) There is no physical remain of contact whatsoever. All the "proofs" that are always mentioned are hoaxes, including the "African bones" and the Mande script (the Mande script was invented in 1820). The plant interchange and thousand of other pseudo-historical claims are also false.           Olmec, recovered from an archeological site by Mexican scientists.

Originally posted by pinguin Originally posted by red clay     All Scientists Agree!!??  You couldn't get all scientists to agree on what to have for lunch, let alone something as controversial as this. The Olmec heads are much more than "squared pieces of stone"  They are realistic representations, apparently of people who lived in the area where they were carved.  Chiseled, carved stone, not relief. Have you even seen an Olmec head? The west Africans of contact times may not have been seafaring, but we are talking several thousand years before contact [pre columbian]  Final? What sources are you using for that one?  The case for diffusion has gotten stronger in the last ten years.  With new discoveries almost weekly, to rule anything out is setting yourself up.  There is so little known about West African civilizations BCE to say anything is final is absurd.     I don't want to debate the point. Actually, I know the African contact theory was developed by Afrocentrist "schollars" like Ivan Van Sertima and Clyde Winters, which are really a joke for the serious archaeologists.   However, these are some points you should know if you want to enter in a discussion.   (1) Native Americans didn't have inmunity for the diseases that affected them so much during the 16th century. Most of those diseases originated in Africa. If contact existed they would have developed inmunity.   (2) There is no physical remain of contact whatsoever. All the "proofs" that are always mentioned are hoaxes, including the "African bones" and the Mande script (the Mande script was invented in 1820). The plant interchange and thousand of other pseudo-historical claims are also false.   (3) There is no genetical marker of African ancestry in pre-contact peoples of the Americas, and not in today's Native American pure populations.   (4) West African kingdoms become important ONLY in the Middle Ages. By that time Olmec culture had already being replaced by the Maya. Chronology does not match.   (5) West Africa simply did not have the tech for long distance sailing into the open sea. Actually, Native Americans were more advanced than Africans of the time in navigation. If any contact existed would have happened the other way around.   I suggest you read this article before you attempt to answer. Is called " Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs"   http://www.thehallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=73   It was written by a scientist and blow Van Sertima up.   Read it carefully, please.   Pinguin

Reply to My Critics

by Ivan Van Sertima

An attack on my thesis that Africans made contact with America before Columbus in two major pre-Christian periods (circa 1200 b.c. and circa 800 b.c.) in addition to the Mandingo contact period (1310/1311 A.D.) has been circulated in advance to hundreds of subscribers to a journal, Current Anthropology.  Copies of this attack by Bernard de Montellano, Warren Barbour and Gabriel Haslip-Viera were also sent out to African-American scholars, some of whom were cited in the attack, dishonestly titled "Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs."  The title's emphasis is meant to suggest that all revisions of African history by so-called "Blacks" belong to a common school, radiate from a common brain, and are cast in the same "racialist" hue and mode.  This circular, which precedes my new book, REPLY TO MY CRITICS (scheduled to appear in Sept), seeks to highlight the brazen and malicious lies, slanders and misrepresentations that characterize this attack.  Let it be noted that I was invited to respond to this attack but was forced to withdraw.  The editor, after verbally agreeing that I could reprint my commentary, after the issue of the Journal appeared, did a dramatic about-turn when pressed to sign a written agreement to back up his word.  He wrote that I could only reprint my "commentary" (15 pages) if I also reprinted the attack on me (50 pages) since "they form a unit."  To feel the full absurdity of this, just imagine the Jewish Defense League being forced to republish an extended Nazi-type attack on their positions in order to republish a brief response to such a slanderous attack.

LIE ONE: - "Van Sertima's expedition allegedly sailed or drifted westward to the Gulf of Mexico where it came in contact with inferior Olmecs.  These individuals created Olmec civilization." - De Montellano, Barbour and Haslip-Viera.

THE TRUTH: As far back as 1976, I made my position on this matter very clear. I never said that Africans created or founded American civilization. I said they made contact and all significant contact between two peoples lead to influences.  "I think it is necessary to make it clear - since partisan and ethnocentric scholarship seems to be the order of the day - that the emergence of the Negroid face, which the archeological and cultural data overwhelmingly confirm, in no way presupposes the lack of a native originality, the absence of other influences or the automatic eclipse of other faces"-p. 147 of "They Came Before Columbus."  See also Journal of African Civilizations, Vol 8, No. 2, 1986 "I cannot subscribe to the notion that civilization suddenly dropped onto the American earth from the Egyptian heaven."

LIE TWO: None of the early Egyptians and Nubians looked like Negroes.  "They have long, narrow noses..." "Short, flat noses are confined to the West African ancestors of African-Americans."  Again, "there is no evidence that ancient Nubians ever braided their hair.       This style comes from colonial and modern Ethiopia."

THE TRUTH: Narrow noses have been found among millions of pure-blooded Africans.  We can see this among the Elongated and Nilotic types.  My critics know nothing about the variants of Africa, ancient or modern.  All the six main variants of the African have been found in the Egyptian and Nubian graves.  For examples of ancient braided Nubian hair, see Frank Snowden's "Before Color Prejudice," As for Egypto-Nubians only having narrow noses, see Egyptian pharaohs in Vol 10 and 12 of the JAC and major Nubian pharaohs in Peggy Bertram's essay (JAC, Vol.12) -Ushanaru, Plate 8, p 173; Taharka as the god Amun from Kawa Temples, Plate 9, p. 173; Shabaka, Plate 12, p. 176. Tanwetamani, Plate 16, p. 180.  To say that these are narrow noses is to exhibit a colossal ignorance of African types in ancient Egypt and Nubia.  The agenda behind this is to bolster their case that they could not have been models for any of the Olmec stone heads.

LIE THREE; Modern Egyptians look exactly as they did thousands of years ago. The composition of the Egyptian has not changed over the last 5000 years. Invasions by the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Arabs and Romans left them looking the same today as in the dawn of history.

THE TRUTH: This is a hasty misreading of the work of scholars like A.C. Berry, R. J. Berry and Ucko who point out that there is a remarkable degree of homogeneity in this area for 5000 years. What a superficial reading of this fails to note is that the period ends with the close of the native dynasties BEFORE the invasions of the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Arab foreigners

LIE FOUR: Faced with the startlingly Negroid features of some of the Olmec stone heads, my critics try 4 ways out: (a) They are "spitting images of the native;" (b)  they appear dark because some of them were carved out of dark volcanic stone; (c) some were made of white basalt which turned dark over time; (d) ancient Egyptians and Nubians were remote in physiognomy from sub-Saharan Negroes and none of them could have been models for any of the "Negro-looking" heads. Having said all that, they then claim that "races are not linked to specific physiognomic traits."

THE TRUTH: No need to shoot them down on this. They turned the gun on themselves.

LIE FIVE: Nothing African has been found in any archeological excavation in the New World.

THE TRUTH: In the drier centers of the Olmec world - at Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban - the Polish craniologist, Andrez Wiercinski, found indisputable evidence of an African presence. The many traits analyzed in these Olmec sites indicated individuals with Negroid traits predominating but with an admixture of other racial traits. This is what I have said. The work of A. Vargas Guadarrama is an important reinforcement of Wiercinski's study. He found that the skulls he examined at Tlatilco, which Wiercinski had classified as Negroid, were "radically different" from other skulls on the site, bearing indisputable similarities to skulls in West Africa and Egypt.

LIE SIX: Van Sertima presents no evidence that a New World cotton (gossypium hirsutum var. punctatum) was transferred from Guinea to the Cape Verde in 1462 by the Portuguese and there is no hard proof that West Africans made a round trip to America before Columbus.

THE TRUTH: I cited evidence in 12 categories to establish Mandingo voyages to the New World circa1310/1311 A.D. This included eyewitness reports from nearly a dozen Europeans, even Columbus himself, metallurgical, linguistic, botanical, navigational, oceanographic, skeletal, epigraphic, cartographic, oral, documented and iconographic evidence. With regard to New World cotton in Africa before 1462, Stephens spoke in two tongues to pacify isolationist colleagues.

LIE SEVEN: My critics claim that I said the bottle gourd came in with Old World voyagers.

THE TRUTH: I was at pains to point out that this is ONE PLANT THAT COULD DRIFT TO AMERICA WITHOUT THE LOSS OF SEED VIABILITY. "Bottle gourds got caught in the pull of currents from the African coast and drifted to America across the Atlantic. Thomas Whitaker and G.F. Carter showed that these gourds are capable of floating in seawater for 7 months without loss of seed viability" - "They Came Before Columbus," 204. They indulge in an even more vicious dishonesty with regard to cotton, claiming that I said "Old World cottons came into America with a fleet of Nubians circa 700 B.C." I never linked cotton transfer to Nubian contact.

LIE EIGHT: My critics admit "we cannot unequivocally date the heads" but they single out one which they say Ann Cyphers confidently dated about 1011 B.C. Note the date! This is 200 years AFTER the Egyptian contact  period c. 1200 B.C. Yet they claim that the dating of this one head proves "Negro-looking heads" were being carved, mutilated, and buried prior to 1200 B.C.

THE TRUTH: The stone heads could not have been buried before they were carved.

LIE NINE: Egyptians stopped building pyramids "thousands of years" before 1200 B.C. No relationship whatever exists between Old World/New World pyramids.

THE TRUTH: Enormous obelisks, calling for the same complex engineering skills of the pyramid age were built at Karnak as late as 1295 B.C. A pyramid was also built as Dashur circa 1700 B.C. Bart Jordan, the mathematical child prodigy, to whom Einstein granted special audience, established startling coincidences between Old World and New World pyramids. He agrees with me that "The overwhelming incidence of coincidence argues overwhelmingly against a mere coincidence."

LIE TEN: My critics claim that I have trampled upon the self-respect and self-esteem of native Americans and they have come forward to champion their cause.

THE TRUTH: My people (for I am part Macusi and part African) would be horrified to have, as champions of our cause, De Montellano, Barbour, and Haslip-Viera, who disgrace us with the charge that "native Americans would have sacrificed and eaten the Africans if they came."

 

 

Originally posted by red clay   All Scientists Agree!!??  You couldn't get all scientists to agree on what to have for lunch, let alone something as controversial as this. The Olmec heads are much more than "squared pieces of stone"  They are realistic representations, apparently of people who lived in the area where they were carved.  Chiseled, carved stone, not relief. Have you even seen an Olmec head? The west Africans of contact times may not have been seafaring, but we are talking several thousand years before contact [pre columbian]  Final? What sources are you using for that one?  The case for diffusion has gotten stronger in the last ten years.  With new discoveries almost weekly, to rule anything out is setting yourself up.  There is so little known about West African civilizations BCE to say anything is final is absurd.

One thing when debating this that you have to keep in mind.. Is that according to Spencer Wells A Genetic Scientist said that humanity started in Africa,

and when the water levels were low the Africans traveled threw the water, into Asia, Australia, Europe,

and they kept traveling until they completely made it across the whole entire earth....By that time their appearance was different.....

See if the africans was the cause of all the other races on the earth who's to say that their were'nt black(african) people who's body hadn't gone threw the evolution stages  in that same area  during the times of The Olmecs?


Edited by AfrikaJamaika - 28-Feb-2007 at 03:51

If I suggested the vikings were negroid, people would look at the Scandinavians of today and reguard it proof that the claim was untrue. Surely the same holds with the Olmecs. Why aren't the Olmec of today black if their ancestors were?

Edited by Paul - 29-Sep-2006 at 20:19

Originally posted by red clay Originally posted by Paul Using the Olmec heads to suggest Africans colonised Mexicon is rather like insisting flat headed giants colonised Easter island.     Not Quite the same. The Olmec heads are realistic representations of apparently real people, just on a very large scale.  Decidedly different personalities exist in each head, there isn't heavy stylization as in the Easter Island heads.  The Olmec heads have decidedly African features. I personally feel the Olmec heads are considerably older than they're given credit for.

Using the Olmec heads to suggest Africans colonised Mexicon is rather like insisting flat headed giants colonised Easter island.

again, if any mesaomerican culture was influenced or contacted bya foreign culture, where are the probes about those contacts ? why there`s no evidence of iron tools or metallurgic ? what I`m trying to say is that when a culture is influenced by others, there are aspects printed as result from those contacts such as tooling, ideas, etc.

Regards