There are occasions when scientific thought must undergo a paradigm shift by rejecting old theories and acknowledging the new. Stanford and Bradley present a new theory; that the Solutreans from western Europe arrived in North America with their elegant laurel leaf points well before Clovis points were in use. Well researched, with a wealth of detail, this book lays out motive, opportunity, and the ability of the Solutreans to travel along the North Atlantic ice face in the same manner modern Inuit survive in their Arctic home. Yes, it is a provocative theory that will raise the ire of the politically correct, but isn’t that the way advances in human knowledge have always been? ( )

I will admit that I read only the introduction and the summary of this rather technical book. The average lay person will probably do the same as pages of drawings of flint points are rather dry reading. Some may trumpet this work as proof that the America's were peopled from Europe rather than Asia in furtherance of some theory or other. The author's theories are far more modest. They point out that the Beringian hypothesis has been challenged on several fronts. Furthermore, ancestral forms of Clovis style weapons have not been found in NE Asia or in N Central North America, where they might be expected. On the other hand, they lay out convincing comparisons of Clovis points to the productions of the Solutrean cultures that lived along the icy northern shore of the Iberian Peninsula during the last great ice age. They hypothesize tha peoples reliant on hunting sea mammals along the pack ice could have moved north and west and eventually reached N. America, eventually abandoning marine resources and moving inland. Quite an interesting idea. The main problem with verification is rising sea levels submerged much of the land on which these peoples would have lived, making discovery of artifacts difficult.

This is a masterful presentation of a fascinating new dimension to Native American studies, anthropological and prehistoric. It should be useful to the professional, but it is quite readable to the serious amateur. ( )