My reply to a FReepmail:
> Maybe this is too dumb to put on the board; but if they left Spain, drifted ...
Not dumb at all, that's the route Columbus made.
But heading out to blue water means provisioning: salted meat, barrels of water, veggies in straw, etc. A military-style naval expedition that I don't think was possible 20,000 years ago.
Note that even with sail, Columbus's ships were out of victuals by the time they got to San Salvador (or Cuba or whereever). And I doubt anyone once making landfall would stay on the water in a primative boat, up past the US coast and then decided Nova Scotia is the place to be ...
Sailing across Atlantic.
Quite likely different people used different routes, just as the Europeans did after Colombus. Also there is some shifting of the currents as the earth gets warmer or cooler. Ancient man was probably much better at living from materials harvested from the sea. The Spaniards were already too "civilized" to be so good at that. The great polynesian voyages were much longer than Atlantic ones and they managed to transport women children and livestock and settly many of the Pacific islands.
In terms of our own history. The Spaniards settled the Caribbean and the south using the Equatorial Current. The English took the northern current and ended up in New England instead of Virginia where they were trying to go.
The article postulates that the Europeans came over in the process of hunting seals. Meaning that their boats would have stayed close to the Northern ice. Paddle for a while, find a seal colony on an ice floe, hunt some seal, eat some seal, paddle west some more. Ice is fresh water -- don't need barrels. Eskimos have been surviving just fine for millenia on a diet of seals and fish (no fruit grows in the polar regions)