Agora: Red Deer Polytechnic Undergraduate Journal
Volume 14:1 2023 Agora Conference Proceedings

The Solutrean Hypothesis and the Epistemology of
White Supremacy
Ben Meier
Twenty-one thousand years ago, before the Last Glacial Maximum, thousands of years before the
Age of Discovery’s proliferation of European oceangoing trade and exploration, some believe sealskin boats crossed the Atlantic Ocean, then the host of an ice bridge.1 These voyages would begin
as modest hunting trips in search of seals, escalating--possibly by accident--into thousands of
kilometers across the ocean.2 The ocean would be intensely harsh and frigid, demanding the utmost
physical agility and stamina in their seal-skin boats that would quickly wear out from overexposure
to the seawater.3 Over months, the voyagers would make their way through the sea ice into a stopand-go routine. First, after their vessel was on the verge of wearing out, they would rest on a glacier
in the warmth of it so it would dry enough for reuse.4 Then, they would go back out on the water
to traverse further, repeating this sequence until, finally, North America was reached unexpectedly.
Conventional wisdom states that the first North Americans came here from Asia via the Beringia
land bridge.5 However, there are other interpretations of history that suggest migration to the
continent came in the opposite cardinal direction, most likely by such seal-skin boats. The
“Solutrean hypothesis” posits that members of the Solutrean culture of the Solutré region of France
and the southwestern coast of Europe were the first to colonize North America. 6 Since its first
proper instance in scientific literature in 2004, the Solutrean hypothesis has been widely

Phillips, “SOLUTREAN SEAL HUNTERS,” 580.
Phillips, 580.
3
Phillips, 578.
4
Phillips, 578.
5
Bradley and Stanford, Across Atlantic Ice, 67.
6
Bradley and Stanford, 67.
1
2

discredited as being unsubstantiated.7 Despite this, it has become a minor fascination of both
popular and alternative cultures, becoming the subject of popular science journalism, and most
concerningly, agitprop of the political far-right. Given the scientific inaccuracy of the proposition,
what explains the continued relevance of the Solutrean hypothesis? Its most remarkable
implication is that it reorientates the human origin of North America as fundamentally European,
a profound revision of history that contravenes the self-conceptual autonomy of Indigenous and
non-European people of the continent. Because of its historical implications, the continued
relevance of the Solutrean hypothesis suggests that it is an epistemic device that legitimizes white
supremacy both within the fringes of the far right and the mainstream media.
The Solutrean hypothesis is the product of a 120-year history – once an obscure assemblage
of various studies of Paleolithic America eventually consolidated into the proper theoretical
proposition that we understand it as today by the early 2000s.8 The concept was given its
foundation by the American naturalist Charles Abbott in 1892, who was among the first to study
paleolithic life on the North American continent, comparing them to ones found in Europe.9 But
the discoveries prior to the 70s were merely setting the stage for the true development of the
Solutrean hypothesis.
In 1970, approximately 74 kilometers east of the Virginia Capes, Captain Charles Thurston
Shawn and the crew of the small wooden scallop trawler the Cinmar reeled in the skull of a
mastodon while dredging.10 While cleaning the bone from the dredge, they discovered something
else within the remains: a stone tool.11 This tool - a thin, sharp, bifacially flaked rhyolite knife12,

Vastag, "Radical theory of first Americans,” February 2012.
Phillips, “SOLUTREAN SEAL HUNTERS,” 573.
9
Meltzer, The Great Paleolithic War, 41-70.
10
Stanford et al, “New Evidence for a Possible Paleolithic Occupation,” 74.
11
Eren, Boulanger, and O’Brien, “The Cinmar Discovery,” 708.
12
Dennis Stanford et al, “New Evidence for a Possible Paleolithic Occupation,” 75.
7
8

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nearly 8 inches long13 - demonstrated skilled workmanship, given the difficulty of flaking rhyolite
correctly. The lithic technique used to construct this tool resembled that of the Clovis culture, a
Paleoamerican culture seemingly predating all other inhabitants of North America, whose sites
had been discovered across the continent since the 1930s.14 The crew of the Cinmar did not know
this, of course. Nor did they care to. So, absentmindedly, they split up what they wanted to keep
amongst themselves and either tossed what they didn’t want overboard or sold it to Gwynn’s Island
Museum on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula.15 Captain Shawn took notice of these discoveries,
making sure to note the water depth and the area on his navigation charts for future reference. 16
However, the location of these charts is unknown.17 Every detail of the Cinmar discovery, from
when to where exactly it took place, has been approximated by crewmates and confounded by the
second-hand accounts of researchers. The story was inconsistent, and the crew of the Cinmar did
not recognize it as all that significant anyway. But a group of researchers and scholars took notice
of it: whatever was found off the coast of Virginia should not have been there.18 Over the next 40
years, research was conducted on the Clovis and Solutrean cultures, piecing together their artifacts.
The Solutrean hypothesis was initially proposed by American researchers Dennis Stanford
and Bruce Bradley in 2004 in the journal World Archeology.19 They argued that the Solutreans
possessed a twofold advantage: (1) they existed before the Last Glacial Maximum, giving them an
ice sheet in the North Atlantic to travel beside or across by wood-frame or seal-skin boats, and (2)
they had the technical aptitude to construct, unprecedented for that time in human history.20 Upon

Vastag, "Radical theory of first Americans,” February 2012.
Vastag, February 2012.
15
Eren, Boulanger, and O’Brien, “The Cinmar Discovery,” 709
16
Eren, Boulanger, and O’Brien, 709
17
Eren, Boulanger, and O’Brien, 710
18
Vastag, "Radical theory of first Americans,” February 2012
19
Bradley and Stanford, “The North Atlantic Ice-Edge Corridor,” 465.
20
Vastag, "Radical theory of first Americans,” February 2012.
13
14

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reaching the east coast of North America, the Solutrean colonists spread throughout the continent,
settling as far south as present-day New Mexico and as north as eastern Canada and Alaska.21 The
scientific community has laid four main charges of implausibility against the hypothesis: (1) it is
chronologically inconsistent,22 (2) it lacks cultural evidence,23 (3) it lacks physical and genetic
evidence,24 and (4) it is oceanographically ahistorical,25 therefore, making the geographic
separation between the Clovis and Solutrean cultures a weak point in the theoretical integrity of
the hypothesis.26 This repudiation effectively ended its life as a credible scientific idea, leaving its
corpse to be taken up by less empirical domains.
The scientific community’s near-unanimous dismissal of the Solutrean hypothesis
prompted it to permanently relocate to the domain of pop-sci clickbait because of the concept’s
lopsided ratio of speculative intrigue against insubstantial evidence, making it particularly
palatable to the attention economy. Given the North American continent’s long and profoundly
violent history of European colonialism, the seemingly inoffensive alternative interpretation of
history has become politically charged. Beginning in the 2010s, the Solutrean hypothesis became
mainstream thanks to a novelty-seeking media, indifferent to the consequences of their actions in
the public sphere.27 These consequences came in many wildly unlike forms, ranging from the wellmeaning to the worst of tastes. On one end, there’s CBC’s The Nature of Things episode “Ice
Bridge,”28 a David Suzuki-hosted TV documentary matter-of-factly interviewing many of the
scientists – including Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley – distilling their research into 44-minute-

21

Bradley and Stanford, Across Atlantic Ice, 2-84.
Straus, “Solutrean Settlement of North America?” 220.
23
Straus, 223-224.
24
Straus, 223-224.
25
Straus, 223-224.
26
Straus, 221.
27
Vastag, "Radical theory of first Americans,” February 2012.
28
The Nature of Things.
22

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long infotainment. On the other far less benign end, the Solutrean hypothesis has served as fodder
for aberrant, fringe literature such as Kyle Bristow’s self-published far-right extremist epic White
Apocalypse. The novel follows “a rogue anthropologist [who] teams up with a proponent of the
Solutrean Hypothesis and a fiery lawyer” to reveal (to the dismay of the liberal status quo)29 that
Solutreans, are explicitly depicted as white people. Not only were the first North Americans but
were the first to be “systemically murdered” by invading colonists in the form of non-white
“Amerindians” who crossed the Bering Strait.30 Although this media is not at the forefront of
everyday conversation, it is put out consistently enough in the background of the cultural current
for it to be endemic of larger social forces: the drumming up of the id of Western culture. The
continued relevance of the Solutrean hypothesis suggests not that it possesses some unfairly
neglected empirical merit that demands reassessment by the scientific community but that the
concept serves a particular purpose in the culture that captured it.
The adoption of the Solutrean hypothesis into the mainstream media and the ideological
vernacular of the far-right could be described as a kind of kitsch phenomenon. In the essay “On
the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste,’” German scholar
Winfried Minninghaus describes Benjamin’s definition as being an aesthetic that “offers
instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of
distance [found in classical works of art], without sublimation. It usually presents no difficulties
in interpretation and has nothing to do with the aesthetics of negativity.”31 The term is typically
relegated to the arts but has been adopted by cultural criticism to describe the “kitschification” of
culture or the “mass diffusion of art through the diverse media: radio, TV, large-scale reproduction,

“Kyle Bristow.” Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.
Bristow, White Apocalypse, synopsis.
31
Benjamin and Rice, Walter Benjamin, 41.
29
30

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records, cheap magazines and paperbacks sold in supermarkets, etc.”32 Applying this concept to
the proliferation of the Solutrean hypothesis, it can be understood as a mild aesthetic of white
supremacy (European indigeneity in North America, triumphant colonization, etc.) which offers
instantaneous emotional gratification in its simplicity and its appeal to white-dominated North
America. This aesthetic is then diffused through mass culture, disseminating its ideas covertly
regardless of the intention or distance between the creators that propagate it. The effect of the
Solutrean hypothesis, as it remains in mass and alternative cultures today, is white supremacy
taking up a conceptual framework to express itself, whether covertly or overtly, allowing its danger
to hide in plain sight. This cultural malleability is what gives its proliferation the viral character
that it has, spreading far and rapidly throughout the noosphere, being able to subtly reinforce the
violence of white supremacy and its institutions under the epistemic guise of scientific validity,
being equally palpable to government-funded media as it is to the vulgar fringe of neo-Nazi
politics. The consequence of this marriage of scientism and chauvinism is the neutralization of the
latter, allowing the harm of its ideas to proliferate unfetteredly. The Solutrean hypothesis is not
the only example of this phenomenon. More overtly, the mainstreaming of American white
supremacist ideologue Richard Spencer, a prolific public speaker and editor who unabashedly
advocated for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”33 whose rise to prominence among influential figures
such as former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon got enabled in part due to the “dapper”
characterizations of him in the reportage of mainstream outlets such as the Washington Post,34
neutralizing him in a similar (albeit more aggressive) way that their work with the Solutrean
hypothesis did. Ultimately, these examples make up a phenomenon that broadly seeks to defang

Sheldon, “Crimes and Punishments,” 70.
“Richard Bertrand Spencer,” Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.
34
Cox, “'Let's Party like It's 1933,” November 2016.
32
33

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the inherently violent ideology of white supremacy, adapting them to be more palpable to
resistance and maintaining it as the dominant culture through it all.
The proliferation of the Solutrean hypothesis is emblematic of how white supremacy
defines itself epistemologically, the consequences of which are relevant to the contemporary era.
As established previously, the actual scientific merit of the hypothesis is irrelevant. However, its
appearance of scientific validity is what is of use, giving the institutions, concepts, and
iconography a veneer of empirical legitimacy, obscuring its true baselessness with the decorum of
science. This relationship to appearance reveals that white supremacy is an ideology that is
fundamentally about force. Its objective is violence and domination for their own sake. Any
appearance of empiricism or rigour is merely a means to an end, being the violent domination of
those othered by whiteness. The conditions by which white supremacist knowledge constructs
itself are immaterial and idealist, affirming Walter Benjamin's notion that fascism - one of white
supremacy's most vulgar and explicit incarnations - is "the aestheticization of politics."35 In the
image-laden attention economy of the contemporary era, this idealist epistemology is particularly
palpable, allowing its violence to take hold as it has in past centuries.

35

Hillach, Wikoff, and Zimmerman, “The Aesthetics of Politics,” 99.

87

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