Roger wrote:

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

There is indeed a strong link between Solutrean artifacts and very
similar items in America and there is some mitochondrial DNA linkage
between several native American tribes and some modern European groups
but as with any hypothesis for which there is absolutely no evidence
there is some dispute about whether the the Solutreans ever made it from
Europe to America at all let alone whether they did it by land or sea.
Nor that they used kayaks.

In that case, the BBC TV programme that showed the DNA traces was a
load of rubbish.

Thanks for your input.

Not a program I ever remember watching but have you any evidence that
DNA relating to the Solutreans or native Americans of similar antiquity
has ever been extracted?

The US scientist who was following this showed the DNA traces, and
again AFAIIA they have not been seriously challenged.

The programme was about the 'Clovis point spear', which was first
discovered in North America. Later, it was related to the identical
spear-point developed by the Salutrians, but 10,000 years previously.

The search was on for a connection between the Salutrians and North
America, and it was some time before the scientist, who was working on
other programs at the time, realised that he had not only the DNA from
the Salutrians (or possible their descendents, I can't recall which),
but that it was matched by that of a single tribe of NA Indians, the
inplication being that the Salutrians took their spear-point design to
North America.

But 20,000 years ago, the ice-cap stretched from France to NA, and
gave rise to the speculation that the Salutrians, who lived in a style
much like the Innuit, could have paddled along the edge of the
ice-cap.

The BBC is good at turning supposition into concrete fact - vis walking
with dinosaurs.

You've just shot down the BBC's programme shown last Sunday, that set
out to show how fake the anti-global-warming debate is, and which was
mentioned earlier in this thread.

As for alternative routes for DNA, the obvious one is a minor European
contamination of the largely Asian DNA of the Native Americans.

The possibility of contamination wasn't mentioned in the programme, so
I can't comment.