Until recently it was agreed among anthropologists that America was settled by hunter-gatherer tribes belonging to the Clovis culture, who pursued mammoths across the ice which in their day bridged the Bering Straits. These people are supposed to have left their home in Siberia about 12,000 years ago, and it is the distinctive fluted points of their flint axes which link Siberia to Alaska. The Clovis people then moved south through what is now Canada and the United States into South America, where their traces are found in Chile and elsewhere.
A commentary in Science for November 19, 1999, discusses the controversial dwelling site at Monte Verde in northern Chile which has prompted many anthropologists to reassess the likely progress of the Clovis people from Asia to America. The Monte Verde site dates from about 12,500 years before present, prior to the supposed Bering Straits transfer. It reveals flint points closely resembling those which are called Solutrean in the Old World, and derived from northern Spain, where they date back to 20,000 years before present. The conclusion that the Americas were populated by hunter-gatherers from Spain by way of the Atlantic, now put forward in some circles, rests on the similarity of the flints.
It seems an unlikely scenario, but much depends on the state of the Atlantic in those distant days. The lapse of some 5,000 years between the last of the known Solutreans and the first New World Clovis people throws doubt on whether the one culture gave rise to the other by way of the frozen north.