<p>This one's incredibly difficult for me to rationalize. Online explanation doesn't help much.</p>
<p>This question was asked previously here:<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/791206-desperate-need-cr-mc-w-help-specific-questions-bb-2nd-ed.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/791206-desperate-need-cr-mc-w-help-specific-questions-bb-2nd-ed.html</a> but there is no definitive answer.</p>
<p>BB2, Test 3, Section 7, Question 15 (page 541)</p>
<ol>
<li>Both authors agree on which of the following points?</li>
</ol>
<p>(A) A maritime environment would have presented unique challenges to early Americans.
(B) The first Americans most likely subsisted on masatdons and other big game.
(C) Overland travel to the New World would have been difficult during the most recent ice age.
(D) It may never be definitively determined when America was initially settled.
(E) The Clovis people were most likely the first Americans.</p>
<p>PASSAGES</p>
<p>Passage 1: (found from National Geographic)</p>
<p>In 1929 a teenager named Ridgely Whiteman wrote to the Smithsonian Institution about what he called warheads that he had been finding near Clovis, New Mexico. The spearpoints were elegantly chipped to sharpness on both edges and finished off with a groove, or flute, down the center of each side. Eventually such fluted points turned up in the oldest archaeological excavations elsewhere in North America. </p>
<p>Stone can't be carbon-dated, but the dating of organic material found with the tools showed that the people who used them were in America no earlier than about 13,500 years ago. The story most archaeologists built on these ancient tools was of a people they nicknamed Clovis, who came into North America via Siberia, moved south through the ice-free corridor, then dispersed, their descendants occupying North and South America within a thousand years. Since their tools were often found with the bones of mammoths and other large creatures, scientists usually described the Clovis people as big-game hunters. </p>
<p>For decades attempts to find proof of earlier people failed the rigorous tests of archaeological science. As late as 1996 a prominent archaeologist, Frederick Hadleigh West, could state in a major book that "Clovis is taken to be the basal, the founding, population for the Americas." But in the past decade that certainty has been dramatically shaken. </p>
<p>The most straightforward challenge to the old story is the matter of time. The era in which the Clovis people lived is limited by a time barrier that stops about 13,500 years ago. Two things create that barrier: the dates of organic material found with the tools and geologic evidence that the ice-free corridor would not have been open much before then. </p>
<p>But in 1997 a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists visited a site in Chile called Monte Verde and agreed that people had lived there at least 14,500 years ago, about 1,000 years before the first sign of Clovis people in North America. Acceptance of the Monte Verde date not only broke the time barrier but focused new interest on other sites with early dates. </p>
<p>Passage 2: (from Discover Magazine)</p>
<p>One of the biggest barriers to accepting pre-Clovis sites has been geographical. During the last ice age, the New World was pretty much closed to pedestrian traffic. Some 30,000 years ago, the northwest corridor in Canada would have been filled with glacier, and much of the Bering land bridge would also have been covered with ice. Though ancient humans might have mastered the prehistoric crampon, mastodons almost certainly did not, and finding food and shelter under those circumstances would have been difficult at best. But the latest idea circulating among archeologists and anthropologists has people ditching their crampons and spears for skin-covered boats. Maybe the first Americans came not by land but by sea, hugging the ice-age coast in a wide arc from Fiji to Tierra del Fuego.</p>
<p>When the seafaring theory was proposed in the mid-1970s, it sank for lack of evidence. Any shoreline outposts of an ancient maritime culture would probably have been submerged when sea levels rose some 300 feet about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age. But as the timeline for new-world occupation has changed, the theory seems downright sensible, if not quite provable. The Pacific Rim has vast resources of salmon and sea mammals, and people need only the simplest of tools to exploit them: nets, weirs, clubs, knives. Whereas ancient landlubbers would have had to reinvent their means of hunting, foraging, and housing as they passed through different terrains, ancient mariners could have had smooth sailing through relatively unchanging coastal environments. And recent geologic studies show that even when glaciers stretched down into North America, there were thawed pockets of coastline in northwest North America where people could take refuge and gather provisions. "Most archeologists have a continental mindset," says Robson Bonnichsen, an anthropologist at the Center for the Study of the First Americans at the University of Oregon in Eugene. "But the peopling of the Americas is likely to be tied very much to the development and spread of maritime adaptation."</p>
<p>I can see how it relates to passage 2, but not passage 1. CB offers the explanation:</p>
<p>The author of Passage 1 states that organic material found with ancient tools reveals that the Clovis people were in America no earlier than about 13,500 years ago; he or she later explains that geologic evidence shows that an ice-free corridor between Siberia and North America would not have been open much before then. The fact that the Clovis peoples movement depended on having an ice-free corridor suggests that travel to North America would have been difficult during the most recent ice age.</p>
<p>And...I still don't get it. Thanks in advance, oh great ones.</p>