" When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.
Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.
Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.
Its makers probably paddled from Europe and arrived in America thousands of years ahead of the western migration, making them the first Americans, argues Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Dennis Stanford." [Washington Post]
Some version of the Solutrean hypothesis is beginning to look almost inescapable. It is almost impossible that Asians could have reached the American heartland before the Bolling interstadial of ca. 14,500 years ago. Yet this find, as well as those at Cactus Hill and Meadowcroft, are thouosands of yeas older than that (see Roots of Cataclysm, Algora Publ. NY 2009).
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