The people who settled the Island 12,000 or so years ago brought with them a lithic or stone technology that far surpassed the core tool techniques that I illustrated in the previous post. True, the newcomers would have used all the kinds of core tools I described – and more even – in their lives as hunters and gatherers, but they brought with them a technique of converting special kinds of stone into spectacular blades such as we have observed in France and Spain, Clovis, New Mexico, and Debert in Nova Scotia. These blades are thin, with flakes knocked off to produce a lenticular (lens shaped) cross section and they…

The first humans to settle in North America had to face horrendous problems, not least of which was finding suitable lithic materials – rocks – to use in the making of their tools and weapons. Those who entered through the Beringia passage would have had a relatively easy time of it because as they moved down the continent temperatures were warmer and resources – animals, wood, rocks and food – were plentiful. If they moved east and settled Eastern Canada and the US, they would have had all these resources at hand along the way. It would have been a different story for the Solutrean settlers from Europe – if…