The Clovis culture (less frequently referred to as the Llano culture in the Plains and SW today) is a prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 11,000 radiocarbon years ago, at the end of the last ice age. Our best guess at present suggests this is equal to roughly 13,000 calender years ago.
The culture is named for artifacts found in the Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout much, but not all, of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America, and even into Northern South America (see Pearson and Ream in Current Research in the Pleistocene 2005, Volume 22).
The Clovis people, one of several Paleo-Indians groups, were long regarded as the first human inhabitants of the New World, and ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America.
The controversial Solutrean hypothesis proposed in 1999 by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford and colleague Bruce Bradley (Stanford and Bradley 2002), suggests that the Clovis people could have inherited technology from the Solutrean people who lived in southern Europe 21,000-15,000 years ago, and who created the first Stone Age artwork in present-day southern France. The link is suggested by the similarity in technology between the projectile points of the Solutreans and those of the Clovis people. Such a theory would require that the Solutreans crossed via the edge of the pack ice in the North Atlantic Ocean that then extended to the Atlantic coast of France. They could have done this using survival skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people. Supporters of this hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia), that are knapped in a style between Clovis and Solutrean, support a possible link between the Clovis people and Solutrean people in Europe.
Mitochondrial DNA analysis (see Map in Single-origin hypothesis) has found that some members of some native North American tribes have a maternal ancestry (called haplogroup X) (Schurr 2000), which appears to be more closely linked to the maternal ancestors of some present day individuals in Europe and western Asia than to the ancestors of any present-day individuals in eastern Asia. |
