NOVA on PBS to feature Lawrence Straus

UNM Professor of Anthropology Lawrence Straus will appear on the TV science program NOVA on KNME-TV, Tuesday, Nov. 9 at 7 p.m. Straus and UNM graduate student David Kilby discuss new archaeology findings in an episode titled “America's Stone Age Explorers.”

Ever since ancient and deadly spear points were found near Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s, many archaeologists have believed these weapons to originate with the first settlers of the New World. NOVA reports on a new version of an old hypothesis that disputes the generally held view that humans migrated to the Americas from Asia at the end of the Ice Age.

Clovis points have been found at archeological sites throughout the continent. For decades, the artifacts represented the oldest know evidence of human presence in the New World. Many archaeologists have concluded that hunters equipped with Clovis weapons were the first settlers of the Americas, who probably arrived from Asia about 13,500 years ago.

But growing evidence suggests that humans populated the Americas before Clovis hunters arrived. Based on some similarities of Clovis points to the weapons of Solutreans, who lived in southern France and Northern Spain 20,000 years ago, researchers have suggested that the first Americans came from Europe, not Asia.

Straus has long opposed the idea that Clovis technology at 11,000 BC is "related" to Solutrean technology in Spain and France, from which it is separated by not only 5-6000 years, but also by 5000 km of the North Atlantic. Straus claims there is no evidence that Solutrean people had deep-sea navigation knowledge or equipment and that the superficial similarities in point shape are the result of technological convergence. In 2000, Straus wrote a detailed article for the American Antiquity journal debunking the theory of a Transatlantic Solutrean migration.

Straus has conducted archeological excavations in Spain, France, Portugal and Belgium annually since 1972. Beginning in 1996, Straus focused his research on El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, where hundreds of thousands of artifacts have been uncovered. He considers the project to be his most significant in 30 years of archeological research.

Contact: Greg Johnston, (505) 277-1816