Whether it's law, science, medicine or figuring out whether your guilty-looking teenager is lying about what time they came in last night, evidence is essential. The problem, however, is deciding the "beyond a reasonable doubt" point. At what point does not enough evidence to back a conclusion become ample evidence?
This is the daily world of police officers, judges and juries but it is also a key part of other professions, from journalists and mechanics to teachers and doctors.
How much information does a doctor need before diagnosing a patient?
What does a mechanic need to find under the hood of a vehicle before figuring out what's wrong with it?
It's not only about the evidence at hand but also the probability of the proposed solution.
Casual and intimate relationships are also rooted in evidence and probability. What do you need to know about a person to upgrade them from acquaintance to friend?
What does a spouse need to know to be convinced they are being cheated on by their partner?
In his letter to the editor in Wednesday's Citizen, Larry Barnes brought up the Solutrean hypothesis, which suggests that Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years earlier than first believed, either at roughly the same time or even earlier than it is believed people migrated across the Bering Strait from Eurasia during the last Ice Age. This theory hinges on the age and style of a handful of stone points found at a few sites, mostly in the Eastern United States.
The problem, as Barnes freely admits, is the Solutrean hypothesis is mired in accusations of racism.
There are those who would use the Solutrean hypothesis as a racist weapon to delegitimize the Indigenous peoples of North and South America as the original settlers of these continents while many defenders of the Clovis theory supporting Indigenous peoples as the original settlers of the Americas quickly dismiss anyone who says otherwise as racist.
Strip away the emotional rhetoric and it becomes a matter of competing scientific theories. From an evidence standpoint, the Clovis theory is widely accepted as true for two reasons: ample evidence forms a reasonable explanation to a scientific question and there is no competing theory that comes even close to being more probable or having as much supporting evidence.
The Solutrean hypothesis is also missing many details. In contrast to the geological data that shows there was a land link that would have simplified Eurasian humans crossing into the Americas, there is little to show that European populations had anywhere near the technological sophistication to build ocean-faring vessels and navigate them across 2,000 kilometres of open sea. And even if they did, could they have crossed in sufficient numbers to support a settlement that would eventually spread across two continents?
That doesn't mean the Solutrean hypothesis should be outright dismissed, but there simply isn't enough evidence or probability to take it seriously next to the Clovis theory. Barnes is right when he says that more work needs to be done but he's wrong to suggest that if archeologists keep digging, they'll eventually find the evidence they're looking for. Kids use the same logic all the time to insist Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are real.
Furthermore, the absence of counter evidence is used all the time to support the probability of prevailing scientific theories (like evolution and Clovis), not to mention killers convincted even without the presence of a body, based on the probability they murdered the missing individual.
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of both black holes and gravitational waves but was far from convinced he was right. It took thousands of scientists working decades after his death to provide enough evidence to show he was right.
Same for the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs and most of life on Earth. The hypothesis offered a convenient explanation of that mass extinction event but there was no hard evidence until the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula 40 years ago. Currently, astrophysicists are hunting for dark matter, because its existence would explain several current mysteries about the workings of the universe.
The core problem with the Solutrean hypothesis (and why archeologists shouldn't devote too much time to collecting supporting evidence) is that if it were true, it would create more questions than answers about the prehistorical human settlement of the Americas.
Put simply, it remains little more than a "what if" scenario, a solution seeking a nonexistent problem.
Just like people shouldn't accuse a spouse of having an affair or send a criminal to jail when there is far more evidence to show innocence than guilt, the same should go for questioning the origins of the Indigenous peoples on the American continents.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
