Across Atlantic Ice by Dennis J. Stanford

That’s a very long way from the Bering Strait and Siberia. If true (and that find has been subject to a major recent assault) that would place human beings on the east coast 22,000 years ago. One of the truly amazing finds is the so-called Cinmar site, some miles off Virginia’s present day coastline, where a fishing boat dredged up an archaic stone blade in the company of mastodon bones. Also, you can now find an impressive roster of really ancient pre-Clovis archaeological sites in the Eastern US, rather than the West, and some of the very oldest are on or near Chesapeake Bay. Very early Americans used a stone technology reminiscent of the Solutrean cultures of Western Europe. However odd this sounds, you can actually make a surprisingly good case for this view. Over the past quarter century, though, a heretical alternative view has arisen, which suggests that at least some of the first early humans came from Western Europe – from Iberia rather than Siberia. More recent work has pushed that movement back by several thousand years, but still assumes that the newcomers came from East Asia, perhaps sailing along the coasts rather than tramping across the land-bridge. Again to illustrate how scholars argue, let me cite one ongoing battle.Īs I remarked, the standard view of early human occupation assumed that big game hunters entered the New World from Siberia and eastern Asia around 13,000 years ago, and you can recognize them by their Clovis culture tools. One of the illustrations I have been using in recent columns is the whole question of early human settlement in the Americas, and that area is currently the subject of intense debate. In this case, a heretical work failed to become orthodoxy, but it did some really valuable services along the way.

Most Bible scholars would still reject his arguments, but the way he posed them forced even the best-accredited experts to re-examine their assumptions, to justify why they believed what they did.

I remember in the 1970s reading the book Redating the New Testament by Bishop John Robinson, who argued that virtually all the New Testament writings were completed before the year 70 AD, far earlier than the academic consensus would accept. Plenty of examples of such “heretical” works come to mind.

Across Atlantic Ice by Dennis J. Stanford