Solutrean

The Solutrean industry was an advanced flint tool making style of the Upper Palaeolithic.

It is named after the type-site of Solutré in Eastern France and appeared around 23,000 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.

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.

The pioneers of this revolutionary technique lived in modern day France and Spain and disappeared from the archaeological record around 19,000 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 Magdelanian 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 between ice floes. Others argue that through force of numbers, the makers of Magdelanian tools exterminated the Solutrean culture through invasion.