Cortez archaeologist Bruce Bradley is at the center of an archeological controversy for suggesting that stone-age settlers first came to North America from Western Europe by sea, not by crossing the Bering Strait land bridge.

Bradley, along with Smithsonian Institute Chair of Anthropology Dennis Stanford, is refuting the traditional theory that claims the first immigrants crossed over the famous land bridge from Siberia, and instead is proposing that these settlers navigated from Europe by boat, cruising along the receding edge of a glacier in the North Atlantic.

The traditional human migration theory claims that woolly mammoth hunters migrated southward after crossing the Bering Strait about 11,500 years ago. They are identified by their distinctive spear points known as Clovis Points.

Bolstered by recent discoveries of possible pre-Clovis settlements in South America and in the eastern United States, Bradley and Stanford have come up with a new theory: that the earliest inhabitants of North American could have arrived here by boat over the North Atlantic from western Europe.

They cite a style of spear points discovered along the west coast of Spain that are similar to Clovis, and suggest that an ocean route along the ice surrounding modern Iceland and Greenland would have been possible, given the more southern orientation of glaciers in the North Atlantic some 16,000 years ago.

"Our theory is that one of the founding populations that becomes what we identify as Clovis probably came from southwestern Europe, and not from Asia," Bradley said. "It has proven to be impossible to get Clovis people out of Asia."

The two men base their claim in part on the fact that no artifacts have been found on opposite ends of the Bering Strait land bridge that resemble Clovis spear-point technology. However, an ancient European culture known as the Solutrean people that lived between 25,000 and 16,500 years ago in what is now Spain did have a flaked stone spear that is very similar to the Clovis style. That is more likely the Clovis-point’s predecessor, considering the evidence, said Bradley, a well-known and nationally published expert on flaked-stone technology.

"There are virtually identical Clovis-like points perched on the coast in southwest Europe," Bradley said. "I think that we can make the case that it appears first in the southeastern U.S., where we have found pre-Clovis sites in eastern Virginia and western Pennsylvania. That evidence has not turned up in the interior, Canada, Alaska or Siberia."

OCEAN TRAVEL BIAS

Bradley said one bias preventing his theory from being widely accepted is that many Western educators believe early inhabitants of the world were not sufficiently advanced or smart enough to use the ocean for long-distance travel.

"There is anti-ocean bias here that implies a Stone Age people could not possibly have had the technology for open-sea navigation because even later Phoenician civilizations, known as great sailors, were not known to cross the oceans," Bradley said.

But he and Stanford counter that glacial conditions during the end of the Solutrean period made coastal migration along the North Atlantic edge of the glaciers much more calm and travel-friendly than during the sailing craze of the Phoenician era some 8,000 to 10,000 years later.

Prehistoric peoples in Australia were also known to have capable, seafaring boats about 50,000 years ago.

"Proving how they got across the ocean is turning out to be the least of our worries because our route seems very plausible considering studies that suggest these seas were a lot different back then along the ice-sheet border," Bradley said. "There was more food and fishing, better currents, plenty of driftwood, and of course plenty of fresh water.

"Scientists are also finding evidence that towards the end of the Solutrean, the edge of the North Atlantic glaciers was much farther south, ending right above Spain, which would have shortened the trip west considerably. They followed the food source as the oceans rose, inundating the land due to the end of the Ice Age."

Supporters of the coastal-migration theory say the new idea for New World migration and travel works because it would have been easier and faster, and would help to explain possible pre-Clovis artifacts found at Monte Verde, a settlement 10,000 miles from the Bering Strait on the southern coast of Chile.

METHODS QUESTIONED

The Monte Verde evidence is being challenged by some archeologists, including Dr. Stuart J. Fiedel, who claims in a recent article of Scientific American Discovering Archaeology that the studies are erroneous and are not conclusive of a pre-Clovis settlement.

Other critics of Stanford and Bradley’s North Atlantic theory argue that the two should have put their findings through a peer-review process and been published in professional journals before going to mainstream press outlets, including Newsweek and the New York Times .

Bradley says he and Stanford have not looked for publicity, but rather the frenzy of interest in alternate theories stems from the discovery in 1997 of a 9,300 year-old skeleton with European characteristics, dubbed "Kennewick Man," who may have arrived after the Bering Straight land bridge was gone.

"They’re right, we should have had the peer-review journal articles, but what are we going to say, ‘We won’t talk to you?’ It’s not something we sought out," said Bradley.

The facial reconstruction of the Kenniwick skull has led to controversy because it doesn’t resemble modern Native Americans’ modern bone structure, casting a new light on less traditional migration theories to the continent from southern Asia, Europe and elsewhere via the sea. The issue is relevant because under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Indian tribes must prove ancestry before reclaiming artifacts or ancient bones stored in museums for re-burial or ceremonial uses.

MORE EVIDENCE NEEDED

Dr. Philip Duke, a professor of anthropology at Fort Lewis College, said that Bradley’s theory is "provocative and should be taken seriously considering his caliber as a researcher," but adds that further evidence needs to be obtained before the idea is proven.

"Archaeologists need to collect a lot more evidence from either end of the route and also from the temporary camps along the actual migration paths themselves, which usually do not have much material," Duke said. "Also you need to determine whether or not the similarities between the European material and the North American material were produced by migration or by independent invention."

He points out that it is difficult to prove a pre-Clovis site such as the one at Monte Verde because of geologic shifts over millennia that mix artifacts of different time frames together, potentially skewing the historical context and related data.