It doesn't take long for that website to set off all my bullshit alarms.

First it starts off talking about links between the so-called Clovis Culture of Pleistocene North America and its connections to Europe 17,000 years ago. This idea is based on the Solutrean Hypothesis, an erroneous idea proposed by Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley almost 20 years ago. It's been widely discredit by other anthropologists and archaeologists, but now and then various media outlets like to drag it out because it's sensationalist science. In this post I discuss the key problems with the Solutrean Hypothesis, but for convenience I'll run through the highlights here too.

1. While the X2a haplogroup does exist in both western Eurasia and eastern North America, these two subsets of X2a split apart around 28,000 years ago - far earlier than the Solutrean Hypothesis proposes the migration to the Americas occurred.

2. Solutrean technology vanishes from Europe thousands of years before Clovis technology appears in North America.

3. Clovis technology is based on pre-Clovis technology indigenous to the Americas, which does not closely resemble Solutrean technology.

4. There is no "Clovis culture" or "Clovis people," and they certainly weren't the first people in the Americas. What we once called referred to by these terms is no more accurately described as a whole host of different pre-existing cultures and peoples adopting and sharing a similar technology across a large chunk of the continent. Some intracontinental migration may have occurred during this time, but diffusion of ideas rather than the spread of peoples seems to have been the driving force behind the spread of Clovis points. Intercontinental migration doesn't seem to have played a part at all. The main thrust into the Americas was already over and if anyone was coming over at this time, it was the ancestors of the Athabaskans in the northwest, not anyone coming from the east.

The second thing that stands out is the fact they prominent reference the Si-Te-Cah. The Si-Te-Cah are a legendary people associated with the Piaute and Lovelock Cave. The site mentions Sarah Winnemucca, but it should be noted that she never used the term "Si-Te-Cah." Instead, she only talked about a tribe known as "The People-Eaters." As their name suggests, the People-Eaters were unrepentant cannibals. After several unsuccessful attempts to convert the People-Eaters from cannibalism, the Paiutes warred against them. Eventually the People-Eaters were confined within a cave, which was then sealed with fire for ten days. The Paiutes called out, saying they would let anyone who renounced cannibalism to go free (here, it should be noted, that the People-Eaters are explicitly described as speaking the same language as the Paiute), but they refused. After ten days, the Paiute put out the fire and searched the cave. They found no one alive, but thought maybe some People-Eaters may have escaped because they cave was so enormous that they couldn't search the whole thing. After this, the band of Paiute band responsible became known as the "Say-do-carah." Winnemucca claimed to have a sample of red hair taken from the cave - now associated with Lovelock Cave - and that these events took place 5-7 generations before her time.

A lot of auxillary legends have popped up about the Si-Te-Cah. The two most prominent are that they were also giants and / or Europeans. They get associated with giants because two miners found a tall skeleton in Lovelock Cave. They called this skeleton a giant, but it was only 6 feet tall or so from what little we know of it today. The miners weren't the best archaeologists to say the least, so we don't have any of the skeletons they found. The European angle comes from bit of red hair that Winnemucca claimed to have had. Again, we don't have that sample anymore to be certain that it actually existed or to test to see if it is what she thought it was. People hear "red hair" and assume that this must mean European. Assuming that the hair was 1) human hair, 2) that it was red and 3) as old as she claimed, there's also the possibility it was red due to oxidation of eumelanin or dying / other cosmetic alterations. We currently have no way of knowing. And if there really were Europeans living in the Americas for thousands of years, the evidence for this shouldn't hinge on a scrap of hair that may not actually exist.

Ultimately, that's the Clovis Tribes' main argument - that Europeans have been living in the Americas for thousands of years. They also mention Kennewick Man which has been a favorite target for advocates of ancient Euroamericans - except that recent genetic analysis has confirmed what more reasonable minds have always suspected: Kennewick Man is more closely related to modern Native American populations than he is anyone else on the planet.