Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?
Even before the discovery of Folsom made early man in America look like a fugitive from that village in France called Solutré, anthropologists were struck by other resemblances. In 1924 the Englishman Sollas compared the Eskimo culture with the Magdalenian.[9] In 1932 Hrdlička was writing of an Aurignacian and Magdalenian ancestry for the American Indian.[10] In 1933 N. C. Nelson was playing with such comparisons, and writing of our “wooden spear and spear-thrower, perhaps of Magdalenian affinity; our three out of four forms of Solutrean chipped blades; our ordinary Aurignacian-like endscraper; our simple Mousterian type flake; and, finally, our Abbevillian and Chellean varieties of the coup-de-poing.”[11] In the same year Harrington was going further. Recalling that in 1921 he had reported flint work in Cuba that was Aurignacian in style, Harrington pointed out that the Solutrean never reached the West Indies. “Man in a Magdalenian stage of development ... reached America, probably via Asia, but perhaps from Europe via Iceland and Greenland. These bands kept to the north, following up the retreating glaciers, and became the ancestors of the Eskimo.”[12] Thomas Jefferson had somewhat the same idea when he wrote that the Eskimos “must be derived from the Groenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent.”[13]
Must we add the Aurignacians and Magdalenians of the end of the New Stone Age to the Solutreans and the Australoids as early invaders of America? The answer is dubious, for as yet northern Asia has yielded only a little evidence of the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian.