(This is more of a summary of a few of the arguments than an actual review.)
By way of a review, I really liked the book. Great read. It covers a vast intellectually and disciplinary space and reading it was a sheer delight.
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Clovis culture is based on stone tools: most other materials are gone, and no "Clovis" bodies have ever been found. So, no DNA trace of Solutreans. [Of course, other sources note widespread Euro DNA components across the East and Great Lake regions, as you know.]
There is no precursor to Clovis (pre-Clovis) in NE Asia or Beringia, but there is on the East Coast.
They also rebute the criticism that there is a big time gap between Clovis and Solutrean (5000 years): new evidence erases that gap.
The center of the Clovis culture is the east Coast, even though most of its sites were submerged after the last Glacial Maximum (LGM). A succession of sites show the gradual expansion of Clovis culture in the East. beginning with oldest sites that have limited knowledge of where to harvest rocks to make stone tools, to the later sites that demonstrated broad geographical knowledge that allows them to pick and choose perferred stone types over vast regions.
The expansion of the Clovis culture westwards is illustrated by the finds of caches: stockpiles of tools that were the basis of expansion into areas with unknown stone resources. The caches illustrate the use of easterly sources of stone by communities moving westwards, and chart a path of expansion west and northwards into the Great Plains. Clovis will reach Alaska but only as part of a mixed cultural-technology that may indicate technology transfer to other peoples. Since the east was the core region, western extensions of the cultural region illustrate more specialization and simpler tool kits.
The gap between glaciers over the Great lakes and Pacific seacoast of Alaska and British Columbia opened from the bottom, so Clovis culture intrudes into the corridor long before other (Asian) cultural relics are found there.
Accepting a possible European-Solutrean origin, the most likely homeland based on the present state of archeology is the submerged plain that is today the Bay of Biscay. Comparable Solutrean lithic technology is found along the north coast of Spain, but the majority of this cultural region is underwater. The core area of the Soltreans who colonized the New World was small and the number of people involved was small, but they prospered. And it is underwater on both sides of the Atlantic. Discovery of mammoth bones off Delmarva on the sea floor by fishermen (who knew?) is a hint of how much remains to be found underwater. (They note that in a recent drought in Florida, 54 "perishable" canoes were found on the dry floor of the lake. Of course, these canoes were much more recent than Clovis.)
In one tantalizing anecdote [p. 110], a genuine French Solutrean point was found in the possessions of a man who lived in Virginia in the 1700s. He lived in an area with Clovis culture and he had visited France. Did he bring it back with him (they were popular tourist souvenirs) or did he find it locally???
Could Clovis be independently developed? The authors argue that the more complex an artifact, the more likely it is to be based on inherited cultural tradition, noting the extreme persistence of Lithic technologies. Clovis technologies are very complex in design and the steps required for fabrication. Many steps are aesthetic rather than utilitarian and such aesthetic considerations are incorporated even though it takes more skill and risks breaking usable tools: such features in Clovis/Solutrean make them even more likely to be related. Conclusion: no independent discovery. Clovis is Solutrean.
One compelling argument in the conclusion is that if the current body of evidence linking Clovis to Solutrean linked Clovis to Asia, it would be immediately accepted, and they appeal for the same standards of evidence that are used when judging claims of Asian origins be used to judge claims of Solutrean-Clovis ties.
They note that in some instances, the artifacts are so similar that if they were both found in Europe, instead of one in North American and one in Europe, that the question would not be whether they represented the same lithic tradition, but whether they were produced by the same man.
"Our guess is that no one would question the Solutrean origin of Clovis is Solutrean sites were found in northwestern Asia instead of southwestern Europe." [p. 185]
What happened to them?: The authors only offer a bit of speculation and a call for further research: In Europe absorbed by Magdalenan culture (maybe flooding of the Biscay plain limited their numbers and resources) and still around, maybe, among Basques, and in North America, they are still here among the Eastern Indians. (BTW--Did you ever see Passamoquaddy (sp?) of Maine? They look like Danes to me, but they are newer than the Solutreans, more like a remnant of the Celt-Iberians who built that "Stonehenge" in New Hampshire 5500 years ago.) (Oddly they think Kennewick man is Southeast Asian in origin: I have lost track of that debate.)
This is a very careful and scholarly book. The authors are careful to honestly explain the limitations of their findings, problems and directions for future research. I await their next work.
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