The Solutrean industry was an advanced flint tool making style of the Upper Palaeolithic. The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic – lit. ...

It is named after the type-site of Solutré in the Mâcon district, Saône-et-Loire, eastern France and appeared around 19,000 BCE. The makers of Solutrean-style tools used techniques not seen before and not rediscovered for millennia. They also made ornamental beads and bone pins as well as creating prehistoric art. Mâcon is a commune of France, préfecture (capital) of the Saône-et-Loire département, in the Bourgogne région. ... Saône-et-Loire is a French département, named after the Saône and the Loire rivers. ... This page is incomplete. ...

They produced relatively finely worked, bifacial points using pressure flaking rather than cruder flint knapping. This method permitted working of delicate slivers of flint to make light projectiles and even elaborate barbed and tanged arrowheads. In lithic reduction, pressure flaking is a method of trimming the edge of a stone tool by removing small lithic flakes by pressing on the stone with a sharp instrument rather than striking it with a percussor. ... A flintknapper is an individual who manufactures stone tools through the process of lithic reduction. ...

Large thin spear-heads; scrapers with edge not on the side but on the end; flint knives and saws, but all still chipped, not ground or polished; long spear-points, with tang and shoulder on one side only, are also characteristic implements of this industry. Bone or horn, too was used.

The name was created by G de Mortillet to describe the second stage of his system of cave-chronology, following the Mousterian and he considered it synchronous with the third division of the Quaternary period. Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet (August 29, 1821 – September 25, 1898), French anthropologist, was born at Meylau, Isère. ... Mousterian is a name given by archaeologists to style of flint tools (or industry) dating to the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age. ... The Quaternary Period is the geologic time period from the end of the Pliocene Epoch roughly 1. ...

The Solutrean work exhibits a transitory stage of art between the flint implements of the Mousterian and the bone implements of the Magdelanian epochs. Faunal finds include horse, reindeer, mammoth, cave lion, rhinoceros, bear and urus. Solutrean finds have been also made in the caves of Les Eyzies and Laugerie Haute, and in the Lower Beds of Cresswell Crags in Derbyshire in England. The Magdalenian, also spelt Magdalénien, refers to one of the later culture of the Upper Palaeolithic in western Europe. ... Binomial name Bos primigenius (invalid), proper name Bos taurus Bojanus, 1827 The aurochs (Bos taurus) is an extinct European mammal of the Bovidae family. ... Creswell Crags is a limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, in the Midlands of England. ...

The pioneers of this new flint working technique lived in modern day France and Spain and disappeared from the archaeological record around 15,000 BCE as mysteriously as they appeared. Given the technological superiority of Solutrean tools it is difficult to ascribe a reason for their replacement by the Magdalenian culture. Some archaeologists have found similarities between the Solutean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America and suggested that the Solutreans crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge using survival skills similar to that of modern Inuit people. The Magdalenian, also spelt Magdalénien, refers to one of the later culture of the Upper Palaeolithic in western Europe. ... The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 13,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. ... Clovis points are the oldest flint tools associated with the North American Clovis culture. ... World map showing North America A satellite composite image of North America. ... The Atlantic Ocean is Earths second-largest ocean, covering approximately one_fifth of its surface. ... Inuit (Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᓄᐃᑦ, singular Inuk or Inuq / ᐃᓄᒃ) is a general term for a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic coasts of Siberia, Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Québec, Labrador and Greenland. ...

Others argue that through force of numbers, the makers of Magdelanian tools replaced the Solutrean culture through invasion.

References

• This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a publication in the public domain.

The 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910–1911) is the most famous edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...

External links

• Clovis and Solutrean: Is There a Common Thread? by James M. Chandler
• Stone Age Columbus BBC TV programme summary