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Photo by The Nature of Things with David Suzuki/ Handout

“These people were here and they were here in great numbers,” said Stanford, an anthropologist and curator with the Smithsonian Institution. “A young archeologist in the future will be taught a different story based on the work that we’ve been doing, because we’re changing the history of the world.”

The other proponent, Bradley of the University of Exeter, says he likes to answer the question about why would a people cross an ocean during an ice age by asking “Why wouldn’t they?”

As Suzuki puts it, Solutreans were “lured by the neverending bounty of the sea,” hunting great auks and seals, and they reached North America almost by accident.

The documentary is scheduled for online release on Friday, in advance of its airing on CBC on Sunday.

The Solutrean Hypothesis, as it is known, is so toxic, and so discredited among mainstream researchers that documentary director Robin Bicknell said she could barely find anyone willing to go on camera even just to say it was wrong.

“That’s how repellent the term ‘Solutrean Hypothesis’ is,” Bicknell said. The common view was that this theory has already been debunked, she said. The final product includes two academic skeptics.

“Who were the first North Americans?” says Suzuki as the film opens.

That question has a “huge political component” that can overshadow the science, said José Victor Moreno-Mayar of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Photo by Handout

One prominent example is the book White Apocalypse by Kyle Bristow, which fictionalizes the theory with a story about the “Solutrean Liberation Front” and their modern-day battles, and argues that ancient Solutreans were exterminated in North America by more recent migrants of Asian background — the ancestors of modern Native Americans.