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Solutreans were the first known people to use needles

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

It is named after the type-site of Solutré in the Mâcon district, Saône-et-Loire, eastern France and appeared around 19,000 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.

Large thin spear-heads; scrapers with edge not on the side but on the end; flint knives and saws, but all still chipped, not ground or polished; long spear-points, with tang and shoulder on one side only, are also characteristic implements of this industry. Bone or horn was also used.

The name was created by Gabriel de Mortillet to describe the second stage of his system of cave-chronology, following the Mousterian and he considered it synchronous with the third division of the Quaternary period.

The Solutrean work exhibits a transitory stage of art between the flint implements of the Mousterian and the bone implements of the Magdalenian epochs. Faunal finds include horse, reindeer, mammoth, cave lion, rhinoceros, bear and aurochs. Solutrean finds have been also made in the caves of Les Eyzies and Laugerie Haute, and in the Lower Beds of Cresswell Crags in Derbyshire, England.

The pioneers of this new flint working technique lived in modern day France and Spain and disappeared from the archaeological record around 15,000 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 Magdalenian culture. Some archaeologists have found similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America and (in a proposal known generally as the "Solutrean hypothesis") suggested that the Solutreans crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge using survival skills similar to that of modern Inuit people.

Others argue that through force of numbers, the makers of Magdalenian tools replaced the Solutrean culture through invasion.

• Synoptic table of the principal old world prehistoric cultures
• Franco-Cantabric region
• Gravettian

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

• Clovis and Solutrean: Is There a Common Thread? by James M. Chandler
• Stone Age Columbus BBC TV programme summary
• "America's Stone Age Explorers" transcript of 2004 NOVA program on PBS
• Images of Solutrean artifacts