Extraordinary claims require a lot of evidence

Several people have emailed me about the Solutrean hypothesis. The trigger is the publication of Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture. To my surprise this has received a lot of media attention. The Washington Post, io9, and The New Scientist. Granted, the coverage has been appropriately skeptical. But it still gets to the truth of it that all publicity is good publicity, and here I am talking about a model which I believe is pretty much bunk. My own current estimation is that there is a 99.5 percent probability that the basic outlines of the Solutrean hypothesis are false (that Paleolithic Western Europeans traversed the North Atlantic ice, that the Solutrean culture substantively contributed to the Clovis culture). I don't say 100 percent because the past few years have indicated that certainty is something you shouldn't adhere to with much ardor in the area of human prehistory. ...