“There is a point to this discussion …”: the use and misuse of projectile point morphology and technology in North American Early Peopling studies. / Joe Watkins （北海道大學合作研究及教育研究中心研究員、前美國考古學會理事長）

Dr. Joe Watkins
（北海道大學合作研究及教育研究中心研究員、前美國考古學會理事長）

A Research Article published in Science Advances (Davis, et al., 2022: 3) in December 2022 proclaimed that excavations at the Cooper’s Ferry site in Idaho revealed “early stemmed points and the lithic technology used to produce them … similar to bifacial points found in northeast Asia”, and that this “shared similarity in pre-Jomon stemmed point technology may point to the general location along the northwest Pacific Rim from which some of the earliest peoples in the Americas may have originated between ~22,000 and 16,000 years ago” (p. 9).

In 2013, Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley hypothesized that the foundations of Clovis Culture might have been the Solutrean of southwestern Europe as evidenced by specific technological attributes of the older Solutrean culture. Are scientists still attempting to equate technology to cultures, or do they still believe that people are only occasionally innovative?

In this paper I will discuss the Clovis-Solutrean situation, the more recent searches for the earliest humans in North America, and the implications of the recent Cooper’s Ferry statement on “pre-Jomon”/Cooper’s Ferry populations.