Palaeolithic dugouts drudged from Aegean island harbours in my lifetime.

But that's the warm, island-dotted Mediterranean. You need something stronger for the Atlantic. Stronger than a Gascon dugout.

You need a full ship: made of fitted wooden boards sealed with bitumen. Do we see any of this before the Bronze Age?

As for the spread of this tech - as of 20kBC, between Alaska and Siberia was a land-bridge, "Beringia". This was already populated by some Siberians who'd not picked up the Solutrean kit; they didn't need that kit. (They didn't need boats either.) These Beringians flowed as far as Monte Verde by 13kBC and - which is why we're talking about this - still weren't Solutrean. By the time Bering strait isolated this new world, in 9kBC, both its continents were already full and in places Neolithic itself I think.