The Evidence that Indians and Mexicans Ignore
Joe
The first Americans were descended from Australian aborigines, according to
evidence in a new BBC documentary.
The programme, Ancient Voices, shows that the dimensions of prehistoric
skulls found in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia
and Melanesia. Other evidence suggests that these first Americans were later
massacred by invaders from Asia.
Until now, native Americans were believed to have descended from Asian
ancestors who arrived over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and then
migrated across the whole of north and south America. The land bridge was
formed 11,000 years ago during the ice age, when sea level dropped.
However, the new evidence shows that these people did not arrive in an empty
wilderness. Stone tools and charcoal from the site in Brazil show evidence
of human habitation as long ago as 50,000 years.
The site is at Serra Da Capivara in remote northeast Brazil. This area is
now inhabited by the descendants of European settlers and African slaves who
arrived just 500 years ago.
But cave paintings found here provided the first clue to the existence of a
much older people.
Images of giant armadillos, which died out before the last ice age, show the
artists who drew them lived before even the natives who greeted the
Europeans.
These Asian people have facial features described as mongoloid. However,
skulls dug from a depth equivalent to 9,000 to 12,000 years ago are very
different.
Walter Neves, an archaeologist from the University of Sao Paolo, has taken
extensive skull measurements from dozens of skulls, including the oldest, a
young woman who has been named Lucia.
"The measurements show that Lucia was anything but mongoloid," he says.
The next step was to reconstruct a face from Lucia's skull. First, a CAT
scan of the skull was done, to allow an accurate working model to be made.
Then a forensic artist, Richard Neave from the University of Manchester, UK,
created a face for Lucia. The result was surprising: "It has all the
features of a negroid face," says Dr Neave.
The skull dimensions and facial features match most closely the native
people of Australia and Melanesia. These people date back to about 60,000
years, and were themselves descended from the first humans, who left Africa
about 100,000 years ago.
But how could the early Australians have travelled more than 13,500
kilometres (8,450 miles) at that time? The answer comes from more cave
paintings, this time from the Kimberley, a region at the northern tip of
Western Australia.
Here, Grahame Walsh, an expert on Australian rock art, found the oldest
painting of a boat anywhere in the world. The style of the art means it is
at least 17,000 years old, but it could be up to 50,000 years old.
And the crucial detail is the high prow of the boat. This would have been
unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it
was used on the open ocean.
Fantastic voyage
Archaeologists speculate that such an incredible sea voyage, from Australia
to Brazil, would not have been undertaken knowingly but by accident.
Just three years ago, five African fishermen were caught in a storm and a
few weeks later were washed up on the shores of South America. Two of the
fishermen died, but three made it alive.
But if the first Americans had drifted from Australia, where are their
descendants now? Again, the skulls suggest an answer.
The shape of the skulls changes between 9,000 and 7,000 years ago from being
exclusively negroid to exclusively mongoloid. Combined with rock art
evidence of increasing violence at this time, it appears that the mongoloid
people from the north invaded and wiped out the original Americans.
The only evidence of any survivors comes from Terra del Fuego, the islands
at the remotest southern tip of South America.
The pre-European Fuegeans, who lived stone age-style lives until this
century, show hybrid skull features which could have resulted from
intermarrying between mongoloid and negroid peoples. Their rituals and
traditions also bear some resemblance to the ancient rock art in Brazil.
The identity of the first Americans is an emotive and controversial
question. But the evidence from Brazil, and a handful of people who still
live at the very tip of South America, suggests that the Americas have been
home to a greater diversity of humans than previously thought - and for much
longer.
Ancient Voices: The hunt for the first Americans will be shown on BBC Two at
2130 BST on Wednesday 1 September.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_430000/430944.stm
editorial on this article and topic:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/ponte/1999/ponte09-28-99.htm
Carlos cmsahe
UNDERWORLD / Graham Hancock
Michael Joseph / Penguin | ISBN: 0-718-14400-7 | 2002 | 741 pages |
GBP 20.00
* * * (out of four)
Let's be clear at the outset: this is not a review of the merits of
Graham Hancock's theories. Instead this is a review of the alternative
historian's new book Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age as a
non-fiction entry into that broad-based category of "literature." As
such, it's pretty good.
Hancock became famous in the mid-1990s when he proposed that a lost
civilization of advanced technology and well-developed science had not
only mapped the ancient world but had bequeathed civilization to the
prehistoric civilizations of Egypt and the Americas. Now the massive
new tome Underworld attempts to provide a factual and maybe even
scientific basis for some of his earlier works' core claims. Hancock
dived at sites around the world, from the sunken cart-ruts of Malta to
the strange stone circles submerged off the coast of Taiwan. To his
credit, in this book, unlike earlier works, Hancock gives mainstream
archaeologists and geologists a chance to express doubts about his
conclusions, though of course the tone of the book understandably
favors the author who created it.
But that very quest to keep Underworld grounded in facts gives the
book a split personality. On the one hand, it is an effort to provide
an alternative history for the end of the Ice Age, one which claims
that our ancestors witnessed the great cataclysms that accompanied the
melting of the glaciers and recorded those memories in myths, legends
and ancient maps. On the other hand, it is a book that tries to
highlight anomalous ruins lost beneath the waves, ruins which could be
man-made and could be more than 9,000 years old. Hancock manages
(mostly) to walk the fine line between geology textbook and historical
fantasy, but at times the two intertwining threads don't seem to
completely mesh. Especially in the earlier sections about Ice Age
geology (and the annoyingly frequent references to LGM -- the Last
Glacial Maximum, or greatest extent of the ice), Underworld tends to
read more like a refrigerator manual, but it improves as it goes
along. The book is strongest when Hancock is talking about himself,
his journey of discovery, and how he began to assemble the pieces of
the puzzle.
Our intrepid author takes us around the world (except for Egypt and
the Americas) to strange places and stranger times. He tells his story
in the form of a personal voyage of discovery carried out through a
series of dives at underwater ruins. (However, we could do without
Hancock's opinions on how diving is like good sex: "if your body and
mind are relaxed, you can go on for ever"). He shows us sunken temples
and monuments off the coasts of India, Malta and Japan which seem to
hint at the prospect that people lived off these coasts when they were
still above land. Hancock relies on a series of maps made by Durham
University's Dr. Glenn Milne to illustrate that these places were
habitable an astonishing 15,000 years ago. Hancock also includes a
fascinating, but less than scientific, section on ancient maps and the
strange similarity many of them bear to Milne's reconstructions of the
world of 10,500 B.C.
Of course, since he is an alternative historian, Hancock must also
link the Ice Age to the legend of Atlantis, and he continues his
tradition of accusing in each of his books at least one archaeologist
of conspiring to cover up evidence of a lost civilization. This time
the victim is J.D. Evans, late director of Malta's museums,
unconvincingly accused of conspiring to prevent the discovery of
Paleolithic evidence on Malta, an island the mainstream believes was
first inhabited during the later Neolithic period. But these are minor
quibbles with otherwise fine work in linking Malta to the Paleolithic.
Hancock also gives us two long sections on India and how its ancient
culture connects back in time to prehistoric Indian civilizations, and
he provides a coherent (if not always convincing) argument for why the
India of today shares much in common with its prehistoric Indus Valley
predecessor.
However, after exploring 600 pages worth of India and Malta, the
section on Japan feels rushed (even though it is long), and here
Hancock loses that precious balance between physical discoveries and
armchair speculation. Too much of this section is devoted to mythology
and map-mysteries, while the underwater ruins are mostly hinted at.
For a book called Underworld, Hancock left out much of his underwater
research: "I've said nothing for example about the underwater enigmas
of Tenerife [or those] around the Tahitian islands of Raiatea and
Huahine [or] of the strange things we saw underwater off the Tongan
island of Haapai."
Here I find myself compelled to say a few words about Hancock's thesis
because it directly impacts the book as a whole. In fact, this new
version of the lost civilization theory is the single largest problem
with an otherwise compelling and readable Underworld. Graham Hancock
has done the unthinkable: he has effectively abandoned much of his
charmingly quirky earlier theory that Paleolithic Ice Age humans were
technologically advanced super-men.
Even if we accept every shred of Hancock's evidence without question,
he has done nothing more than propose that over the course of the
5,000 years people spent living through the Ice Age meltdown people
managed to raise some stone monuments, develop a spiritual system of
great complexity, and (most controversially) somehow manage to map the
world. While many conservative archaeologists will disagree with at
least the last of these things, it is not hard to conceive it
possible. Since ancient humans arrived in Australia by boat before
50,000 B.C., it is not that hard to imagine that Ice Age peoples did
explore their coast lines, trade maps and information with neighboring
groups and produce after thousands of years a decent and close to
accurate map of most of the world. If Europeans could do it in two
centuries, then Ice Agers could have done it in five millennia.
Hancock's other position, that ancient peoples lived along the coasts
that the end of the Ice Age sent underwater is neither new nor
original. Hancock claims, however that it is being ignored: "Marine
archaeologists have barely begun a systematic survey for possible
submerged sites on those flooded lands. Most would regard it as a
waste of time even to look." Yet Hancock fails to recognize two
important facts. First, that many (if not a majority) of
archaeologists would very much like to explore the old coastlines
where early humans once lived. Second, the funding is not there
because the archaeologists cannot guarantee to financers that they
will find anything down there. It is the funding system Hancock should
attack, not the archaeologists' integrity.
So what is the bottom line on Underworld? It is an ambitious and
largely solid book that makes a compelling case that the areas once
occupied by Paleolithic man may hold secrets that we do not yet
understand. It is also a book that, while always taking the most
extreme view the scientific facts make possible, does not often go
beyond published literature. What we have is a work of alternative
history that tries so hard to be credible and factual that it comes
across at times like the very archaeological literature it aims to
replace. But is it worth the money? Without a doubt, this book is well
worth the ridiculously low price at which the British are selling it.
. .
When writing this review, I discovered that despite the fact that I
liked the book I wrote a review that sounded quite negative. I think
this is because the book is not what I had expected it to be, and that
disconnect between the old Hancockian romantic vision of powerful,
advanced Atlanteans and the new theory of map-making hunter-gatherers
made the book less fun. I give it three stars, though, because for
what it is Underworld is very good. However, with a little more
underwater evidence and one more revision, it could be great.
__________
One brief quibble about the physical volume. Michael Joseph's printing
left much to be desired. When reading the book, I found that the ink
rubbed off on my hands and left gray patches on the pages. Also, the
photographic plates are placed oddly, are (almost) never mentioned in
the text, and in one case interrupt a two-page map spread that really
needed to be seen side-by-side.