Pre-Columbian Indo-European Civilizations of the Americas
Pre-Columbian Indo-European Civilizations of the Americas
By Tom Finn
Writer, Historian, Student of Archaeology, Anthropology, and History
Abstract
Many thousands of years ago, spaced throughout the area of land we refer to today as North and South America, great civilizations flourished. In their art, skill and science these cultures rivaled the much later Egyptian and Persian Empires of the Fertile Crescent. These bearers of civilization to the American continents were great megalithic builders and were a people who were not racially or culturally kin to those we call today “Native Americans.” The Empire builders of the Americas were a maritime people who have roots that can be traced back to the Megalithic builders of Europe, Asia and the Western Pacific rim. These builders were red headed giants to those who came upon them, and so far advanced that they were immediately worshiped as gods by more primitive peoples who crossed their path. These, then, were the FIRST AMERICANS.
Pre-Columbian Indo-European Civilizations of The Americas
America before Christopher Columbus was much more than a homeland to nomadic, wild savages who walked from buffalo hunt to buffalo hunt while waiting a few thousand years to pass so Spaniards could bring them horses to ride on their hunts. The stereotypical image that most people have today of Pre-Columbian America could not be further from reality and truth. While there were Indian villages situated peacefully on the banks of streams in the wilderness, there were, also, great cities of fifty to a hundred thousand people built on the shores of the oceans that surround this continent. While two man canoes did quietly ply the streams and lakes of interior America, it is, also, true that great, three-masted ships regularly sailed many hundreds, and perhaps many thousands, of miles through oceans, conducting trade and exploration of the American continents and the oceans that surrounded them. And while primitive folk medicine was practiced, using herbs and medicine men, other great physicians performed brain surgery and repaired wounds to the skull that would only be repeated again in the 20th century. For every teepee and crude dugout inhabited by hunter-gatherers, there were metropolitan areas containing thousands, living comfortably in well-built homes richly decorated. While there were those who lived off the land hunting and gathering with bow and digging stick, there were many more who raised thousands of acres of crops, using irrigation systems fed by aqueducts that the Romans would have greatly admired. The picturesque image of a tribe gathered around a campfire under the stars, listening to the words of a wise “father,” is quite true. But, elsewhere on this same continent, there were great pyramids surrounded by beautiful temples rivaling in majesty those of ancient Persia, upon which stood wise men who studied the stars, wrote books, and calculated solar events with an accuracy comparable to that of computers. This, then, is the opening chapter of the America of which you have heretofore heard only fleeting rumors. The America that existed before Columbus, before the Vikings, and before those who erroneously lay exclusive claim to the title, “Native Americans” -- ever erected more than a pole for a teepee.
When Bartholomew Ruiz, the pilot of the first European ship known to have sailed south of the equinoctial line on the Pacific side, looked into the distance one morning in 1526, he became greatly perplexed. For on the deep sea off the coast of Northern Peru, “was a vessel, seeming in the distance like a caravel of considerable size, traversed by a large sail.”[i] He had every right to question his eyes, for he believed his was the only European ship to ever sail this far south on the Peruvian Sea. Ruiz was scouting the coastline of Peru for Francisco Pizarro, the Spaniard who believed there was a great kingdom to the South. As Ruiz pulled close enough for inspection, he was astounded to see a large vessel with two masts, a rudder, and moveable keel, loaded with fine goods of many types[ii] bound for trade along the coast. These hallmarks of civilization were far greater than anything yet seen south of the Yucatán Peninsula by the Spaniards. There, of course, had been rumors among the Spanish of a “great kingdom to the South,” where gold was as common as iron was with the Europeans. But, now, before his eyes was the proof. There was somewhere yet before them a great people unknown to Europeans.
The Spaniards would in the following months discover not just a kingdom, but also, an empire that stretched some 2,000 miles from Ecuador to Chile. An empire whose titular head claimed to be a “child of the sun.” A race of god/men credited with bringing civilization to the Americas. It was an empire so astounding to the eyes of the Conquistadors that they themselves compared it to what they had left behind in Europe. Nonetheless, the richness that was Inca Peru, the astounding cities, magnificent palaces, and megalithic fortresses; were all, in reality, only the shadow legacy of greater civilizations which had preceded them. The Inca ruling class, passing themselves off as descendents of the god Viracocha, were in reality a mere, faint remnant of the ancient builders, scientists, astronomers, and skilled craftsmen who had come before them. The Incas, thus, were not the first Americans. Rather, they were the very last of those “children of the sun” who could lay claim to being the First Americans.
Children of the Sun
We do not know exactly whence they came, but, we do know some things about them; they worshiped the sun; they built with 200-ton megalithic blocks, which they moved for miles over both land and water; they understood the movement of the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies; they created accurate calendars, had writing, art, and an understanding of the physical sciences. These civilized peoples of the American Continents lived, married, and died from Canada to as far south as modern Chile. Their greatest known center of concentrated population was in the area we know today as Peru.[iii] Their physical remains show them to be part of the migrations of the Indo-European family.[iv] They were red-haired, often over six feet tall, and appearing as giants to those other tribes of lesser stature and different ethnic stock who came to be ruled by them. For they were not alone: “The American race before Columbus was not a fixed and single racial type; nor was its culture a stereotyped form from any one single source. Both race and culture were mixed from many sources and both were undergoing constant changes.”[v]
We do know where they were at certain points in time. Their roots run nearly the entire Pacific Rim, from Indonesia, Southeast Asia to the Jomon people of Japan, the ancestors of the Aineu. From there they spread across the Pacific to the American Continents by both Northern and Southern migrational routes. In their migrations in the Pacific they came to Easter Island where they erected giant stone statues of themselves along the coastline known as Moai. Upon each one was placed a red “topknot” to signify their red hair and god-like status. And carved upon the chest of one of these stones was a pictograph of how these redheaded, megalithic workers of stone arrived at Easter Island, in great three-masted ships. [vi] They were a maritime people who sailed the Pacific.
“New World” or Old?
America is not the “New World” we have been led to believe. Rather it is an “old world” with an ancient legacy of peoples, cultures, and development going back at least 30,000 years and probably, many additional millennia.[vii] Instead of thinking in terms of when man may have immigrated to the American Continent, it is time to consider when he may have, also, emigrated FROM this continent to Polynesia, Asia, and elsewhere. The Bering Strait, to the extent that ancient peoples used it, was never a one-way street.
Your Mummy or Mine?
Many people, when they hear the word mummy, immediately think of Egyptian Pharaohs such as Ramesses II. But, one’s mind need not roam to the “old world” for mummies. Much closer, and right here in the “new world,” is a far older mummy than any yet discovered in Egypt, Spirit Cave Man. This early American and his people lived 9,500 years ago in Nevada and he was discovered in 1940 in a cave near Fallon. With an age near three times that of the oldest Pharaonic mummy, he is an object of great interest at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. This mummy, like many of the Pharaohs of Egypt, also, has reddish hair[viii] and Proto Indo-European features. The style of weaving used in the textiles found at the gravesite, known as diamond-plaited matting, marks the earliest known stage in North American weaving technology.[ix] Much like the equally ancient Kennewick Man found in Washington State in 1996, he has been the object of controversy. His so-called “non-Native American” features are a threat to established dogmas taught for over fifty years by dogmatically blinded professors handicapped by factually thin theories. These doctrinarians are in such desperate need to bolster worn-out theories of indigenous peoples having developed independent of outside contact, that they often make a laughing stock of themselves. They futilely attempt to explain away the evidence before their eyes with such statements as hair “turns red” when exposed to “light and air,” or some strange genetic diseases that struck only the ruling nobles. In a recent excavation at Dos Cabazas on the northern coast of Peru, where the ancient pre-Inca Moche once ruled, three nobles were found buried close to each other in a magnificent tomb. Their great height, ranging from five feet nine to six feet tall, presented no small problem for the archaeologists, one of whom, declared that the nobles “may have suffered from a disease similar to Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes thin, elongated bones.”[x] The red hair of the mummies there, and elsewhere in the imperial ruins, was not addressed—this time.
Native Mongolian Americans
Sprit Cave man predated by several thousand years the first verifiable appearance of so-called “Native Americans,” the term “native” denoting place of birth, becomes meaningless since the “Natives” had not yet reached America. Indeed, Mongolian “Native” Americans cannot be shown to have even arrived in North America when Sprit Cave man and his people were already settled in what is now Washington State, Nevada, the eastern seaboard of North America in Virginia[xi] and in the Basin of Mexico, a naturally enclosed high plain around today's Mexico City,[xii] and elsewhere.
With archaeologists finding artifacts of human existence as far South as Chile dating 30,000 years BP (before the present), it is crystal clear that not everyone came to America over the supposed ice-free corridor at the end of the last ice age 10 to 12 thousand years ago. Currently accepted “theories” of the peopling of America are just that, and should be treated as such by those with an interest in American pre-history.[xiii] There is strong evidence that some of the early immigrants to the Americas were related to the same wave of pre-historic migrations that brought to Southeast Asia the Jomon people who settled in Japan and elsewhere in the western Pacific Rim. The discovery of Kennewick Man adds considerable credence to this view, as his skull most closely resembles that of the Caucasoid Ainu of Japan, believed to be descendants of the Jomon. The ancient Jomon and more modern Ainu have racial physiological characteristics more genetically similar to those of Europeans than to East Asians who, also, migrated from mainland Asia to the Americas—but at a far later date than the First Americans.
Ships, Roads, Great Cities—Built By gods
There is more, so much more. However, this essay is meant to be but an introduction to the history of the “First Americans.” It is written with the intent to produce in the reader the desire to question currently pandered “histories” and theories of pre-Columbian America. For one thing is certain, there is more to this great story of the settlement of the American Continent than is currently being taught in modern schools and Universities. The reason for this great void of knowledge and research has everything to do with the “politics of archaeology,” as it is so well described by Thomas D. Dillehay in his book The Settlement of the Americas. Politics, the desire for political correctness, and peer pressure among those studying American pre-history are all factors in what we think we know on this subject. Fortunately, in spite of those with such narrowly drawn views — “the truth is out there.”
Captions
Figure 1. Rongorongo Tablet
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Rapanui, with its statues and unique writing system (known as Rongorongo), has provided a fertile breeding ground for the imagination of modern man.
By Tom Finn
Writer, Historian, Student of Archaeology, Anthropology, and History
Abstract
Many thousands of years ago, spaced throughout the area of land we refer to today as North and South America, great civilizations flourished. In their art, skill and science these cultures rivaled the much later Egyptian and Persian Empires of the Fertile Crescent. These bearers of civilization to the American continents were great megalithic builders and were a people who were not racially or culturally kin to those we call today “Native Americans.” The Empire builders of the Americas were a maritime people who have roots that can be traced back to the Megalithic builders of Europe, Asia and the Western Pacific rim. These builders were red headed giants to those who came upon them, and so far advanced that they were immediately worshiped as gods by more primitive peoples who crossed their path. These, then, were the FIRST AMERICANS.
Pre-Columbian Indo-European Civilizations of The Americas
America before Christopher Columbus was much more than a homeland to nomadic, wild savages who walked from buffalo hunt to buffalo hunt while waiting a few thousand years to pass so Spaniards could bring them horses to ride on their hunts. The stereotypical image that most people have today of Pre-Columbian America could not be further from reality and truth. While there were Indian villages situated peacefully on the banks of streams in the wilderness, there were, also, great cities of fifty to a hundred thousand people built on the shores of the oceans that surround this continent. While two man canoes did quietly ply the streams and lakes of interior America, it is, also, true that great, three-masted ships regularly sailed many hundreds, and perhaps many thousands, of miles through oceans, conducting trade and exploration of the American continents and the oceans that surrounded them. And while primitive folk medicine was practiced, using herbs and medicine men, other great physicians performed brain surgery and repaired wounds to the skull that would only be repeated again in the 20th century. For every teepee and crude dugout inhabited by hunter-gatherers, there were metropolitan areas containing thousands, living comfortably in well-built homes richly decorated. While there were those who lived off the land hunting and gathering with bow and digging stick, there were many more who raised thousands of acres of crops, using irrigation systems fed by aqueducts that the Romans would have greatly admired. The picturesque image of a tribe gathered around a campfire under the stars, listening to the words of a wise “father,” is quite true. But, elsewhere on this same continent, there were great pyramids surrounded by beautiful temples rivaling in majesty those of ancient Persia, upon which stood wise men who studied the stars, wrote books, and calculated solar events with an accuracy comparable to that of computers. This, then, is the opening chapter of the America of which you have heretofore heard only fleeting rumors. The America that existed before Columbus, before the Vikings, and before those who erroneously lay exclusive claim to the title, “Native Americans” -- ever erected more than a pole for a teepee.
Ships Ahoy!
When Bartholomew Ruiz, the pilot of the first European ship known to have sailed south of the equinoctial line on the Pacific side, looked into the distance one morning in 1526, he became greatly perplexed. For on the deep sea off the coast of Northern Peru, “was a vessel, seeming in the distance like a caravel of considerable size, traversed by a large sail.”[i] He had every right to question his eyes, for he believed his was the only European ship to ever sail this far south on the Peruvian Sea. Ruiz was scouting the coastline of Peru for Francisco Pizarro, the Spaniard who believed there was a great kingdom to the South. As Ruiz pulled close enough for inspection, he was astounded to see a large vessel with two masts, a rudder, and moveable keel, loaded with fine goods of many types[ii] bound for trade along the coast. These hallmarks of civilization were far greater than anything yet seen south of the Yucatán Peninsula by the Spaniards. There, of course, had been rumors among the Spanish of a “great kingdom to the South,” where gold was as common as iron was with the Europeans. But, now, before his eyes was the proof. There was somewhere yet before them a great people unknown to Europeans.
The Spaniards would in the following months discover not just a kingdom, but also, an empire that stretched some 2,000 miles from Ecuador to Chile. An empire whose titular head claimed to be a “child of the sun.” A race of god/men credited with bringing civilization to the Americas. It was an empire so astounding to the eyes of the Conquistadors that they themselves compared it to what they had left behind in Europe. Nonetheless, the richness that was Inca Peru, the astounding cities, magnificent palaces, and megalithic fortresses; were all, in reality, only the shadow legacy of greater civilizations which had preceded them. The Inca ruling class, passing themselves off as descendents of the god Viracocha, were in reality a mere, faint remnant of the ancient builders, scientists, astronomers, and skilled craftsmen who had come before them. The Incas, thus, were not the first Americans. Rather, they were the very last of those “children of the sun” who could lay claim to being the First Americans.
Children of the Sun
We do not know exactly whence they came, but, we do know some things about them; they worshiped the sun; they built with 200-ton megalithic blocks, which they moved for miles over both land and water; they understood the movement of the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies; they created accurate calendars, had writing, art, and an understanding of the physical sciences. These civilized peoples of the American Continents lived, married, and died from Canada to as far south as modern Chile. Their greatest known center of concentrated population was in the area we know today as Peru.[iii] Their physical remains show them to be part of the migrations of the Indo-European family.[iv] They were red-haired, often over six feet tall, and appearing as giants to those other tribes of lesser stature and different ethnic stock who came to be ruled by them. For they were not alone: “The American race before Columbus was not a fixed and single racial type; nor was its culture a stereotyped form from any one single source. Both race and culture were mixed from many sources and both were undergoing constant changes.”[v]
We do know where they were at certain points in time. Their roots run nearly the entire Pacific Rim, from Indonesia, Southeast Asia to the Jomon people of Japan, the ancestors of the Aineu. From there they spread across the Pacific to the American Continents by both Northern and Southern migrational routes. In their migrations in the Pacific they came to Easter Island where they erected giant stone statues of themselves along the coastline known as Moai. Upon each one was placed a red “topknot” to signify their red hair and god-like status. And carved upon the chest of one of these stones was a pictograph of how these redheaded, megalithic workers of stone arrived at Easter Island, in great three-masted ships. [vi] They were a maritime people who sailed the Pacific.
“New World” or Old?
America is not the “New World” we have been led to believe. Rather it is an “old world” with an ancient legacy of peoples, cultures, and development going back at least 30,000 years and probably, many additional millennia.[vii] Instead of thinking in terms of when man may have immigrated to the American Continent, it is time to consider when he may have, also, emigrated FROM this continent to Polynesia, Asia, and elsewhere. The Bering Strait, to the extent that ancient peoples used it, was never a one-way street.
Your Mummy or Mine?
Many people, when they hear the word mummy, immediately think of Egyptian Pharaohs such as Ramesses II. But, one’s mind need not roam to the “old world” for mummies. Much closer, and right here in the “new world,” is a far older mummy than any yet discovered in Egypt, Spirit Cave Man. This early American and his people lived 9,500 years ago in Nevada and he was discovered in 1940 in a cave near Fallon. With an age near three times that of the oldest Pharaonic mummy, he is an object of great interest at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. This mummy, like many of the Pharaohs of Egypt, also, has reddish hair[viii] and Proto Indo-European features. The style of weaving used in the textiles found at the gravesite, known as diamond-plaited matting, marks the earliest known stage in North American weaving technology.[ix] Much like the equally ancient Kennewick Man found in Washington State in 1996, he has been the object of controversy. His so-called “non-Native American” features are a threat to established dogmas taught for over fifty years by dogmatically blinded professors handicapped by factually thin theories. These doctrinarians are in such desperate need to bolster worn-out theories of indigenous peoples having developed independent of outside contact, that they often make a laughing stock of themselves. They futilely attempt to explain away the evidence before their eyes with such statements as hair “turns red” when exposed to “light and air,” or some strange genetic diseases that struck only the ruling nobles. In a recent excavation at Dos Cabazas on the northern coast of Peru, where the ancient pre-Inca Moche once ruled, three nobles were found buried close to each other in a magnificent tomb. Their great height, ranging from five feet nine to six feet tall, presented no small problem for the archaeologists, one of whom, declared that the nobles “may have suffered from a disease similar to Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes thin, elongated bones.”[x] The red hair of the mummies there, and elsewhere in the imperial ruins, was not addressed—this time.
Native Mongolian Americans
Sprit Cave man predated by several thousand years the first verifiable appearance of so-called “Native Americans,” the term “native” denoting place of birth, becomes meaningless since the “Natives” had not yet reached America. Indeed, Mongolian “Native” Americans cannot be shown to have even arrived in North America when Sprit Cave man and his people were already settled in what is now Washington State, Nevada, the eastern seaboard of North America in Virginia[xi] and in the Basin of Mexico, a naturally enclosed high plain around today's Mexico City,[xii] and elsewhere.
With archaeologists finding artifacts of human existence as far South as Chile dating 30,000 years BP (before the present), it is crystal clear that not everyone came to America over the supposed ice-free corridor at the end of the last ice age 10 to 12 thousand years ago. Currently accepted “theories” of the peopling of America are just that, and should be treated as such by those with an interest in American pre-history.[xiii] There is strong evidence that some of the early immigrants to the Americas were related to the same wave of pre-historic migrations that brought to Southeast Asia the Jomon people who settled in Japan and elsewhere in the western Pacific Rim. The discovery of Kennewick Man adds considerable credence to this view, as his skull most closely resembles that of the Caucasoid Ainu of Japan, believed to be descendants of the Jomon. The ancient Jomon and more modern Ainu have racial physiological characteristics more genetically similar to those of Europeans than to East Asians who, also, migrated from mainland Asia to the Americas—but at a far later date than the First Americans.
Ships, Roads, Great Cities—Built By gods
There is more, so much more. However, this essay is meant to be but an introduction to the history of the “First Americans.” It is written with the intent to produce in the reader the desire to question currently pandered “histories” and theories of pre-Columbian America. For one thing is certain, there is more to this great story of the settlement of the American Continent than is currently being taught in modern schools and Universities. The reason for this great void of knowledge and research has everything to do with the “politics of archaeology,” as it is so well described by Thomas D. Dillehay in his book The Settlement of the Americas. Politics, the desire for political correctness, and peer pressure among those studying American pre-history are all factors in what we think we know on this subject. Fortunately, in spite of those with such narrowly drawn views — “the truth is out there.”
Captions
Figure 1. Rongorongo Tablet
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Rapanui, with its statues and unique writing system (known as Rongorongo), has provided a fertile breeding ground for the imagination of modern man.
Figure 2. A Red Headed mummy from the Nasca culture.
Footnotes
[i] Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico &History of the Conquest of Peru. 1847, pp. 854-55.
[ii] Vases and mirrors of burnished silver, beautifully woven woolen cloth, finely made figurines of precious metal and other goods indicating a higher level of civilization than previously known.
[iii] “Known” is the operative word here. It is quite probable, that just off the American coast, both on the Pacific and Atlantic sides, lie cities now buried in water rather then dirt. Marine archaeology is just now coming into its own era of great discovery and the future holds significant promise of revealing civilizations yet unknown.
[iv] “The first entrants to the Western Hemisphere of maybe 15,000 years ago gave rise to the continuing native inhabitants south of the U.S.-Canadian border. These show no close association with any known mainland Asian population. Instead they show ties to the Ainu of Hokkaido and their Jomon predecessors in prehistoric Japan and to the Polynesians of remote Oceania. All of these also have ties to the Pleistocene and recent inhabitants of Europe and may represent an extension from a Late Pleistocene continuum of people across the northern fringe of the Old World.” C. LORING BRACE, A. RUSSELL NELSON, NORIKO SEGUCHI, HIROAKI OE§, LESLIE SERING, PAN QIFENG, LI YONGYI, DASHTSEVEG TUMEN, “Old World sources of the first New World human inhabitants: A comparative craniofacial view” July 30, 2001 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The above note is supplemented to include the following information:
THE TIMES, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2000
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, in Washington DC
EUROPEANS colonized America up to 30,000 years ago, perhaps by crossing the Atlantic, according to a genetic analysis of native Americans that sheds light on their origins.
By studying the DNA in “power packs’ of cells called mitochondria, scientist can compare populations to reveal evidence of ancient migrations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was told.
Such work shows four main lineages in native Americans which can be traced to Siberia and north-east Asia, notably in Baikal and Altai-Sayan.
However, a fifth – more minor – founding lineage, called haplogroup X, can be traced to Europe, and is found in North American populations, said Dr Theodore Schurr of Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas.
[v] Poindexter, Miles, L.L.D., The Ayar-Incas, Volume One 1930. Horace Liveright, New York. Pages XIV-XV.
[vi] Heyerdahl, Thor 1958 Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island. Allen and Unwin, London. See plate page 169 of three-masted sailing vessel.
[vii] “A site at Cactus Hill, near Richmond, Virginia, may be 17,000 years old. In Chile, scientists excavating a 12,500-year-old settlement at Monte Verde have found evidence of a human presence that may extend back as far as 30,000 years.” National Geographic News, July 31, 2001.
[viii] Numerous Egyptian mummies with red hair still attached to the skulls show that straight, wavy, or lightly curled hair types were common in ancient Egypt. For example, in a study (Titlbachova and Titlbach, 1977) involving detailed microscopic investigation of hair samples taken from several ancient Egyptian mummies, most were determined to have been naturally straight, wavy, or gently curled, with a roundish cross-section typical of modern Eurasian peoples.
[ix] Archaeology, Volume 49 Number 5 September/October 1996 OLDEST NORTH AMERICAN MUMMY.
[x] “Tomb of Giants”, National Geographic, March 2001 pages 64-65.
[xi] Both the Cactus Hill Site in Virginia and the Meadowcroft Shelter in Pennsylvania, along with at least a half-dozen other archaeological sites, are all older than the supposed first Bering Strait Migration to North America from Asia at the end of the last ice age, approximately 11,000 years ago.
[xii] “Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City. Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest human remains. However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today. Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait. The extreme age of Peñon woman suggests two scenarios. Either there was a much earlier migration of Caucasian-like people with long, narrow skulls across the Bering Strait and that these people were later replaced by a subsequent migration of Mongoloid people. Alternatively, and more controversially, a group of Stone Age people from Europe made the perilous sea journey across the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before Columbus or the Vikings. Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican-born archaeologist working at John Moores University and the leader of the research team, accepted yesterday that her discovery lends weight to the highly contentious idea that the first Americans may have actually been Europeans.” Does skull prove that the first Americans came from Europe? Independent.co.uk. Published by Independent Digital December 3, 2002.
[xiii] One should further be cognizant that these postulations are also in desperate need of rethinking by those studying the history of the American continent. Constraints imposed by interpretations of the last half-century have boxed in those studying the past. New evidence coupled with new methods of interpreting the past such as DNA analysis, demand reconsideration of long held sacred cows of establishment archaeology.
Footnotes
[i] Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico &History of the Conquest of Peru. 1847, pp. 854-55.
[ii] Vases and mirrors of burnished silver, beautifully woven woolen cloth, finely made figurines of precious metal and other goods indicating a higher level of civilization than previously known.
[iii] “Known” is the operative word here. It is quite probable, that just off the American coast, both on the Pacific and Atlantic sides, lie cities now buried in water rather then dirt. Marine archaeology is just now coming into its own era of great discovery and the future holds significant promise of revealing civilizations yet unknown.
[iv] “The first entrants to the Western Hemisphere of maybe 15,000 years ago gave rise to the continuing native inhabitants south of the U.S.-Canadian border. These show no close association with any known mainland Asian population. Instead they show ties to the Ainu of Hokkaido and their Jomon predecessors in prehistoric Japan and to the Polynesians of remote Oceania. All of these also have ties to the Pleistocene and recent inhabitants of Europe and may represent an extension from a Late Pleistocene continuum of people across the northern fringe of the Old World.” C. LORING BRACE, A. RUSSELL NELSON, NORIKO SEGUCHI, HIROAKI OE§, LESLIE SERING, PAN QIFENG, LI YONGYI, DASHTSEVEG TUMEN, “Old World sources of the first New World human inhabitants: A comparative craniofacial view” July 30, 2001 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The above note is supplemented to include the following information:
THE TIMES, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2000
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, in Washington DC
EUROPEANS colonized America up to 30,000 years ago, perhaps by crossing the Atlantic, according to a genetic analysis of native Americans that sheds light on their origins.
By studying the DNA in “power packs’ of cells called mitochondria, scientist can compare populations to reveal evidence of ancient migrations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was told.
Such work shows four main lineages in native Americans which can be traced to Siberia and north-east Asia, notably in Baikal and Altai-Sayan.
However, a fifth – more minor – founding lineage, called haplogroup X, can be traced to Europe, and is found in North American populations, said Dr Theodore Schurr of Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas.
[v] Poindexter, Miles, L.L.D., The Ayar-Incas, Volume One 1930. Horace Liveright, New York. Pages XIV-XV.
[vi] Heyerdahl, Thor 1958 Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island. Allen and Unwin, London. See plate page 169 of three-masted sailing vessel.
[vii] “A site at Cactus Hill, near Richmond, Virginia, may be 17,000 years old. In Chile, scientists excavating a 12,500-year-old settlement at Monte Verde have found evidence of a human presence that may extend back as far as 30,000 years.” National Geographic News, July 31, 2001.
[viii] Numerous Egyptian mummies with red hair still attached to the skulls show that straight, wavy, or lightly curled hair types were common in ancient Egypt. For example, in a study (Titlbachova and Titlbach, 1977) involving detailed microscopic investigation of hair samples taken from several ancient Egyptian mummies, most were determined to have been naturally straight, wavy, or gently curled, with a roundish cross-section typical of modern Eurasian peoples.
[ix] Archaeology, Volume 49 Number 5 September/October 1996 OLDEST NORTH AMERICAN MUMMY.
[x] “Tomb of Giants”, National Geographic, March 2001 pages 64-65.
[xi] Both the Cactus Hill Site in Virginia and the Meadowcroft Shelter in Pennsylvania, along with at least a half-dozen other archaeological sites, are all older than the supposed first Bering Strait Migration to North America from Asia at the end of the last ice age, approximately 11,000 years ago.
[xii] “Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City. Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest human remains. However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today. Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait. The extreme age of Peñon woman suggests two scenarios. Either there was a much earlier migration of Caucasian-like people with long, narrow skulls across the Bering Strait and that these people were later replaced by a subsequent migration of Mongoloid people. Alternatively, and more controversially, a group of Stone Age people from Europe made the perilous sea journey across the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before Columbus or the Vikings. Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican-born archaeologist working at John Moores University and the leader of the research team, accepted yesterday that her discovery lends weight to the highly contentious idea that the first Americans may have actually been Europeans.” Does skull prove that the first Americans came from Europe? Independent.co.uk. Published by Independent Digital December 3, 2002.
[xiii] One should further be cognizant that these postulations are also in desperate need of rethinking by those studying the history of the American continent. Constraints imposed by interpretations of the last half-century have boxed in those studying the past. New evidence coupled with new methods of interpreting the past such as DNA analysis, demand reconsideration of long held sacred cows of establishment archaeology.
posted by LRB at 1:23 AM
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