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I saw a re-run of the History Channel show Journey to 10,000 BC recently. My expectations from the History Channel continue to sink as they produce low quality shows full of factual errors and outright speculation presented as fact. They have turned into the Pseudoscience Channel.

Despite the broad sweep implied by the title “10,000 BC”, the show was limited to the North American continent, completely ignoring interesting events such as the beginning of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the first monumental stone architecture, that were happening elsewhere in the world.

The show focused on the human occupation of the North American continent. It mentioned the prevailing theory that the paleo-Indians were of Beringian origin, who migrated from Asia across a land passage over the Bering Strait, which existed at the time due to lower sea levels. The Beringian people were of Siberian stock, but the show inexplicably chose Caucasian-looking actors to portray them. This discrepancy was later cleared up when they introduced the Solutrean Hypothesis, advocated by a number of people, including Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institute.

The Solutrean Hypothesis proposes that the Clovis Point Culture was of European origin, specifically, an offshoot of the Solutrean Culture in Eastern France and Spain. The Solutrean industry is characterized by pressure-flaked bifacial stone points, which appear to resemble stone points found in ancient paleo-Indian sites such as Cactus Hill in Virginia, and the later Clovis Points. The idea is that Solutrean people moved across the Atlantic to the east coast of the North American continent, across a northern passage that consisted of large masses of packed ice interspersed between land masses (Iceland, Greenland). These people “followed the seal herds”, using animal skin boats to cross the stretches of water between land masses and ice packs, and eventually made their way into the Americas. The archeological finds at Cactus Hill appear to pre-date the Clovis Culture, and are inferred to be the remains of the early settlements of these Solutrean people from Europe. Sometime around 13,500 years ago, these people developed the fluted Clovis Point (an elongated Solutrean-like stone tool, with fluting at the base to allow it to better fit a spear haft), and the Clovis Culture spread across the continent.

Solutrean, Cactus Hill and Clovis Points

To support this theory, the show pointed out that most Clovis sites have been found in the Eastern US, indicating that the Clovis culture may have spread from east to west, which would be contrary to a west-to-east migration of people who had arrived via the Bering Strait and the Pacific coast.

Although the show mentioned a couple of times that this theory was “controversial”, it failed to mention the large body of evidence against it, nor did it even attempt to offer equal time to any of a number of mainstream archeologists and anthropologists who oppose it. It continued to represent the paleo-Indians through Caucasian actors, going so far as to present a hypothetical confrontation between these Caucasians, and the Asian Siberian people who arrived through the Bering passage. The confrontation ends in a fight, with the implication being that the Asians possibly wiped out these early Europeans. There is a lot more about the end of the Clovis culture, with the concomitant disappearance of the native mega fauna with the climate cooling of the Younger Dryas, a hypothesis that this may have been caused or aided by an asteroid impact, etc.

While controversy sells, this account shortchanges the truth in many ways. The Solutrean hypothesis is not widely accepted, and is contradicted by several lines of evidence. Its support rests upon a similarity between the appearance of Solutrean and Cactus Hill / Clovis points. Such similarities may result in a number of ways. Tools develop to fulfill certain functions, and a bifacial pointed tool that can be attached to a wooden stick to form is spear is singularly handy for bringing down large game, which both the Solutreans and the Clovis Point people did. After all, there are only so many ways you can design a hammer, or a knife. If the tool is to be used for a particular purpose, its design will naturally lead to a form suitable to that function, whether done by Solutreans in France, or paleo-Indians in the Americas.

There are a number of unexplained factors to consider. How did these Solutrean people cross the Atlantic? Proponents of this hypothesis believe they used animal skin boats. No evidence of such a boat building Solutrean culture has ever been found, but the proponents claim it could easily have been lost, since you would expect to find its remains along coastal regions, which have long since been submerged as the ice melted. There is a distinct lack of other Solutrean features in the Clovis Point people, other than these bifacial stone points. There is an unexplained 2,000 – 3,000 year gap between the end of the Solutrean industry in Europe, and the emergence of Solutrean-type tools in the Americas. Where were these people then? Where is the evidence that they kept this industry alive in the meantime?

There is little evidence of any European inheritance dating to this period in modern native American populations. Earlier studies showed a significant prevalence of haplogroup X in the mitochondrial DNA of native Americans. Haplogroup X is found predominantly in west Asia and Europe. However, the latest research shows that all current native American populations are likely descended from a single group in Berengia, which took part in a series of migrations along the Pacific coastal route into the Americas, between 18,000 to 15,000 years ago. These are, in fact, the pre-Clovis people.

Haplogroups A–D are also frequent in Asia, suggesting a northeastern Asian origin of these lineages. However, the differential pattern of distribution and frequency of haplogroup X led some to suggest that it may represent an independent migration to the Americas. Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all Native American haplogroups, including haplogroup X, were part of a single founding population, thereby refuting multiple migration models.

- Fagundis, et al. Amer. J. Human Genetics, 82: 1-10, March 2008

None of this was mentioned in the documentary. Nor was there any mention of the range of pre-Clovis sites that have been found along the Pacific route (such as the 14,300 year old human coprolite found in a cave in Oregon, or the Monte Verde site in Chile, dated to 14,500 years old). The Monte Verde II site is the oldest reliably dated human settlement in the Americas, at least 1,000 years older than any other. If the paleo-Indians could reach and settle a point thousands of kilometers farther from their point of entry into the Americas than Cactus Hill, or the Clovis sites along the east coast, why could they not have reached the east coast sites, which are much closer? Just because we have found more Clovis sites along the east coast does not imply an eastern origin to the people. There is every reason to believe that there were pre-Clovis people scattered throughout the continent, and that these people could easily have been descendants of paleo-Indians from Berengia. Clovis point is simply a tool making industry, and it says little about the nature or origin of the people who developed it.

Presenting such a one-sided account of a controversial hypothesis which has found little acceptance in academia does a disservice to the audience. Most people who watch the History Channel are not experts in this field, and will tend to accept it at face value. When the bulk of the program consists of a couple of these controversial scientists presenting their theory, interspersed with shots of Caucasian actors stalking mammoths, the average viewer is left with the impression that this is in fact what happened.

The show had numerous other factual errors. Twice, the narrator claimed that the Columbian mammoth hunted by these Caucasians was the “largest land animal since the dinosaurs”. This is completely untrue. Apparently, they forgot the indricotheres. Even worse, they ignored other larger mammoths, such as the Imperial mammoth that lived right here in the Americas, or the even larger Sungari mammoth or Steppe mammoth from Siberia. Surely they could have avoided such mistakes if they had just run the script by even one expert. There were numerous instances of cheap shoddy work. The CG effects were horrible. The mammoths look like something out of a cheap computer game.

Having a low budget is not a crime, but distorting science to present controversial theories that are probably wrong as fact is unforgivable for a science program. It only supports my contention that the History channel is all about entertainment, and has little to do with facts.