The Solutrean hypothesis was always a minority position among archaeologists, and it faced numerous empirical and logical objections — the chronological gap between Solutrean and Clovis was thousands of years; no convincing intermediate sites had been found; the technology, while superficially similar, was not identical; and no ancient genetic evidence supported a European contribution to early American populations.

But the hypothesis attracted popular attention, partly because it was dramatic and counterintuitive, and it contributed to a broader cultural narrative in some quarters that questioned whether Indigenous American peoples were really the first and deepest-rooted inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere.

The genome of the Anzick child would address this hypothesis directly — and definitively.

The Technology That Made It Possible

Ancient DNA analysis — the extraction and sequencing of genetic material from the physical remains of organisms that died long ago — is a science that did not exist in any practical sense before the 1980s, was limited and unreliable through most of the 1990s, and became genuinely powerful only in the first decade of the twenty-first century.