Game animals may have been negatively impacted so that both animals and humans had to move to better areas -- most likely along the rivers and coastlines of Southwestern Europe where they could hunt and fish. Solutrean artists left evidence in rock art, which shows sea mammals, deep water fish, and great auks.
Faunal collections also show Solutreans were making use of marine resources, which were available all year round. All this would have required tool kits, waterproof clothes, nets, harpoons, and watercraft.
The authors theorize that seal would have played a large role in their lives. Probably, the Solutreans developed techniques for hunting seal during a colder period, and when the weather got warmer they would have had to travel farther out to find seals, eventually making extended trips. They came to the Atlantic Coast by following the migration of Canadian seals. Some families decided to stay. The authors state that artifacts of pre-Clovis people have been found in Eastern North America showing transitional technologies between Solutrean and Clovis.
In "Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis Connection," Strauss, Meltzer and Goebel refute the notion that America was colonized by Europeans. They say that Bradley and Stanford grossly exaggerated the similarities between the technologies of the two cultures and that they ignored the differences. They point out the assertion that overshot techniques were used only by Solutrean and Clovis people are "empirically unsubstantiated." This type of flaking was not exclusive to the...
They also say large blades were rare because of a shortage of raw materials. Although nearly half of Solutrean concave base points had unifacially flaked points, such points are rare or absent in Clovis. Clovis points were bifacial. Texas Clovis points are fluted on both faces, Solutrean are not. The stemmed points and corner notched points frequently seen in Solutrean sites are not found in Clovis. Solutrean assemblages include burins, but not Clovis. Solutreans heat-treated their raw materials frequently, but Clovis did not. Perhaps most compelling is the argument that art is absent in Clovis culture but abundant in Salutrean, who left rock art and cave art, freizes and sculpted images. If the Salutrean people were artists, that wouldn't disappear as a result of crossing the Ocean -- in fact, it would probably increase. Solutrean people produced non-perishable art; Clovis people did not. Clovis caves and rock shelters do not include paintings, drawings, engravings or bas reliefs in Solutrean style.
The authors also argue that the Solutrean people were not seal hunters. They could not have lived in the Southern British Isles because ice reduced the human range to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula. Southern Britain wasn't re-inhabited until 12,500 B.P. This makes it highly unlikely that Solutreans were there hunting seals and navigating on the North Atlantic Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum. The authors also claim there is a 5000-year radiocarbon gap between Solutrean and Clovis which needs to be explained.
