00:00:14: Last year archaeologist Bruce Bradley went on a mission to France
00:00:17: to challenge one of the most widely accepted|theories of early human history
00:00:23: and here, in the back room of this small museum,
00:00:25: he found exactly the evidence he was looking for 
00:00:32: because amid the arrowheads and needles he found something
00:00:34: which by rights should not have been here at all,
00:00:38: some distinctive two-sided spearheads that are at least 17,000 years old.
00:00:48: When I first saw this material when it was first brought out 
00:00:51: I was astounded, I was shocked, I was absolutely flabbergasted. 
00:00:57: Here is what we needed.
00:01:03: Because of what he saw| a mystery that everyone thought was solved will have to be reopened,
00:01:08: for these spearheads say that one of the great sagas of pre-history,
00:01:13: the tale of who were the first people to populate America,
00:01:16: will have to be rewritten.
00:01:37: Once upon a time we thought we knew it all.
00:01:41: The story of who had been the first settlers in America
00:01:44: was one of the most studied in archaeology.
00:01:52: I think to know when people first came into the New World| is important.
00:01:58: Archaeologists have been looking for the earliest for| a long time. It's been a Holy Grail for them
00:02:05: - who was first.
00:02:12: The answer it seemed lay with one remarkable find.
00:02:16: In 1933 in a dried-up lake in Clovis, New Mexico
00:02:20: archaeologists uncovered an ancient spearhead.
00:02:31: It became known as the Clovis Point.
00:02:34: It's a very distinctive type of artefact.| As you can see here it has a flake
00:02:39: that's been taken out of the base
00:02:41: and there's also a, a flake on the other side| removed from the base
00:02:46: and these are called flutes
00:02:48: and beyond that the projectile point is flaked on both sides.
00:02:53: You see it's worked here and it's worked on this side| which is what we call bifacial.
00:03:00: And alongside the Clovis Point| was one huge clue to its age.
00:03:08: The skeleton of a mammoth which it had clearly been used to kill.
00:03:18: When they dated the bones they found they were 11,500 years old.
00:03:25: It made the Clovis Point| the oldest human artefact ever found in America.
00:03:35: That was just the beginning.
00:03:44: Soon all over the country
00:03:46: archaeologists were finding thousands| of similar, beautifully crafted flints,
00:03:50: from tiny arrowheads to much larger possible ceremonial pieces,
00:03:54: all made in the same distinctive way.
00:03:59: The Clovis Point soon became the icon of the first Americans.
00:04:06: There's Clovis in every one of the 48 states| in the United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica,
00:04:14: in all kinds of environments.
00:04:22: The Clovis Point itself, it may be the first
00:04:27: really great American technological invention.
00:04:33: And all these Clovis Points didn't just look the same.
00:04:36: They all seemed to date from the same time, 11,500 years ago
00:04:44: and then the archaeologists noticed something
00:04:46: 11,500 years ago it was not just one mammoth| that met a bloody end - they all did
00:05:07: and a host of other great Stone Age beasts in America
00:05:10: - the giant armadillo, the giant sloth, the great black bear
00:05:15: - all were wiped out in just a few brutal years.
00:05:20: It was large animals for the most part that disappeared.
00:05:24: It looks as though it didn't take long at all.
00:05:27: It looks as thought it was over almost as soon as it began.
00:05:36: And so an epic story was born.
00:05:40: Somehow from somewhere 11,500 years ago| people arrived in America for the first time.
00:05:47: Whoever they were they were warriors| and they brought with them a fearsome weapon,
00:05:52: the Clovis Point.
00:05:56: In just a few years they charged down the length of the continent
00:06:00: killing all the great beasts as they went.
00:06:12: It was a fantastic story. 
00:06:14: There was only one outstanding question:
00:06:17: where did this intrepid band of hunters come from,
00:06:20: who were they? 
00:06:24: When the archaeologists looked for an answer
00:06:26: they found it in the weather of the Ancient World.
00:06:37: 11,500 years ago was the end of the last great Ice Age.
00:06:42: Huge swathes of the northern hemisphere still lay frozen under ice.
00:06:54: These giant ice-sheets locked up vast quantities of water.
00:06:59: It meant that sea-levels were far lower than they are now.
00:07:05: Huge tracks of land were exposed meaning the continents| of Asia and America were joined
00:07:11: with a bridge of land linking Siberia and Alaska| across what is now the Baring Strait.
00:07:21: It seemed clear that this was the route the Clovis people must have taken
00:07:25: as they undertook an intrepid journey across into a new continent
00:07:28:11,500 years ago,
00:07:42:so their story entered the history books.
00:07:46:The first Americans were the Clovis, a people from Asia,
00:07:50:and they had stayed isolated ruling America for 11,000 years
00:07:54:until their first fatal contact| with Columbus and the people of Europe
00:07:58:in 1492.
00:08:04:Jim Adovasio has spent the past 30 years| excavating an ancient settlement near Pittsburgh.
00:08:16:Layer upon layer telling the story of who lived here| and when going back at least 11,000 years.
00:08:33:On these surfaces that you see before us 
00:08:36:we have signs of repeated visits by Native Americans to this site.
00:08:41:These discolorations literally represent a moment frozen in time.
00:08:47:Just below the surface I'm standing on roughly| 11,000-11,200 years ago
00:08:52:is where the conventional Clovis first model says
00:08:56:that the earliest material should stop basically,
00:08:59:that there ought not to be anything beneath it,
00:09:01:no matter how much deeper we dug.
00:09:06:But then Adovasio did the unthinkable
00:09:09:- he dug below the Clovis layer| - and that's when the trouble started.
00:09:15:The artefacts simply continued| and we recovered blades and blade cores like this
00:09:20:all the way down to 16,000BC.
00:09:32:If Adovasio was right then someone had been in America| thousands of years before Clovis.
00:09:38:It was an astonishing revelation.
00:09:48:In fact it was too astonishing.
00:09:51:When Adovasio published his findings| he was simply dismissed out of hand.
00:09:59:The majority of the archaeological community was acutely sceptical
00:10:04:and they invented all kinds of reasons why these dates couldn't possibly be right.
00:10:11:People have invested in the Clovis first position for more than 70 years.
00:10:17:For a lot of people they think that this is not only a repudiation
00:10:21:of a well accepted dogma, it's a repudiation of themselves.
00:10:31:And so it was for other scientists.
00:10:33:Anyone who dug back beyond 11,500 years ago| had to be either mad or worse.
00:10:41:The best way in the world to get
00:10:43:beaten up professionally is to claim you have a pre-Clovis site.
00:10:49:When you dig deeper than Clovis a lot of people do not report it
00:10:53:because they're worried about the reaction of their colleagues.
00:10:58:And then accused of planting artefacts.
00:11:01:People will reject radiocarbon dates| if they're older than 11,500 years ago
00:11:07:just simply because there's not supposed| to be any people here at those times
00:11:12:and it just goes on and on and on.
00:11:17:And so it could have stayed.
00:11:19:The Clovis theory remained dominant| with just a few awkward dissenters,
00:11:25:but then something happened which opened up the whole mystery once more.
00:11:34:Douglas Wallace is not an archaeologist,
00:11:37:but nonetheless he is trying| to write a complete history of the world.
00:11:47:It's just that his history| is based on the science of genetics.
00:11:56:Stored at temperatures below minus 250°C
00:12:01:he has samples of DNA from every part of the world,
00:12:04:a complete record of who we all are| and where we came from.
00:12:12:We can get insight into our history| by looking at modern DNA samples. 
00:12:19:If and when we need a sample from| a population in Africa or a population in Asia
00:12:25:we can then go to that tube, pull that tube out,
00:12:28:resurrect those cells, amplify them,| isolate their DNA and ask yet a new question.
00:12:43:Wallace was particularly interested in a type of DNA| called mitochondrial DNA.
00:12:52:As humans reproduce mitochondrial DNA is passed along
00:12:56:the female line from mother to daughter.
00:13:05:The only change that takes place
00:13:07:is when there are mistakes in copying as the cells reproduce.
00:13:15:The mistakes are called mutations
00:13:18:and they take place| with a clock-like regularity.
00:13:25:By comparing the number of mutations in his samples from around the globe
00:13:29:Wallace could trace not only the route our ancestors followed| as they migrated across the planet,
00:13:34:but also when they did it.
00:13:42:So what we've been able to do using genetic variation
00:13:45:and comparing the genetic variation of aboriginal populations
00:13:48:from all the major continents of the world
00:13:50:we've literally been able to reconstruct the history of migration.
00:13:57:So the DNA should tell Wallace| not just where the first American came from,
00:14:02:but even when they made the journey.
00:14:11:When he looked at his samples
00:14:13:he found that genetically speaking every Native American's DNA
00:14:17:was made up of a combination of four groups
00:14:20:which he called A, B, C and D.
00:14:24:They all came from Siberia and north-eastern Asia.
00:14:32:So far this discovery was consistent with the Clovis theory,
00:14:41:but then came the revelation.
00:14:43:When he worked out the dates he realised| there were several waves of migration
00:14:51:and the earliest group had come over nearly 10,000 years before the Clovis,
00:14:56:some 20,000 years ago.
00:14:59:Immediately Wallace thought he had to be wrong.
00:15:01:He repeated his work. So did other labs.
00:15:06:The results were absolutely clear.
00:15:11:All of the papers that had been published| have come to a very similar conclusion:
00:15:16:that the first migration was| in the order of 20,000-30,000 years ago.
00:15:25:There was now no doubt.| The epic Clovis theory had to be wrong.
00:15:33:The great quest to uncover the story of the early settlement of America
00:15:37:had to start all over again.
00:15:50:Archeologists decided to go back to basics
00:15:54:and none more so than Dennis Stanford from the Smithsonian Institute.
00:16:03:He started with what was still the only real clue:
00:16:07:the Clovis Point itself.
00:16:11:He decided to look for spear points| along the route from Asia to America
00:16:15:trying to see if he could trace the people| who had brought the Clovis Point to the Americas,
00:16:21:but as he worked back through Alaska and then Siberia
00:16:25:the trail went dead.
00:16:27:The only tools he found were quite different.
00:16:30:After looking at the collections we were disappointed
00:16:33:that we didn't find what we thought we would find
00:16:37:and I was surprised to find that the technologies were so much different.
00:16:43:In Siberia he found Asian tools that bore| no relation to Clovis Points at all.
00:16:49:Most were made from lots of small flints| called micro-blades embedded in a bone handle.
00:16:57:Microblade technology is striking| a long thin flake from the core
00:17:03:and then making a projectile point or a knife blade
00:17:07:out of bone and then cutting a slot in it| and then putting the microblade in the slot
00:17:13:and that's a totally different philosophy entirely
00:17:17:than using the bifacial projectile point,| as you can see here,
00:17:21:it's just a total different mindset.
00:17:25:There was now a real puzzle.
00:17:28:The DNA said the earliest Americans could only have come from Asia,
00:17:32:yet the Clovis Points seemed to have come from somewhere else.
00:17:42:The man who set out to solve this paradox| was archaeologist Bruce Bradley.
00:17:52:Bradley has a skill that allows him| to see things in stone tools that others cannot.
00:18:00:He's a flint knapper, an expert at crafting flint objects.
00:18:08:So what I'm doing here is I'm choosing to be..
00:18:11:Clovis, in other words I'm choosing a Clovis approach| to this piece of stone now.
00:18:15:I'm going to grind it a little bit, strengthen it.
00:18:23:If he could work out how the Points had been made
00:18:26:it might be a clue to who the people| were who had brought them to America.
00:18:34:Every piece that we find,
00:18:38:if you know how to read it, can tell you the story| of the technology from which it comes.
00:18:47:What Bradley found was that the Clovis Points| didn't just look distinctive,
00:18:52:they had also been made in a very distinctive way.
00:18:55:You can see how this,
00:18:57:starting from this side went and took off this whole other side.
00:19:01:This is what we call an overshot outré passé flake,
00:19:06:a very intentional process.| Now I've set up to do, go this way.
00:19:14:The result of this process is that the flint flakes| off in large, useable chunks.
00:19:19:Such flakes have been found wherever you find Clovis Points.
00:19:34:Not only do I have a spear point,
00:19:36:but with this technology| I have a large number of big, useable flakes
00:19:41:that are going to be very good for making other kinds of tools
00:19:46:and so every single flake has that little story to tell.
00:19:51:Bradley was certain that the big flakes had to be a clue.
00:19:55:Whoever had made the Clovis Point had used
00:19:57:a technique quite different to that used in Asia,
00:20:01:so where had they come from
00:20:07:and then he remembered a textbook he had seen when he was a student.
00:20:12:It showed pictures of ancient spearheads made 20,000 years ago,
00:20:16:long before Clovis, by a people called the Solutreans,
00:20:22:but their points looked very like Clovis Points.
00:20:27:The trouble was that the Solutreans came from France.
00:20:32:Even then I was thinking this can't be right,| something's going on.
00:20:39:Nevertheless, the idea began to form in his mind.
00:20:43:No matter what the textbooks of the DNA might say,
00:20:46:perhaps some of the earliest Americans| were not Asian, but European.
00:20:53:It was sacrilege to even mention the possibility,
00:20:56:you know, it, it certainly wasn't part of the scientific
00:21:00:process at that point in time.
00:21:02:There was no possibility,| forget it, don't even think about it.
00:21:14:The heresy was that it was a challenge| to the identity of Native Americans.
00:21:19:They believed they were an Asian people| with no European blood at all.
00:21:24:It had long been a crucial part of their culture.
00:21:40:Despite the controversy Bradley was stirring up,
00:21:43:he decided to pursue his idea.
00:21:49:He went to south-western France| where the Solutreans had lived 17,000 years earlier.
00:21:56:In his mind was one simple question:
00:22:01:could they possibly have been amongst the first Americans?
00:22:09:In France one thing became abundantly clear.
00:22:13:The Solutreans were a remarkable people.
00:22:24:Of all the Stone Age cultures that we've studied,
00:22:27:the Solutrean people continually come out as being the most innovative,
00:22:31:the most adaptive and probably the most inventive.
00:22:37:We have evidence that they invented the heat treatment| of flint to make it better to flake.
00:22:51:I mean they invented all kinds of things| like the eyed needle
00:22:58:and the, the list goes on and on and on.
00:23:06:Bradley's research took him to the local museum| in the town of Les Eyzies.
00:23:13:What he saw were displays of hundreds| of what looked very like Clovis Points.
00:23:30:I see this stuff and I just, it's, I don't know, it's so exciting.
00:23:34:The similarity is just, it's mind-boggling.
00:23:41:But the close similarity of the spearheads was not enough.
00:23:46:What we're seeing here is only the finished objects,
00:23:49:only the things that museum people thought were really good for display.
00:23:52:It doesn't always show you how things were made.
00:23:56:To establish a link between the Solutreans and the earliest Americans
00:24:00:he needed to find out if they shared the same technology.
00:24:04:Had the Solutreans used the same big flake method| to make those spearheads?
00:24:12:So what we do is we go back to the collections of the broken materials
00:24:15:which is probably 99% of what there is here
00:24:19:and in that we're seeing the various ways that
00:24:23:the Solutrean were making the things,| not just the finished objects
00:24:26:and so it's the pieces that are hidden away| that are going to tell us the most.
00:24:34:And there in the drawers he found what he needed,
00:24:38:clear signs that the Solutreans really had made their spearheads
00:24:41:just like the early Americans.
00:24:51:The thing that I first noticed when I looked in this drawer specifically
00:24:55:was a few pieces right on the very top
00:24:58:- this is a good example here - 
00:25:00:that shows a kind of flaking that,| where the flake is struck from one side
00:25:05:and went across the surface removed some of the other side
00:25:10:and these pieces show it over and over and over again.
00:25:13:I mean just about any piece you pick up
00:25:15:shows this very special technique.
00:25:18:This is the technique we see uniquely in Clovis
00:25:21:and when I saw so much of it| just sitting there
00:25:25:I just knew there had to be some kind of a connection.
00:25:28:There's nothing in here specifically that makes them Solutrean
00:25:31:except that we're in France and they came from here.
00:25:36:To Bradley it was the first proof of a direct link| between the people of America and Europe,
00:25:46:but critics pointed to one problem in particular.
00:25:50:The Solutreans had lived 17,000 years ago
00:25:53:and the Clovis Point had apparently not arrived in America| until 11,500 years ago.
00:26:02:Where had the Solutreans been| in the intervening five thousand years?
00:26:07:It was a question that even troubled Bradley's colleagues.
00:26:12:I was going through the old arguments, yeah,
00:26:15:well Solutreans, five thousand years older than Clovis
00:26:19:and you've got the Atlantic Ocean out there,
00:26:22:so I wasn't convinced that we really ought to push forward on it.
00:26:25:I remember it a little bit differently.| You said are you out of your mind?
00:26:33:Bradley needed to find something to bridge the 5,000 year gap
00:26:37:between the Solutreans and the Clovis
00:26:40:and then from a site called Cactus Hill in Virginia a wonder:
00:26:46:a Solutrean-style point| and it dated from far earlier than the Clovis.
00:26:55:And here we have
00:26:58:a projectile point from a feature that dates
00:27:01:right at 15,900 years or 16,000 years ago
00:27:06:which is clearly right in the middle between Clovis and Solutrean
00:27:11:and what's really exciting about it is that the technology here
00:27:15:is very similar to Solutrean.| In fact it's closer to Solutrean than Clovis
00:27:20:where you can see that it's in a progression| between Solutrean and Clovis
00:27:26:so you have Solutrean, Cactus Hill and Clovis.
00:27:34:The evidence of the points was that there was no 5,000 year gap.
00:27:38:The Solutreans hadn't disappeared.
00:27:41:They seemed somehow to have gone from France to America
00:27:45:some 16,000 years ago,
00:27:48:but it was still far from proof.
00:27:50:Critics pointed out a massive problem, one that was 5,000 kilometres wide:
00:28:00:the Atlantic Ocean. 
00:28:06:The fact was the Solutreans lived in south-west France.
00:28:12:Between their settlements here on the coast and America
00:28:15:lay one of the biggest expanses of water in the world
00:28:21:and there was something that made the journey far more formidable then:
00:28:28:the Ice Age.
00:28:43:The environment would have been pretty much a frozen environment
00:28:46:similar to what we see in the Arctic today
00:28:48:and the ice was the furthest south that it, that it ever got.
00:28:53:The environment would have been
00:28:55:almost diametrically opposed to what we see here today.
00:28:58:We wouldn't see people lounging on the beach.
00:29:05:At the time of the Solutreans
00:29:07:ice-sheets stretched down from the Arctic
00:29:10:obliterating life as far south as southern France.
00:29:17:The weather, even in south-western France,
00:29:20:would have dropped to 20 degrees below freezing.
00:29:27:The Atlantic would have been thick with icebergs| and over-run with blizzards.
00:29:31:It is difficult to conceive of a journey to America| through this.
00:29:37:There are 5,000 kilometres of open North Atlantic| Ice Age conditions to be crossed.
00:29:46:There are icebergs floating around in the Bay of Biscay| and it's a polar desert.
00:29:59:The problem confronting Bradley and Stanford
00:30:02:was to show how the Solutreans could have survived| these extraordinarily harsh conditions.
00:30:10:Could this Stone Age people have used their technology| to take them across an ocean?
00:30:15:How would they have travelled, kept warm and found food?
00:30:20:There was one place on Earth where Stanford hoped he could find out,
00:30:23:from the one people on Earth who still live in conditions
00:30:26:like those endured by the Solutreans:
00:30:31:the Eskimos.
00:30:47:Stanford flew to Alaska, to the small town of Barrow.
00:31:01:Barrow stands on the edge of the continent
00:31:03:at the northern most tip of the United States.
00:31:06:Here people have to endure temperatures| that reach below -35°C in the winter.
00:31:18:Nowadays they live a thoroughly modern existence,
00:31:21:with supermarkets, four-wheeled drives and snowmobiles,
00:31:34:but Stanford hoped that ancient Eskimo techniques might demonstrate
00:31:37:how much the Solutreans could have achieved| with their inventions thousands of years ago.
00:31:44:I'd like to show you some old needles.
00:31:53:This needle is 20…|(ESKIMO WOMAN) Needle. Oh. Eskimo needle?
00:31:59:No, 20,000 years old.
00:32:01:Ah that 20,000…
00:32:06:The Solutrean needle was almost identical to Eskimo ones,
00:32:10:made of bone and used until recently.
00:32:13:The Eskimos used these needles to fashion warm,| waterproof clothing out of fur.
00:32:19:Eskimo mukluks.
00:32:22:This way and this way and this way and this, that way.
00:32:28:To make a waterproof seam.
00:32:30:They use… Yeah, waterproof.
00:32:32:Right.
00:32:38:The Eskimos used caribou skin and sinew to make their clothing.
00:32:42:The Solutreans could have hunted the same animals
00:32:45:and they would have had exactly the same function.
00:32:49:That needle would have been their passport to survival| in the Ice Age landscape.
00:32:53:It would have allowed them to keep warm and dry.
00:33:01:Even so, their survival was far from certain in this polar desert.
00:33:07:What would they have eaten on a voyage| which would have taken months?
00:33:11:Again the Eskimo has provided the answer.
00:33:15:There is all the food anyone could want - in the sea.
00:33:25:The sea has been our garden. 
00:33:27:We don't have any growth, growing things.
00:33:31:There's nothing growing up here,| so we depend on the sea for our livelihood
00:33:36:and most of our hunting is based on sea mammal hunting.
00:33:54:We have the great whales, polar bears, walrus, seals and...
00:34:00:fish and this is a good time for us to be going out| to do some crabbing, for example.
00:34:19:What Stanford realised was that the Solutreans| could have done exactly the same.
00:34:25:They had all the tools they needed to hunt at sea,| from spears to bows and arrows.
00:34:31:Above all they had the crucial Clovis Point.
00:34:41:The projectile points that we found that are Solutrean in age
00:34:46:are almost identical to the in blades| that Eskimos use on their seal hunting harpoons
00:34:54:and the Clovis Point makes a wonderful harpoon point.
00:35:02:The technology's there, the technology is definitely there.
00:35:12:But then came the critical question:
00:35:15:how would they actually have travelled,
00:35:17:could they have made boats capable of surviving journeys| across thousands of miles of icy water?
00:35:30:It would be easy to assume that Eskimos today
00:35:33:would rely on the most modern craft when going out to sea,
00:35:37:but in fact this isn't the case.
00:35:42:You need something resilient here
00:35:44:and these advanced technological materials| do not work well in the Arctic.
00:35:52:They freeze, they break.
00:35:55:Unbreakable plastic breaks apart.
00:36:06:Instead Eskimos still build their whaling boats| with sealskin, wood and caribou sinew.
00:36:18:The frames are sealed with oil applied directly from seal blubber.
00:36:23:These are exactly the type of materials| that would have been available to the Solutreans.
00:36:39:People have been using this type of craft for at least 10,000 years
00:36:42:that we know of and probably 20,000.
00:36:45:The flexibility of this type of,| of boat is, is really amazing
00:36:51:and it's specially built for Arctic waters.
00:37:04:17,000 years ago| the Solutreans had all the materials and the skills they needed
00:37:10:to build Eskimo-style boats
00:37:18:and what Stanford discovered
00:37:20:is that the flimsiness of these open boats is deceptive.
00:37:23:Once launched into the water
00:37:25:these craft are capable of making| extremely long journeys through the ice.
00:37:31:Boats like these can, could have made the journey| that we're hypothesising for Solutrean people quite well.
00:37:36:In fact I was noticing on the distance signs here in the middle of town
00:37:40:they say it's about 1500 miles to Greenland
00:37:44:and we know that prehistorically Eskimo peoples| moved that distance from here to there several times.
00:37:59:The way Eskimos travel is to work along the edge of the ice
00:38:03:hopping from ice floe to ice floe.
00:38:15:17,000 years ago the northern Atlantic,| as far south as south-west France,
00:38:19:would have been filled with pack ice
00:38:22:and the Solutreans would have been able to travel| in the same way.
00:38:30:Well it certainly is exactly the way I think| the Solutrean guys were dealing with
00:38:34:the ice edge
00:38:36:'cos you can get in and off of the ice real rapidly and,
00:38:39:and if the weather gets a little, little nasty
00:38:42:then you just pull up off the, out of the water and onto the ice.
00:38:50:Operating along the edge of the ice like this| you could keep hitting the water all summer.
00:38:58:Stanford and Bradley felt the Eskimos| had greatly strengthened their case.
00:39:02:The Solutreans had everything they needed to make a journey like this
00:39:06:and to the Eskimos| the proposed feat of these Stone Age people
00:39:10:would not be at all out of the ordinary.
00:39:15:There's nothing that would have prevented other people
00:39:18:from crossing the Atlantic into the Americas| 17,000 years ago.
00:39:22:It, it would be a perfectly normal situation| from my perspective.
00:39:27:Why not a journey like this?| I mean I'd turn the question around.
00:39:32:It's not could they have done it,| is how could they not have done it?
00:39:37:Back in America, Douglas Wallace was continuing his mammoth task
00:39:41:of writing the history books according to the evidence of DNA.
00:39:46:So far his work showed that the Native Americans| had four distinctive types of mitochondrial DNA
00:39:52:- A, B, C and D| - all of them from Asia.
00:39:59:Then one day a set of samples from a north-eastern| Native American tribe called the Ojibwa
00:40:04:arrived on his desk.
00:40:11:When we studied the mitochondrial DNA of the Ojibwa
00:40:13:we found, as we had anticipated,
00:40:16:the four primary lineages - A, B, C and D
00:40:20:- but there was about a quarter of the mitochondrial DNAs| that was not A, B, C and D.
00:40:28:There was a mysterious fifth source of DNA.
00:40:32:He called it X, and X was very strange.
00:40:36:It was of European origin.
00:40:39:At first he thought it must have got there| some time in the last few hundred years, after Columbus.
00:40:46:When we got that result
00:40:48:we naturally assumed that perhaps| there had been European recent mixture
00:40:54:with the Ojibwa tribe and that some European women
00:40:57:had married into the Ojibwa tribe| and contributed their mitochondrial DNAs.
00:41:04:But he was wrong.
00:41:06:When the dates of X came back| it was dated thousands of years earlier,
00:41:11:some 15,000 years in fact,| the time of the Solutreans.
00:41:18:Well what it says is that a mitochondrial lineage| that is predominantly found in Europe
00:41:24:somehow got to the Great Lakes region| of the Americas 14,000-15,000 years ago.
00:41:39:It seemed there could now be no doubt.
00:41:42:Some of the earliest Americans were really from Europe.
00:41:46:The DNA proved it
00:41:54:and so it is now possible to tell a quite different story| about the first settlement of America
00:42:00:and one which makes sense of all the evidence.
00:42:26:The Ice Age led not to one, but a whole host of migrations to America
00:42:31:as people fled the frozen wastes in search of something better
00:42:36:and one of these groups, perhaps the most important of all,
00:42:40:was an extraordinary people from Europe.
00:42:50:For me the, the most important aspect of our
00:42:53:theory about people leaving south-western Europe| and eventually ending up in North America
00:42:59:is that I, I think it takes into consideration
00:43:03:the abilities of people to adapt to new environments,
00:43:07:to embrace new places
00:43:10:and to ignore the, this possibility| ignores the humanity of, of people 20,000 years ago.
00:43:19:It was a journey that would have seen them| hopping from ice floe to ice floe,
00:43:24:spearing food out at sea,
00:43:31:huddling together to keep out the fierce cold.
00:43:47:Eventually they would have arrived at the rich fishing grounds| at the edge of a new continent.
00:43:54:There some of the Solutreans settled| and helped build an enduing culture
00:43:58:that spread across the continent and transformed the landscape of America.
00:44:04:Though controversial, this discovery may not be so upsetting| to Native Americans after all.
00:44:13:I think the value of this research is| that it shows that we are truly all one species
00:44:19:and that our ancestors tends of thousands of years ago
00:44:23:were very much like us and they had new ideas
00:44:27:and that they did crazy things in small boats
00:44:30:crossing big bodies of water to go somewhere else.
00:44:33:I mean I think that's marvellously creative and courageous.
00:44:40:As humanity moved inexorably across the planet
00:44:43:this great voyage of the Solutreans to settle a new world
00:44:47:has emerged as one of the last great colonising efforts| of our species.