Let us stress again that the Folsom and Eden chipping reached a
perfection unknown in Europe until neolithic man brought in agriculture.
Indeed, if the paleolithic Solutrean points had never been found, _all_
American archaeologists—instead of just one or two—might unhesitatingly
have called Folsom and Eden neolithic, even though they were found with
extinct animals. In the history of Europe’s Old Stone Age—and in
Africa’s, too, for that matter—we have no more than one hint of such
work. It was only the men of the Solutrean culture—thrust between the
late Aurignacian and the early Magdalenian—who took much true advantage
of pressure flaking, and who made spear points with Sandia-like
shoulders. (While the flint chipping of the Solutreans is fine, it is
not so minute or so perfect as the work of the men who made Folsom and
Eden points.) With the disappearance of the Solutreans, the art of fine
flint knapping and point making faded away in the Old World, not to
appear again with any vigor until neolithic times.
The Solutreans are not a part of the flow and development of prehistoric
European culture. They seem to come as invaders, and then fade out after
500 years, or, at the most, 10,000. Where they came from is uncertain.
Because crude points called Proto-Solutrean are much more plentiful
along the Danube than they are in France—where the finest Solutrean work
is found—it has long been argued that the people who made them came from
western Asia. Lately, flint work of the Solutrean type has been
discovered in Morocco and also in Egypt;[7] and, since it is intermixed
with the products of a much older culture, the Mousterian, it may be
argued that the Solutreans came from Africa. The theory of an eastern
origin remains strong, however; for among the African flints are
shouldered points, and shouldered points were not developed until the
end of the Solutrean period in Europe. We do not know the date of the
Mousterian in Africa; it may have been late.
If the Solutreans did, in fact, originate in Asia, can we believe that
an Asiatic people with an unusual flair for flint knapping fathered both
the Solutreans and the men who made the Sandia and the far finer Folsom
and Eden points? Did this parent stock send a group of migrants across
Bering Strait and down into the High Plains to give us Folsom, Sandia,
and Eden points? Did it throw off toward the west a group that practiced
the Solutrean arts in Europe? Even after archaeologists have dug Siberia
thoroughly we may never know how much earlier or later the American
offshoot appeared on the High Plains than the Solutreans in Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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