Article posted Thursday, June 26, 2014 11:20am

This photo shows two Clovis spear points, one from Illinois and one from Kentucky. The shape is characteristic, with a “flute” along each side that helped attach the stone tip to the shaft of the spear. Usually, sinew was used to affix the point. These were carefully made by Paleo-Indians by chipping away and shaping a piece of flint, a process called “knapping.” These points helped Paleo-Indians kill everything from mammoths to deer. The points are from Paul Burton’s small collection of arrowheads.

It is hard to imagine an America where “no one is home.” Two contradictory and controversial theories prevail among archaeologists and anthropologists as to who settled North America. It is known that 26,000 to 18,000 years ago the Laurentian ice sheet connected Alaska to Siberia. This wide connection formed what has been called “Beringia,” a vast plain of ice that surrounded Alaska and bridged what is now the Bering Sea.

The first settlement theory, the so-called “Clovis” theory, states that from 18,000 to 15,000 years ago a stone-age people from Siberia began moving across Beringia into southern Alaska and then Canada, and finally by 14,000 years ago these Paleo-indians made their way to America. They traveled on land and by skin boats southward along the Pacific Coast to South America. After uniquely shaped spear points of flint were found near Clovis, New Mexico, the new immigrants to North America were referred to as the “Clovis People.”

Clovis points were later discovered all across the U.S. When spear points were found in states along the eastern seaboard of America that differed somewhat from Clovis points, a new theory arose. These points resembled those discovered in France and Spain, where about 21,000 years ago there were stone-age people referred to today as the Solutrean culture. A few archaeologists began to argue that Solutrean people could have crossed into America by migrating along the southern edge of the ice sheet connecting Europe to North America. In America, it was supposed that they established themselves and even gave rise to the Clovis culture. This is the basis of the Solutrean hypothesis, and for years archaeologists debated whether the first Americans were from Siberia or from Europe.

A new study seems to put the matter to rest. The only known human burial linked to the Clovis Culture was recently discovered in Montana. The person was an infant boy buried about 12,500 years ago. A thorough analysis of the genome of this boy revealed that he is closely related to present day Native Americans, and not to European Paleo-indians, and that his DNA matches that of stone-age people in Siberia. The evidence strongly suggests that emigrants from Siberia first arrived in America and removed the “no one at home” sign. (Nature, Feb. 13, 2014, pgs. 162 and 225)