http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1013315/posts
Always the focus on Asia as the origin of Clovis. Why couldn't this "technology" have come from across the Atlantic instead of the Pacific?
The recently aired documentary on NOVA (PBS), "America's Stone Age", examined just this possibility, among others.
What was demonstrated conclusively is that many other groups of humans on the American continent could have been here as long as 30,000 years ago.
"Always the focus on Asia as the origin of Clovis. Why couldn't this "technology" have come from across the Atlantic instead of the Pacific?"
Well, it probably could have, but there are problems with crossing the Atlantic versus the Pacific.
For starters, Alaska and Siberia practically touch, so even though it would still take boats, there is no point in a crossing from Asia to the Americas that anybody ever had to get out of sight of land.
Now, granted, the Polynesians, in particular, threw caution to the wind and voyaged in tiny little boats and colonized far from the sight of land - Hawaii for instance and, apparently, the West Coast of the Americas at some point.
But there isn't a record of there being OTHER seafaring peoples that brave! The Mediterraneans hugged the coast. It is not possible to cross the Atlantic staying within sight of land, and the only place where land is even relatively close is the UK/Iceland/Greeland gaps (the GIUK Gap). And THAT is far north, and cold and icy as hell. The Vikings managed this, but certainly in the thousands of years of Western history since Rome and Greece, there isn't much reason to believe anybody else did it.
Stone Age Polynesians crossing the Central Pacific is brave, but not impossible, because the central Pacific is, well, largely PACIFIC. More importantly, it's WARM. Those Polynesians could dip their paddles and indeed their whole bodies right in that water. Stone age hunters of mammoths and seals walking through the cold and bridging with skin boats a small water gap they could see across is eminently plausible.
But the waters between Iceland and Scotland, or Greenland and Iceland? You can't see across them. Not even close. It's a long, long, long way. The water is ROUGH. This ain't the Pacific tropics but the North Atlantic, which isn't warm even in the summer. Granted there's the Gulf Stream. Could they follow that? Without sails, paddling AGAINST the current? Maybe. It'd be very hard though, and though warm, it's not THAT warm.
Crossing the North Atlantic isn't crossing the Pacific. It's a lot harder and nastier and colder. Doing it on the broad North Atlantic where it isn't cold would have been simply impossible. I suppose the crossing from Saharan Africa to Brazil was possible, though far, but there isn't evidence that Blacks did it.
The only place it could have really been done would have been across the GIUK Gap, and that's frigid, and violent weather, and there are no way-stations on the way. The Vikings were a lot higher tech than the stone agers, and the passage was not trivial for them, with their sails.
Possible, still? Sure.
But not as likely as the Asian crossing.