C-14 Testing Proves America’s Age
Zechariah Sitchin is internationally famous for his controversial books describing the origins of man and civilization. The Lost Realms, Genesis Revisited, and Cosmic Code are read in translated editions around the world, and he has appeared in numerous television documentaries dealing with alternative science.
Born in Russia, Mr. Sitchin was raised in Palestine, and he graduated from the University of London with a degree in economic history. He worked for years as a journalist and editor in Israel before settling in New York.
In an original article for the April, 2001 issue of Ancient American, Zechariah Sitchin showed that civilization on our continent is 15 centuries older than believed. This more
profound antiquity places prehistoric America squarely within the contemporary rise of high culture in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, where Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations did indeed share some provocative similarities with ancient Mexico. He helped prove his findings by using the Carbon-14 testing method.
Could there have been an overseas’ connection between the Nile Valley and the Valley of Mexico, even at the dawn of organized society, as Sitchin argues?
Ancient ruins on a Mexican island explored by an American astronaut back-dated the origins of high culture in the Americas by 15 centuries.
America’s First Civilization: Older Than Believed Possible by Zechariah Sitchin
If an astronaut were to corroborate any aspect of my writings, I would have expected it to be in regard to the inter-planetary matters discussed by my various published works. Surprisingly, such a corroboration concerns, of all things, the Olmec of ancient Mexico. It is tucked away in a recently released book, A Leap of Faith, by Mercury 7’s crew officer, Gordon Cooper. My own book, The Lost Realms, mentions a colossal stone head with unmistakably black African features, discovered in Veracruz, Mexico, during 1869. This is indicative of an advanced civilization preceding the Mayas and Aztecs.
They were arbitrarily named by archaeologists, “Olmec.” The academically embarrassing enigma of who they were, how they had come across the ocean, and why, was compounded by the timing of these sophisticated culture-bearers in the New World. If the Olmec people represented the earliest or “Mother Civilization” of Mesoamerica, the day of their arrival was at first determined to be about 250 B.C. However, the most recent Carbon-14 testing places Olmec beginnings at 1500 B.C. I have argued for a date twice that old.
The Carbon-14 testing is a procedure invented in 1947 to determine the age of organic materials. Christopher Dunn, a manufacturing executive, explains, “C-14 is created when the reaction of cosmic rays with the ionosphere precipitates neutrons through the atmosphere. These neutrons react with Nitrogen 14, creating C-14. Upon creation, C-14 starts to decay, and originally it was determined to have a half-life of approximately 5,568 years. Organic material takes in C-14 at a constant rate, and, knowing what the level of C-14 in an object was before it died, scientists can measure the amount left in it and calculate its age. Apart from normal variations, C-14 stays at a constant level in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
My conclusion that an Olmec presence in the New World went back at least 5,000 years to 3000 B.C. was reached by many paths. The first was an attempt to identify the great god of Mesoamerica, the “Feathered Serpent,” who promised to return on the first day of a 52-year cycle. He was known as Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs and Kukulcan to the Mayas. In 1519 A.D., the Aztec Emperor, Moctezuma II (more commonly and erroneously remembered as Montezuma), mistakenly believed that the Spanish Conquistador, Hernan Cortez, was the returned man-god, because he arrived on the Atlantic shores of Mexico on the anticipated sacred date near Veracruz—the same place at which Quetzalcoatl was said to have landed.
In The Lost Realms, devoted to the prehistory of the Americas, I suggest that the arrival of the Olmec and the Feathered Serpent might be established with convincing precision. The key to unlocking the enigma is found in the Olmec calendar itself. In addition to a practical calendar of 365 days called, in Mayan, the Haab, the peoples of Mesoamerica employed a sacred calendar (the Tzolkin) of 260 days. It was said to consist of two wheels with meshing teeth that turned and returned to the same spot once every 52 years. That was the sacred numeral of the Winged Serpent deity, and also the holy numeral of a man-god known to the Egyptians as Thoth. He, like Quetzalcoatl, was the divine patron of science and the calendar, and had been exiled from Egypt circa 3100 B.C. I suggest, therefore, that this figure was not entirely legendary, but an actual culture-bearer who led a group of his followers to a new land, bringing the “Olmec” to Middle America.
In addition to the Haab and the Tzolkin, there was a third calendar in Mesoamerica used to inscribe dates on monuments. Called the “Long Count,” it was not cyclical, as were the other two, but linear, counting consecutively the total number of days that had passed since the original counting began on a mysterious “Day One.” By means of glyphs denoting days—one, 20, 360, 7,200, or even 154,000— and dots giving the number for each group-gylph, monuments
indicated the days that passed, as though to say, “A total of so many days after Day One have passed when this monument was erected.”
But what was that “Day One”? When did it occur, and what was its significance? It has been established beyond doubt that this Long Count version was the original Olmec calendar, and it is now generally agreed that Day One was equivalent to August 13, 3113 B.C. But what did that date signify to the Olmec? The only plausible answer must be the date of Quetzalcoatl's arrival on the Atlantic shores of Mexico, near present-day Veracruz.
Outside confirmation of this event at the time it occurred appears in Chapter 11 of Gordon Cooper's new book. “During my final years with NASA,” he writes, “I became involved in a different kind of adventure: undersea treasure-hunting in Mexico.” Accompanied by a National Geographic photographer, Cooper and his companions landed in a small plane on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Local residents showed them some pyramid-shaped mounds, where they found pre-Columbian ruins, artifacts, and bones. Upon examination in Texas by chemical analysts, the artifacts were determined to be 5,000 years old.
“When we learned the age of the artifacts,” Cooper writes, “we knew that what we’d found had nothing to do with 17th-century Spain. I contacted the Mexican government, and was connected to the head of the National Archaeology Department, Pablo Bush-Romero.” Together with Mexican archaeologists, the two returned to the site. Cooper writes, “The age of the ruins was confirmed: 3000 B.C. Compared with other advanced civilizations, relatively little was known about this one called the Olmec. Engineers, farmers, artisans, and traders, the Olmec had a remarkable civilization. But it is still not known where they originated. Among the findings that intrigued me most were celestial navigation symbols and formulas that, when translated, turned out to be mathematical formulas still used for navigation. There were also accurate drawings of constellations, some of them not officially ‘discovered’ until the age of modern telescopes.” This left me wondering, “Why have celestial navigation signs if they weren’t navigating celestially?”
And Cooper asks, if “someone” had helped the Olmec with this knowledge, who were they?
An answer was found at Jalapa’s outstanding museum of Olmec Civilization, in the Veracruz province of east-costal Mexico. Featured there is a wall panel showing the extent and dates of Mexico’s various pre-Columbian cultures. On my first visit to this institution, I could hardly believe my eyes: The first and therefore earliest civilization, that of the Olmec, was shown as beginning circa 3000 B.C. I urged the members of my tour group to take photos of me pointing to the date. On a second visit to the museum, however, the column indicating the Olmecs’ 4th Millennium beginnings had been removed. The official museum catalog, concerning Olmec Civilization, reverted to the previous, official 1500 B.C. date. But Gordon Cooper reports, as a professionally trained eye-witness, what he mistakenly learned from the chief Mexican archaeologist. Namely that the Olmec material dated to 3000 B.C., the same moment another great, and apparently related, civilization suddenly arose in the Nile Valley. Was Egypt’s Thoth the Feathered Serpent of Mesoamerica? Their shared mission and time frame is far more than coincidental.
Kennewick Man
On the banks of Washington state’s Kennewick River, the skeleton of a most unusual murder victim was found in 1991. Since their discovery, his remains have been hotly contested between scientists anxious to study them and Indian rights activists, supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who are determined to re-bury the bones without further delay. The man to whom they belonged to 90 centuries ago was Caucasian, and therein lies the
controversy. Until little more than 500 years ago, only the ancestors of Native Americans were believed to be the sole inhabitants of our continent. But this long-held assumption has been called into question by the mere existence of the anomalous stranger, because he was probably not alone.
In the October, 2004 issue of Ancient American, James J. Daly highlighted some of the serious ramifications generated by this contentious find.
Kennewick Man: Still Politically Incorrect After Nine Thousand Years by James J. Daly, Sr., Ph.D.
Media can influence public opinion and provide support for politicians in the form of established authority. If the “experts” have said it, then it must be true. In this light, it would be of interest to know how the controversy of the Kennewick Man has been presented in books, newspapers, and educational documentaries. This review covers three such presentations: What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee, by Jonathan Marks, The Journey of Man, by Spencer Wells, and a documentary film, The Real Eve, narrated by actor Danny Glover. All three mediums have misrepresented the evidence regarding the discovery of a skeleton in North America that does not conform to the physical features of indigenous peoples or Native Americans.
There has been a great deal of reluctance by many in the soft sciences of anthropology, archeology, psychology, and sociology to accept this prima facia evidence of other peoples arriving in the New World before the paleo-Indians, because the findings do not agree with their preconceived sociopolitical ideologies. Some of these obstructive academics have been called radical scientists. The most important feature of radical scientists is that they support “good” science and oppose “bad” science. However, this support has nothing to do with the accuracy, precision, or repeatability of the science in question, but whether or not the science is “good” for the people. Their science is a wholly relative and subjective viewpoint and is much more sociopolitical than scientific. Facts are not important; intention is. They know better than you as to what you should know. The best way to understand their approach to science is to quote Jack Nicholson’s famous line in the movie, A Few Good Men: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth.”
It was important to define the radical scientist viewpoint because it explains the position on Kennewick Man taken in the book written by Jonathan Marks, which is ostensibly about chimpanzees and humans. Marks is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In his book, Marks criticizes the molecular genetics that have been used to make the case that we are the same as apes. His view: Apes are not men and vice versa. But this critique is a smoke screen for other agendas in the book, including racism in science, genetic determinism, sociobiology, Human Genome Projects, and Kennewick Man. Marks discusses the ape/human business in and out of the first 50 pages of the book, after which, he adds something here and there about apes and humans.
However, his strategy is that if you criticize molecular results and techniques in ape/human comparisons, then you can further extend this critique to the genetic studies regarding the diversity of populations or subdivisions of mankind. A question arises as to the motive(s) for this book. It almost seems that the main reason that Marks wrote this book may be for the 19 pages covering Kennewick Man to support the Native American claim on the ancient remains. The ape business might have been somewhat new and different, but it is only covered in about one fourth of the book’s contents. All of the anti-race material is old news and can be found elsewhere, and is included in other publications, including those by Marks. He admits that he received a National Science Foundation grant to help with the formation of the book.
From my own understanding of federal granting agencies, it is highly unusual that NSF would support the writing of a book that is only one person’s opinion and without new research data. There is a suspicion here that some hidden hands were involved in helping to get this book out to create an “expert’s” view to be used in future legal battles, or to persuade the public to be sympathetic to the claims of the Native Americans. A further indication is that it’s badly written in places that makes it look like it was rushed into print without much editorial input. Critical, balanced argument is lacking. Topics such as human homosexuality drift in from nowhere.
But from a literary standpoint, the worst offense is the often puzzling metaphors and analogies that Marks sprinkles throughout his text. However, the chapter attacking the Great Apes Project and human rights for chimps is really worthwhile reading. It is highly entertaining and from an animal rights perspective, is very politically incorrect. Marks’ approach to Kennewick Man can be summarized by one of his chapter’s sub-titles: Give Back Kennewick Man. Marks also summarizes his findings by saying, “Kennewick Man has different significance for the two groups that want his remains, and his importance as a symbol to Native Americans, I would argue, outweighs this importance to the scientists as a basis for thoughtless and irresponsible speculation. Kennewick Man lay at the crossroads of the sciences and the humanities. He represented a confrontation between the politics of identity and human rights, on the one hand, and an archaic and transgressive science on the other hand.”
In other words, science should be subservient to personal feelings. Marks does not consider it important in his treatment of the Kennewick Man that the skeleton does not resemble that of Native Americans. Just give it back. It’s the law. Something is being missed here. No one, not Marks, physical anthropologists, judges, or Native Americans, seems to realize that a case for human rights can be made for Kennewick Man, because it would be unjust to return his remains to the descendants of those who killed him.
One of Marks’ favorite ad hominems is to call someone who doesn’t agree with him a “pseudoscientist,” but it is he who may be the real pseudoscientist. In one paragraph, he almost gloats at the failure of
one scientist to extract usable DNA from the remains, as though this was a triumph of nondiscovery. Intact DNA is almost impossible to extract from ancient remains. That it was done in one case of a Neanderthal skeleton was remarkable. Marks’ worst anti-intellectual comment, however, was that it was only a single skeleton, and single skeletons don’t mean much. Marks was being disingenuous, or better yet, duplicitous. Finding a piece of skull, finger, tooth, humerus, or any part of ancient remains have often been hailed as monumental discoveries when unearthed in other parts of the world.
What Marks fails to say is that finding a complete 9,000-year-old skeleton is a remarkable piece of good luck. Then there is that inconvenient (for Marksists, anyway) Paleo-Indian spear point embedded in Kennewick Man’s pelvis. Being slightly droll, Marks makes it clear that he disdains those scientists who claim that races or distinct human populations don’t exist, and then do research to find differences that prove otherwise. This would describe Spencer Wells perfectly. Wells has been searching for genetic markers that can identify and separate various groups of humans. His excuse to avoid being called a “racist” is that the evolution and migrations of humans throughout unrecorded history can be traced through such markers, and such data is race neutral (as long as you don’t call the differentiated groups “race”—Wells prefers the term “clans”).
Wells, as has Marks, has become a collator and interpreter of other scientists’ data by writing books and producing documentaries, such as the one that inspired this current book. In The Journey of Man, Wells has used the available genetic data to explain the journey of man. The genetic markers do tend to correlate with other evidence from anatomy, linguistics, and cultural artifacts. Wells is a molecular anthropologist, although he would probably more prefer the term molecular geneticist. He would appear to be straightforward in his presentations, depending more on scientific facts then emotional outbursts.
However, his background may still be somewhat suspect, because Wells was at Harvard, which is the epicenter of radical bioscience in the form of Lewontin, Gould, and Montague. Wells did work later with Cavalli—Sforza at Stanford, who pioneered the field of genetic markers in diverse human groups. Such research now has the appellation of being politically incorrect, which explains Jonathan Marks’s crusty comment. One needs to have a somewhat sophisticated grasp of the field of genetic diversity to recognize that Wells is also somewhat of a radical scientist, although much more muted than Marks. Where Wells tips his hand is in the short (very short) discussion of the migrations into the New World by people other than Native Americans.
Wells covers the presumed first two waves into North America as indicated by genetic and corroborative linguistic evidence, the latter being from exhaustive studies by Joseph Greenberg. For Kennewick Man, however, he merely says, “Furthermore, because Siberians and Upper Paleolithic Europeans initially came from the same central Asian populations, they probably started out looking very similar to each other. Kennewick Man, as a likely descendant of the first migration from Siberia to the New World, may have retained his central Asian features—which could be interpreted as ‘Caucasoid.’ In fact, many early American skulls look more European than those of today’s modern Native Americans, suggesting that their appearance has changed over time. The more Mongoloid, or East Asian, appearance of modern Native Americans may have originated in the second wave of migration, carrying Ml 30 (a genetic marker) from East Asia.”
A few caveats are in order here. First, the use of “probably,” “likely,” “may have,” “could be,” and “suggesting,” means that the hypotheses presented are “just-so stories,” which may or may not have long-term validity. Second, the emphasizing of “Caucasoid” indicates doubt about the physical description for Kennewick man. In the beginning of the same paragraph Wells says, “As for other
migrations, from Europe or Australia, there is no compelling evidence.” Unfortunately, if Kennewick Man had not been discovered, then any suggestion of “Caucasoids” being in the New World before Native Americans would have been even less than “compelling” to Wells. Also, because Europeans and central Asians were one and the same at that time, why not use a designation of “Euro-Asians?” Unless one is trying to avoid using the term European in any fashion. One has to wonder if Wells is of the “Anybody but Europeans” school. In any case, the real question is, who was in North America first: the Caucasoids or the Mongoloids?
A third caveat is that it must be understood that genetic markers differentiating diverse human groups are not easy to find. A good example relevant to this discussion can be found with breeds of dogs. Would anyone doubt that an Irish wolfhound is different from a Chihuahua, or a dachshund from a bulldog, a bloodhound from a Saint Bernard? Nevertheless, it was not until 2003 that researchers were able to find markers that would differentiate breeds of dogs, and then only for a few breeds. Molecular genetics, in terms of markers, is still in its infancy. However, new techniques will undoubtedly come forth in the future that will clarify and expand existing information. This is what the radical scientists are afraid of.
So, as suggested by Marks, get rid of the evidence before these new techniques become available. Lastly, the comment that Native Americans may have changed their features because Kennewick Man sounds positively Lamarckian (or superficial) and deserves more speculative discussion as to how this may have occurred than what Wells was willing to give us. In fairness, one does have to understand that Wells is speaking as a molecular geneticist, about genetic markers, and not as a physical or cultural anthropologist. But, as do his colleagues, he will cherry-pick data from other fields, if and when it suits him.
The last media example is a documentary called The Real Eve, narrated by Danny Glover. In this presentation, the history of the
evolution of mankind and its spread over the earth are well documented and there appears to be little favoritism here, allowing one to agree or disagree, depending upon your own perspective, except for Kennewick Man. Kennewick Man is covered and his differences from Native Americans are mentioned as his earlier arrival in the New World.
However, the graphic depiction of Kennewick Man’s death in a dynamic chase with Kennewick Man fleeing Native Americans was misleading. The “Indians” were dressed as Plains Indians with war paint, buckskin clothes, and feathers in their hair. I wondered how the advisors to this production knew that this was how “Indians” dressed 9,000 ago. Now, this may seem to be a small item, but when the cameras caught up to Kennewick Man, laying injured in the grass, on his back, he was dressed in the same fashion, and his face was that of a Native American. It would have been very easy for the producers to show a differentiation. The skeletal remains of Kennewick Man are most closely related to the Ainu on the island of Hokkaido. The Japanese call them the “Hairy Ones.” That distinguishes them from the less hirsute Japanese. Giving Kennewick Man a beard would have then identified him as being much different from his pursuers.
It was obvious that the people making this documentary didn’t want to associate Native Americans with beating up on an unfortunate indigenous victim. Frankly, from the way the action was presented, I couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard. Another oddity, for which I am awaiting an answer, is the spear-point. In the documentary, the spear was thrown at Kennewick Man. I have bow hunted and taught human anatomy. I find it difficult to believe that a thrown spear would have enough force to be embedded in the pelvic bone of the victim. A more reasonable scenario would be that his pursuers had caught up with him and stabbed him at close range, while he was lying down, hard enough to penetrate bone.
If my “just-so story” has merit, it means that he was viciously finished off, on the spot, and had other more lethal soft-tissue wounds
that probably killed him in the end. Those wounds would not necessarily be evident from the skeletal remains.
These two books and a documentary run the gamut from “Be nice, get rid of Kennewick Man,” to “We need more genetic data,” to “Kennewick Man exists, but what’s the real story?” Whatever the “experts” may conclude, the overall significance and importance of Kennewick Man can’t be denied. His discovery has not only revised the picture of populations coming into America, but exposed the motives of radical scientists and other academic elites as being political and not scientific. It has now put doubt into the minds of many people about the trust that can be given to some of these so-called “experts” to make fair and unbiased observations.
Other claims about people entering the New World, before or after Kennewick Man, are now open to much more serious consideration than was previously given. Perhaps that is the best and final legacy of a 9,000-year-old Caucasoid, who might indeed have the last laugh in more ways than one.
Tablets: Hoax or history?
During the first decades of the 19th century, early pioneers in what later became the State of Michigan were confronted by literally thousands of manmade mounds. Local Native Americans made no claim to the structures, claiming that they were raised by a previous people very long ago. When settlers dug into the ancient earthworks, they often found long, slate tablets covered with an unintelligible written language. These strange texts were often accompanied by crude, incised illustrations of scenes familiar only to the Christian farmers clearing their lands. Depicted on the tablets were biblical episodes, the most recognizable being Noah’s Ark and the Flood.
When the last of the Michigan mounds were excavated around 1920, approximately 7,000 mystery tablets had been removed, some under controlled conditions, and attested by eye-witnesses swearing affidavits. Although the sheer magnitude of this state-wide discovery, made by literally hundreds of persons, most of them unknown to each other, argued convincingly on behalf of its prehistoric authenticity, the mostly terra-cotta, or baked-clay, artifacts were universally condemned as “fakes” by Victorian scientists. But their ill-considered verdict may have concealed the truth about the Michigan Tablets; namely, that they were religious documents and teaching aids made by Coptic Egyptians who fled the persecution of fellow Christians in the fifth century to find distant refuge in the Great Lakes region of the American Midwest.
The Copts were and still are members of a unique Christian sect, more gnostic than papal, whose church ceremonies are conducted in a liturgical language scholars believe is the closest surviving example of Egyptian as it was spoken in pharaonic times. At least some Coptic imagery has been found on the Michigan artifacts, underscoring a connection.
Writing in the February, 2000 issue, J. Golden Barton and Ancient American publisher Wayne May exposed the deliberate falsification of evidence that led to the suppression of American prehistory.
The Michigan Tablets: An Archaeological Scandal by J. Golden Barton & Wayne May
In 1961, James Bird and Paul Roundy had been assigned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to South Bend, Indiana. While there, they met with Father Charles E. Sheedy at the University of Notre Dame. The two missionaries told him the story of Joseph
Smith and the inscribed gold plates from which they believed he transcribed the Book of Mormon. “I have some of Joseph Smith’s type of writing here at Notre Dame,” Father Sheedy interrupted. He showed the two surprised men to the attic of the nearby O’Shaughnessy Building. There they discovered three open boxes from which the Catholic priest removed several slate and copper tablets covered with hieroglyphics, pictographs, and inscriptions. Father Sheedy hoped someone might be able to authenticate or disprove the collection. Perhaps the Mormons with their “golden plate” theory would come to the rescue.
Bird and Roundy wrote a letter to researcher Milton R. Hunter of the First Council of the Seventy in Salt Lake City, Utah, but waited in vain for a reply. As it turned out, Hunter had misplaced the letter. When he finally found it several years later, he contacted Father Sheedy, requesting an interview. Sometime before, the priest had turned down a chance to expand his number of alleged artifacts, when Ellis Soper, of North Carolina, offered to donate similar items. Notre Dame was running out of storage room, so Father Sheedy was anxious to meet anyone who might take the questionable objects off his hands. He had even cooperated with Henrietta Mertz, a Chicago attorney and author, who wanted to write a book proving the artifact’s authenticity.
After examining and studying his attic collection for six years, her efforts were stymied by publishers convinced the inscribed tablets were part of some 19th-century hoax. It was Father Sheedy’s personal opinion that they were perhaps of ancient Greek or Egyptian origin. These bizarre objects were not credibly explained by the convoluted theories Mertz advocated of transatlantic fifth- century Christian cultists. Such wild ideas might compromise the priest’s academic standing and even embarrass the Notre Dame authorities. Washing his hands of the whole affair, he presented the astounded Hunter with his entire collection. Since then, the strange tablets continue to fascinate antiquarians puzzled by the mysteries of pre-Columbian America.
One of an estimated 7,000 inscribed tablets excavated from prehistoric earthworks across Michigan.
These early investigators were long aware of our Continent’s prehistory, which seemed to stretch back farther in time with each new discovery. As North America’s forests were cleared, plows turned over the virgin soil, pioneers stumbled upon bizarre artifacts, vacant mines, and shafts— all testimony to some civilization that rose and fell long before modern Europeans arrived. As historian John Baldwin wrote, “An ancient and unknown people left remains of settled life, and of a certain degree of civilization, in the valleys of the Mississippi and its tributaries. We have no authentic name for them either as a nation or a race; therefore, they are called ‘Mound Builders,” this name having been suggested by an important class of their works.”
He was seconded by Francis Carter and James Cheeseman: “The Mound Builders were thought of as white, cultured, and not the ancestors of the Native Americans.... Whoever these ancient people were, they left behind some very puzzling remains. The number of earthworks,
when considered with their size and the area of the country they cover, becomes evidence of a great achievement.” In fact, the prehistoric mounds were so numerous that the total is unknown. In Ohio alone there were more than 10,000 such sites. Tens of thousands more once existed throughout Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Eighteenth, and early 19th-century antiquarians were virtually unanimous in their conviction that the remains of an ancient civilization of white people long ago spread across America from the gulf coast to Canada, from New England to the Pacific coast.
These “Mound Builders,” as they were called, were believed to have been a highly developed race far superior to the Native Americans known to the first pilgrims. No other explanation for the profusion of evidence on behalf of some advanced, vanished culture seemed feasible. Indeed, the Indians themselves spoke of populations of white men predating their own arrival in parts of America. Yet today, very few archaeologists believe that the Mound Builders belonged to a lost, white race. What brought about this re-interpretation? According to historian John Baldwin, “It is rather interesting to consider the circumstances that led to the abandonment of this theory as a myth. The fact is that by 1890 the tide of opinion had shifted, and men of science denied that there had ever been a highly cultured white race in America’s past. This very radical turn-about came as a result of the scientific leadership of one man, Mr. John Wesley Powell.”
In 1879, when Congress created the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethology, Major Powell, a Civil War hero, received additional power and prestige as the Bureau’s first director. He was disposed to think that the Mound Builders were the ancestors of the Native Americans, and presented his theory as dogma in the Bureau’s first annual report, published in 1880. “The vestiges of art discovered do not excel in any respect the arts of the Indian tribes known to history,” he declared. “There is, therefore, no reason for us to search for an extra-limited origin through lost tribes for the arts discovered in the mounds of North America.”
So prestigious was the Smithsonian and its authoritative director that within a few years the scientific community had unilaterally adopted Powell’s opinion, ignoring the vast amount of physical evidence previously accumulated. Scholars without significant new findings began to discredit and re-interpret the civilization of the Mound Builders in favor of Powells theory. As one writer put it, “Evidence contrary to Powells stated opinion was explained as fraudulent, as buried in the mounds intrusively, or simply re-interpreted to favor the new theory. From this time forward, anything that referred to the original, glorious Mound Builder theory was considered mythical. It was a very hostile academic environment for anyone who ventured to propose that there had ever been a highly civilized group of people in the New World.”
Despite Powell's intractable stance against any form of cultural diffusion, stories such as those told of James O. Scotford continued to plague conventional scholars. And it explains why so many anomalous artifacts appeared around the turn of the 20th century, as the following case illustrates.
James Scotford was tired, having already set three quarters of a mile of fence and still had a few more hours before sunset. He drew the line taut in an effort to clear the mound between him and the last post, then grabbed at his auger and began to dig another hole at the center of an old Indian mound. He would have to hurry, as his companion had almost caught up in placing more poles. Scotford gave a groan, as the auger hit something hard. He pushed harder, but it didn’t budge, then shouted to his companion to bring a spade. He hadn’t expected a rock, because there were no stones in the area. He would have to dig around it. To his great surprise, the shovel uncovered a large earthen casket. The auger had broken its cover, but the larger portion was in tact. Scotford was wild with excitement, as he rode toward Edmore, Michigan, with the casket nestled in the bed of his wagon.
During the weeks and months that followed, the citizens of Edmore and those of surrounding communities opened up more than 500 mounds, all blanketed with dense vegetation. Large cedar trees and
oaks covered a few of the mounds. The searchers uncovered hundreds of different relics, including other ancient earthen caskets, tablets of clay, slate, sandstone, and copper. They were all beautifully carved with ancient biblical and historical scenes, writings, and symbols.
“So many citizens from the towns of Wyman and Edmore were eyewitnesses and involved in the excavating and recovery of the relics and the evidence,” reported a local newspaper, “that doubts were never entertained for a moment as to the authenticity of the work. In one case, a casket was found under the roots of a tree which by its concentric circles was shown to be about 300 years old; and one of the roots of the tree had grown through the corner of the casket and was coiled up inside the box, but so decayed that it was broken with a touch.”
Although farmers for years had been finding copper and slate artifacts while clearing and plowing new ground, the activities in Montcalm County exploded into excavations throughout Michigan. Perhaps no man helped to open more mounds in Michigan than Father James Savage, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church of the Most Holy Trinity, in Detroit, Michigan. He described the mounds as follows: “On these mounds you may find large and aged trees; oaks, pine, and other varieties. The decayed roots of pine and other trees that grew, thrived and died on these mounds. They contain another peculiarity. There is a strata of charcoal and ash in each mound. This strata often shows the basin-shaped contour of the interior of the mound when its possessor was laid away to rest. There does not appear, as a rule, sufficient charcoal and ashes for cremation, only enough for purification. In some mounds, however, there is heavy strata.
An associate of Father Savage stated, “these prehistoric mounds of Michigan contain caskets, lamps, bowls, pipes, and tablets of clay; battle-axes, knives, spears, daggers, and arrow-points, domestic utensils, saws, chisels, spades, and a variety of ornamental wearing apparelall of chilled copper; stone tablets, medallions, metals, skinning knives, various implements with strange designs, the object of which
we can not imagine. One remarkable feature of these mounds is that they contain no flint implements of any kind, nor have I seen any stone or copper beads; other ornamental wearing apparel is frequent. Many curious things were unearthed, such as caskets, tablets, amulets of slate stone, cups, vases, altars, lamps of burnt clay, and copper coins hammered out, rudely engraved with hieroglyphics. The caskets are of sun-dried clay, and are covered with picture writing and hieroglyphics. The caskets seem to be intended as receptacles for the tablets of record. They have close-fitting covers, which are cemented on with Assyrian-like cement, and various figures were molded on the top—an ancient sphinx, beasts, serpents, and human faces with head dresses or crowns.”
For the next 20 years, Detroit was the center of interest for people seeking ancient relics. To give some order to such popular archaeology, Father Savage joined Daniel E. Soper, a former U.S. Secretary of State, and a respected businessman, to form a discovery team. Savage reported, “We have opened more than 500 of these mounds in the four counties in which we have worked—a territory exceeding 260 miles. We have diligently inquired regarding the locality of other finds and have so far located 16 counties in Michigan in which these specimens have been found. We are confident that we are only in the border area of the great prehistoric people.”
Between 1858 and 1920, many thousands of mounds were excavated, but the vast majority were empty. According to Russell, “It must not be imagined that every mound opened has been a storehouse of objects of interest. On the contrary, the proportion of productive to non-productive mounds has not been greater than one to 10.”
Nonetheless, many thousands of artifacts were indeed found, and, as time passed and descriptions of the relics appeared in many newspapers, people throughout the state reported finding similar relics. In Soper's own words, “I have personal knowledge of more than 3,000 articles that have been found and if they are fakes and were buried to be found, whoever buried them had been a very busy person, because they have been found throughout the state by hundreds of different people.
“The objects recovered from the mounds are of copper, sandstone, limestone, burned clay, and slate. The copper appears to be true mass-
lake copper. Of the slates, the grayish black variety predominates, this being of the quality which outcrops near Baraga, in northern Michigan. The sandstone is of fine texture now quarried in Amhurst, Ohio. Red and green slate limestone appear, these being of an argillaceous character and having a good polish.”
The research undertaken by Soper and Savage led them to believe that long before the ancestors of modern Native Americans arrived in North America, an alien people left their mark in the vast, prehistoric graveyard that covered the state of Michigan. Both men felt they had the evidence to prove their conclusions. But their ideas brought them ferocious criticism.
The so-called “men of letters” in Americas contemporary scientific community condemned Soper and Savage as conspirators of an archaeological hoax. For every published report even mildly in favor of the two hapless investigators, some university-trained scholars would issue a charge of fraud. So unrelenting was the official campaign of academic hysteria that anyone even remotely associated with the Michigan artifacts distanced themselves from the bitter controversy. Eventually, any discussion of the artifacts’ possible genuineness was no longer considered. And over the decades, the Michigan Tablets fell into almost complete oblivion.
Today, however, they are being re-examined in the new light of unprejudiced investigation. Many collections private and public are being photographed and cataloged for the first time. Their illustrated texts have been preserved for present and future researchers into the lost history of North America.
Human History’s New Face
A discovery that should have rocked the scientific Establishment to its foundations and rewritten the story of human evolution was killed by mainstream scholars who had too much to lose by its disclosure. As it first appeared in the October, 1998 issue of Ancient American, here is the personal account of a university-trained professional whose career was terminated because she refused to be silenced.
Humans in America One-Quarter of a Million Years Ago by Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre
According to current established theory, humans entered the New World, our part of the globe, 12,000 years ago, at most. Modern man, or Homo sapiens, supposedly evolved only about 100,000 years ago. And that was somewhere in the Old World. This view is taught throughout America’s educational system and propounded by most of our anthropologists. But a late 20th-century discovery seriously challenges this dominant paradigm. It was made about 70 miles southeast of Mexico City, approximately 2 miles south of Puebla, another much smaller city.
There, in a high mountain valley, lies the Valsequillo Reservoir, surrounded by three of Mexico’s famous volcanoes: La Malinche, lztaccihuatl, and Popocatepetl. Exposed in the eroded bluffs along the reservoir’s shoreline is a series of ancient sedimentary beds and volcanic ash layers. For more than a century, these beds have been famous with paleontologists for their rich variety of well-preserved bones from extinct animals from the last Ice Age, such as mammoth, mastodon, glyptodont, horse, camel, and saber-toothed cat. As first noted by the Mexican prehistorian Juan Armenta Camacho, man-made artifacts of flaked chert and flint are also eroding from these beds. A Puebla native, he stumbled across a large mammoth pelvis protruding from a stream bank in the nearby Alseseca arroyo, in June of 1933. Two years later, at the same place, he found the leg
bone from another elephant-like creature with a flint spear point solidly driven into it.
Obviously, someone at one time had hunted that beast. Who was that hunter, and when did he live? For the next 30 years, Camacho tried to answer these questions by combing the bluffs around the reservoir, looking for more signs of early hunters. His search was well rewarded with the discovery of more than 100 partial skeletons of mastodons, mammoths, camels, ancient horses, and antelopes. To his experienced eye, many of the bones appeared to have been scratched by human-held blades. There were intentional cut-marks on some bones, while other splinters of bone seemed sharpened, smoothed, and made into tools. Bones were cracked to remove the marrow, a food delicacy for primitive hunters, even today. There were engraved bones, and some with drawings.
But leaders of the archaeological establishment in Mexico City ignored the evidence, declaring, without discussion, that the grooved and smashed bones were the results of nature, not man. At this time, foreign researchers began to take notice of Camacho’s discoveries. Preliminary fieldwork under their direction turned up even more evidence of early hunters. With funding from the American Philosophical Society, Harvard University, the National Science Foundation, and others, the “Valsequillo Project” was born in 1962. Cynthia Irwin-Williams was the youngest archaeologist selected to work with Juan. She had attended Radcliffe and was finishing up her Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard at the time. Later in the Project, she accepted a position on the anthropology staff at Eastern New Mexico University, in Portales, where she remained for several years.
During joint fieldwork, Juan and Cynthia discovered four sites where fossil bones and stone artifacts were found together in situ, that is, in the sediment layers, not lying loose on the ground surface. They were named El Horno, El Mirador, Tecacaxco, and Hueyatlaco (pronounced “way-at-la-co”). El Horno is the lowest, oldest location in the sedimentary section. It only is exposed when
the waters of the reservoir are abnormally low. Hueyatlaco is the highest, youngest site. It is also the one with the thickest overlying sedimentary cover and one where several volcanic ash and pumice layers occur. Additional excavations at Hueyatlaco were carried out in 1964 and 1966. Many bones were found, along with stone tools. They were roughly of two types. Those in the older, lower layers were made of blades and flakes of flint with their edges retouched to make them sharp. Those from the upper layers were bifacially worked artifacts. That is, stone flakes were chipped off both faces of the tool. Both the upper and lower layers contained projectile-point spear heads, which showed that the hunters actually pursued game. They did not just cut up a dead carcass that they happened across.
Cynthia realized at once that she had something special here, not just a run-of-the-mill series of excavations, and she wisely called in reinforcements to help her. The University of Arizona’s Paul S. Martin was an expert in fossil pollen, and Clayton Ray, a vertebrate paleontologist from the Smithsonian Institution, would study the fossil bones. Dwight Taylor of the U.S. Geological Survey examined the fossil mollusks—snail and clam shells, while Hal Malde, another USGS expert, mapped the regional and local geology. Thanks to Hal, I joined the project in 1966 as their tephrochronologist; in other words, someone trained in analyzing volcanic ash to determine the age or time-lime of a specific place or object.
The research was to be part of my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Idaho. I began my work, scrutinizing one ash sample after another. Tens of them. Hundreds of them! No luck. No correlation. And Hueyatlaco had to be dated, because new evidence suggested the site could be 20,000 years old. This would have made it twice as old as the accepted earliest date for human existence in the New World. If confirmed, textbooks around the world would have to be revised. It would also make our careers, or such was our professional ambition at the time.
Gradually, evidence took the form of a single stone flake, probably used as a scraper, and definitely man-made. They were then associated with shells and bone in a high bank of sediment exposed at Barranca Caulapan, about 2 or 3 miles northeast of Hueyatlaco. Irwin-William herself spotted the tool. Shells were collected to obtain carbon-14 testing and bone for a uranium-series time frame. When a scientist quotes a number for a radiometric date, he or she is actually quoting the mid-point of a possible range for that date. Instead of saying, “The Carbon-14 date for a stone flake can range anywhere from 21,000 to 22,700 years,” he/she says, “21,850+/-850 years.” It is much shorter and quicker that way. We were shocked by the dates obtained from shell and bone found close to the stone artifact in the same sedimentary layer: 21,800+/-850 years by the Carbon-14 method; 22,000+/2,000 years and 20,000+/-1,500 years from the uranium-series.
The Caulapan tool was what Cynthia called a “non-diagnostic flake.” It can be fitted in anywhere, from ancient to modern times. We were very lucky to have even that one, because it was associated with materials that could be dated. Things weren’t all rosy. We may have been scientists, but we were also human. And the dark side of our humanity began to raise its ugly head—especially the raw emotions of jealously and fear. The first to feel the effects was Juan Armenta Camacho. The archaeological establishment in Mexico City could no longer ignore him and his research. But he was not “one of them,” not a professional archaeologist. He did not have the right degrees. In fact, other than an honorary certification from the University of Puebla, he did not have any degree at all! And that made him a nobody in their view. Moreover, they were only indirectly involved in the work at Valsequillo, a project that was quickly growing in scope and importance. And they reacted negatively.
A branch of the federal government descended on Juan, confiscating all his fossils and artifacts, everything discovered during the Valsequillo Project, together with his bone collection at the University
of Puebla’s anthropology department and all his equipment. Everything was removed to Mexico City. He was forbidden by law to do any more fieldwork, ever. Shortly thereafter, Establishment archaeologists sank a complex series of excavations less than 100 feet south of Hueyatlaco, paralleling its trenches. But their diggings missed the artifact-bearing stream gravels, exposing only the fine-grained over-bank silts and clays. After much effort and expense, they found nothing. Juan could have told them that. Thirty years of fieldwork had shown him that it was only in the coarse-grained stream channel deposits that significant numbers of artifacts would be found.
Frustrated, the government-sponsored professionals claimed in print that all the artifacts at Hueyatlaco had been planted by workers. They accused the excavators of incompetence and hinted at darker things. It was a tense time for Juan, Cynthia, and the rest of us. After a year of trying, I still could not find a good match between the volcanic ash and pumice layers at the Hueyatlaco site, nor any layers in the dated sequence on La Malinche volcano, a sequence that went back more than 25,000 years. I did come across a possible correlation, with a dated ash layer on the flanks of lztacchuatl volcano, tens of miles to the northwest.
But that dated layer was beyond the limits of the C-14 method and was older than 40,000 years, then a universally unacceptable time frame. Cynthia did not like that date at all. She was part of the eastern Archaeological Establishment, whose doyens would have a hard time accepting a 20,000-year-old date, let alone one twice that age. They mocked and ignored anyone claiming such advanced antiquity for the first Americans, as did Cynthia herself. Officialdom then was an unforgiving bunch. But along with the bone from Caulapan, she had sent away butchered skeletal remains from Hueyatlaco and from the older El Homo site for dating.
Barney Szabo, a USGS geochemist, wanted to test them all using Uranium-series dating. Then, in the mid-1960s, the dates came back. The one for Caulapan brought her joy, because the results of
the test agreed with the site’s Carbon-14 date, around 22,000 Years Before Present. But the time frame for a fragment of the butchered camel pelvis from the upper artifact layers at Hueyatiaco were more than 10 times older than she wanted: 180,000 years and 245,000+/-
40,000 years. Dates for a tooth from a butchered mastodon at El Horno were even older: 154,000 years by one method and 280,000 years by the other. “Poor Barney,” we thought. “His new method only works some of the time.”
Gradually, however, my thinking changed. What if Barney was right after all? If his dates were indeed correct, I’d never find a match between the volcanic layers at Hueyatiaco and those on La Malinche volcano. The matching layers would be too deeply buried in the flanks of the mountain, covered by a quarter million years of younger material. There was also other geologic evidence that the site was old. When one takes into account the bluff behind the excavations, the artifact-bearing layers at Hueyatiaco were buried by more than 30 feet of younger material. And that sediment pile was probably much thicker at one time than at present, because a great deal of erosion had occurred. In fact, the nearby river had cut down through at least 150 feet of sediment to form the modern river valley, now flooded, and by the waters of the reservoir.
The stack of sediments in the bluff additionally contained several buried soils. These had formed at the ground surface for perhaps hundreds or thousands of years. Then they were buried by a mudflow or volcanic deposit of some kind. The sediments themselves were highly weathered, with crystals and glass fragments partly turned to clay. This suggests they had been exposed to the elements for a very long time. If the site was an “unthinkable” 250,000 years old, could it be dated by other radiometric means besides the uranium-series? Perhaps we could borrow the methods and techniques used to date ancient archaeological sites in Africa dated using volcanic ash layers. In essence, that’s what we did.
Virginia Steen-Mclntyre found physical proof of human existence in the Americas dating back to 250.000 years ago.
Our colleague Ronald Fryxell, Hall Malde, and I returned to Hueyatlaco in 1973 for more excavation and sampling. There had always been a nagging question: Did the tool-bearing sediment layers there pass beneath the bluff sediments, or were they cut into the bluff? If the former, then the tools were older than the bluff sediments, because they lay beneath them. We could then use the volcanic ash and pumice layer there to date them. In fact, the volcanic units would be slightly younger. If the latter, all we could say is that the artifacts were younger than the dated volcanic units. How much younger, it would be impossible to tell.
We excavated a trench at right angles to those at Hueyatlaco, through the bluff of sediment, connecting with excavations dug by the Mexican archaeologists. There in the new trench walls was all the proof we needed. The artifact-bearing beds did indeed pass beneath, and thus were older than the sediments in the bluff. We could now use the volcanic ash and pumice layers exposed in the bluff to help date the site. We used tiny zircon crystals from two of the volcanic units exposed in the bluff, the
Hueyatlaco ash, and the Tetela brown mud pumice. The method is called fission-track dating. It relies on the fact that zircons contain minute traces of radioactive materials. When they fission, or disintegrate, they leave behind tiny trails of damage within the crystal which, after chemical preparation, can be seen with a microscope. By knowing how much radioactive materials are present, the rate this material breaks down, and how much of the material has fissured, a rough age estimate can be made.
Chuck Naeser, a geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey, did the work for us, but we did not ask him for precise dates at this stage. All we wanted to know was if his dates for the volcanic layers would be closer to Cynthia’s 20,000-year estimate or Barney’s quarter-million-year uranium-series conclusion. Chuck’s dates, even with a large plus-or-minus value, were far older than the dates Irwin-Williams would accept, and much closer to those of Barney Szabo. They ran as follows: for theTetela brown mud pumice, 600,000+/-340,000 years; for the Hueyatlaco ash, 370,000+/200,000 years. We were thunderstruck. Here was physical proof that men and women already able to make tools had established themselves in the Americas not only millennia before the first Ice Age settlers were supposed to have arrived, but prior to the advent of modern humans.
We now had several lines of geologic evidence, including four radiometric dates, all indicating that the artifacts at Hueyatlaco, the youngest of four sites excavated in the Valsequillo area, were in the neighborhood of a quarter-million years old. Incredible or not, as far as I was concerned, it was an open-and-shut case. How naive I was! Irwin-Williams was against us going public with these extremely revolutionary dates from the beginning. Because, according to her, they were “impossible.” She wanted time to prepare her side of the story and for us to publish jointly. That was fine, except that she had finished the Mexican excavations seven years before and hadn’t begun a detailed site report. It could be years before she was ready for a joint publication.
We decided on a press conference to announce our date findings and their geologic evidence. Fryxell and Malde were not as comfortable with the oldest time parameters as was I. They had worked with archaeologists before and knew that our data would mean that some very famous names in the field would have to eat crow. And archaeologists have never been famous for their small egos! We nonetheless called a news conference at a geologic meeting in Dallas, during the fall of 1973. The story of our discovery was picked up by the wire services and broadcast around the world. I received a lot of good-natured ribbing from fellow scientists on the long plane ride to New Zealand, where I would make a presentation describing our efforts. Several colleagues had read about Hueyatlaco in the papers the day before. My New Zealand presentations were very well attended. Things were looking good, both for our work in Mexico and my career as an internationally recognized scientist. None of us realized at the time that our enterprise had already peaked. Everything was downhill from here for the next 20 years.
In early 1974, Hal Malde, Ronald Fryxell, and I began to write up our research at Hueyatlaco for publication. It was to be a preliminary report; a more detailed description would come later, after Cynthia had published her site excavations. Then, tragedy. Ronald was killed in a car crash on a lonely road in the middle of the night. Not only had we lost a good friend and valued colleague, but the most charismatic personality of our trio. Fryx had been the media’s darling. Whether he was explaining the importance of soil samples or battling for an important archaeological site against the encroaching water of a reservoir, he had their ear and their columns. Hal and I finished the manuscript, then submitted it to the editor of a volume of scientific papers presented at a regional meeting of anthropologists, who I lectured on Hueyatlaco.
We knew that no anthropological journal would print our report over Cynthia’s objections, so the only chance we had to get our
proof in something published was this symposium volume. That was in 1975. We waited for the volume to be published. And waited. From 1976 to 1979, letters to the editor inquiring about the delay went unanswered. Calls were never returned. Meanwhile, Cynthia, who by now had ceased all communication with us, was busy getting out “her side of the story,” while ours still went unread. The quarter-million year time-frame at which we so painstakingly arrived was discounted as a matter of course. Ail geologic evidence was ignored. Only the 22,000-year-old date at Caulapan was mentioned, and that’s what began to appear in the literature.
The site was mentioned briefly in a 1979 National Geographic article on early man, but the only date mentioned was an “estimated” 22,000 years. The following year, Juan Armenta Camacho finally found the funds to publish something on his 30 years of work in the Valsequillo region and slipped in our dates on a surreptitiously added page. Even so, he wrote that he believed they represented the true age for his finds. Unfortunately, his monograph was published privately, with only a 1,000-copy press run. And even though it is printed in Spanish, it has been ignored by the Archaeological Establishment, both in the United States and in Mexico. By now, the Hueyatlaco dates were beginning to adversely effect my career. In 1973, we had made a startling statement about 250,000-year-old hunters in Mexico. But nothing further appeared in print. Were we wrong? Were the dates wrong? Where was the evidence? Was it only my imagination, or did my geology colleagues begin to look at me askance? My correspondence both national and international dropped off. I was suddenly caught by a long-neglected nepotism rule in the government bureau where my husband, Dave, and I worked, and I was suddenly out of a job. After much searching, I was able to get on as an adjunct professor in anthropology at a state university. No pay, but at least I belonged somewhere. At least for a while.
Finally, in early 1980, it became clear that our paper on Hueyatlaco would never see the light of day in that symposium volume. Editor #1 had passed it on to Editor #2, who had in turn passed it on to #3, and #3, apparently, decided to drop the whole thing. The manuscript was returned. So here it was, five years later, back to square one, as far as getting our old dates for the site into print. About that time, I was contacted by the editor of a new science magazine for the general public. It was to be called Science 80 (in 1980), Science 81 in 1981, and so on. He seemed very interested in Hueyatlaco and wanted to publish our report. Hoping once again, I sent the manuscript off to him, now a little shopworn and yellowed around the edges, and waited. It was the same thing all over again. Letters unanswered and calls not returned. Eventually, I caught him in the office. Seems that the manuscript had fallen behind his file cabinet and been misplaced. It was returned. I was almost in despair.
Then a lucky thought. I contacted a prestigious geological journal, Quaternary Research. Steve, the editor, knew me personally, and if anyone would give me and the manuscript a fair shake, he would. Sure enough, he responded as a true scientist. As long as we had good evidence to back up our claims, he didn’t care how controversial our findings were. He sent the submission out for peer review, and it was approved, accepted, and published as the first article of their 1981 volume.
But it was too late. That 22,000-year-old date for the Valsequillo sites was set in concrete. I sent out a news release through the publicity office of the university where I was affiliated. The news editor thought it was one of the most exciting pieces she’d worked on. But no one picked it up; not the wire services; not the Denver metro papers; not the editors or columnists who, over the years, had specifically asked me to let them know when the paper was published. That included the editors of Science 81, Science News, The Washington Post, The New York Times,
and The Valley Voice in Visalia, California. I even sent a copy of the news release to The National Inquirer*. Nothing. The Chairman of the Anthropology Department forbade it from appearing in the faculty newsletter.
Needless to add, when my contract with the university came up for renewal, it was dropped. So, there I was at the end of 1981: no job, tarnished reputation, stone-walled, discouraged, crushed emotionally. I pretty much turned my back on science and went in other directions. From 1987 to 1994, 1 cared for elderly relatives and became a professional flower gardener. During this time, Hal Malde retired from his government job and took up a second vocation: taking exquisite photographs for Nature Conservancy. Juan Armenta Camacho died of a painful kidney disease. Cynthia Irwin-Williams has also since passed away after a long struggle with failing health.
In 1993, Forbidden Archaeology, by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, was released and soon after received favorable attention in some alternative media circles. It and the condensed version, Hidden History of the Human Race, have a nice section on Hueyatiaco, the dates, and our problems (entirely academic) with them. Publicity from Forbidden Archaeology resulted in a short appearance on a syndicated television show, Sightings, in 1995. It was seen by videographers making a documentary on controversial archaeological sites; I was flown down to Mexico for location shots and an interview. Their program, Mysterious Origins of Man, was shown on NBC the following year to the violent disapproval of Establishment scholars.
Today, human hunting sites in the 200,000- to -400,000-year range are popping up all over the place: Germany, England, and Siberia are dated using the same methods we used at Hueyatiaco. But such sites in the New World are ignored. My recent letters to Science News, Science, and Nature concerning these old New World sites were never published. That stone wall is as high as ever. But there is hope. We are trying for some more dates with the view of more excavation this fall (1997). The Valsequillo area is big, and many bones found there are well preserved. Somewhere in that pile of sediments and volcanic ash should lie the
skeletal remains of the men who hunted and killed the mighty Ice Age beasts of a quarter-million years ago. Let’s go find them!
New Evidence of Early Man
Marc Roland is a student at Brighton Hill College, in Kent, Wyoming, where he is studying for a Ph.D. in anthropology. His report of new evidence for early man in America demonstrates how rapidly the science of human origins is changing in favor of not only a far greater antiquity for the first settlers of our continent, but their surprising sea-faring capabilities in the deep past.
No More Clovis Moses by Marc Roland
Since its foundation in 1993, the writers of Ancient American magazine have argued that the first human visitors to this continent arrived from overseas, tens of thousands of years ago. Our conclusion was consistently ridiculed or dismissed by Establishment archaeologists, whereas their version of the past was almost universally embraced by educators and television commentators as indisputable dogma. They insist that post-glacial man crossed a land-bridge from Mongolia into Alaska no earlier than 13,500 Years Before Present.
However, a major discovery to the contrary, made two years ago by university-trained experts and independently validated earlier this summer, confirms a human presence in America some 40,000 years old. The find is additionally important because it proves that men were on the move around the world much earlier than mainstream scholars would have us believe. Moreover, it pointedly implies
that the 40,000-year-old residents originated in someplace other than Mongolia.
The origins of the newly found evidence coincide with the Upper Paleolithic, or Late Stone Age, when modern men appeared for the first time in Europe and began painting cave art on the subterranean surfaces of Lascaux in southwestern France, and Altamira in northern Spain. Meanwhile, they mined red ochre at a place called Lion Cave, in Africa’s Swaziland, and manufactured the earliest flaked stone tools, mostly of chert, in Southeast Asia. Australia simultaneously experienced its first human settlements, proving that even during this remote era, men were able to navigate stretches of the open sea. Clearly, some universal impetus inspired them to populate the world. But until now, conventional archaeologists were certain America was not part of this global event. On July 5, 2005, British scientists announced that literally hundreds of human footprints, approximately one-third of them children, found in Central Mexico during 2003, have been conclusively dated to the very dawn of modern man. Silvia Gonzalez, a geo-archaeologist at Liverpool’s John Moores University, in England, co-discovered the impressions in an abandoned quarry near the city of Puebla, 60 miles southeast of Mexico City. They are perfectly preserved as trace fossils in ash laid down by a nearby volcano, known as Cerro Toluquilla, during the ancient past. The footprints were made on the shoreline of a long-vanished lake. Contemporary sedimentary shells and sand grains baked into the ash were dated using optically stimulated luminescence. Researchers at the University of Oxford, in England, also used argon-argon, uranium-series, and electron spin resonance techniques to date the layers. According to team member Tom Higham, “The footprints are clearly older than 38,000 years.” He and his colleagues additionally employed laser scans and rapid prototyping equipment to create highly accurate, three-dimensional copies, accurate to a fraction of a millimeter.
Although the footprints remain in place where they were found, photographs and descriptions of their discovery were featured at an exhibition of the Royal Society’s Summer Exhibition, in London. Their co-discoverer, Matthew Bennett, of Bournemouth University, believes the impressions were made by colonizers who arrived in the Valsequillo Basin by sea, sailing down the Pacific coast of North America.
Long before the Puebla footprints were found, Ancient American investigators wrote of Brazil’s Pedra Furada site, which pre-dated mainstream notions of the Continent’s earliest human settlers by some 16,000 years. Ongoing discoveries such as these are replacing outdated paradigms, while validating the very premise of our magazine. Its writers have presented readers with abundant, neglected, and sometimes suppressed material to show that many of the first inhabitants arrived from overseas as skillful sea-farers, sometimes thousands of years before the earliest time lines drawn by conventional scholars. For more than 70 years, these guardians of academic doctrine have clung to their conviction that distinctive stone projectiles found in large numbers near the New Mexican town of Clovis were made by the first Siberian Americans, despite accumulating evidence from around the country pointing to the existence of much earlier inhabitants from Europe.
One of the authorities long accused of promoting the Bering Land-Bridge fable was the famous Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. In view of this venerable organization’s reputed hostility to archaeological heresy, an article in the November, 2004, issue of its Smithsonian magazine came as a pleasant surprise. In “America’s First Immigrants,” author Evan Hadingham writes in words similar to those found in back-issues of Ancient American that the first human arrivals in America more likely made their way into our continent, not across some hypothetical land-bridge, but by sea routes from Asia and even Europe. He cites the latest scientific evidence to show that the ice-free corridor could not have exited until at least 12,000 years ago, too late to allow the earliest visitors access to Alaska from Siberia.
Hadingham, senior science editor of the Public Broadcasting Systems popular Nova series, cites the discoveries of archaeologist Thomas Dillehay, who found evidence for a settled human population in Monte Verde, Chile. The residents lived in a log structure and used herbal medicines as early as 1,000 years before Clovis. It took Dillehay 20 years to overcome the opposition of his professional colleagues, but separate testing vindicated his claims in 1997. Hadingham describes an even earlier find, the Meadowcroft site, dated to a remarkable 17,500 Years Before Present. Its location in Pennsylvania means either that human settlers first arrived in North America long anterior to that date, if they walked all the way from Siberia, or, they came by sailing vessels across the North Atlantic—a far more credible alternative, given the unlikelihood of any passable land-bridge.
Older still is Virginia’s Cactus Hill site, where stone blades have been confirmed by independent dating techniques to 19,000 years ago. Hadingham wonders if those deeply ancient Pennslyvanians and Virginians could have been Ice Age Europeans responsible for the Solutrean Culture. They were master painters, whose vivid murals may still be seen in the French caves of Cosquer and Cougnac. Lending credence to the possibility of their impact on our Continent, the Solutreans invented the atl-atl, or spear-thrower, a weapon highly characteristic of Native American tribes from Alaska to Patagonia. Still more importantly, Solutrean spear-heads are virtually identical to Clovis points. Hadingham cites Bruce Bradley, a prehistoric stone tool specialist at Britain’s University of Exeter, that a connection must have existed between the two, very similar types. The Smithsonian’s own Clovis expert at the Institution’s Department of Anthropology, Dennis Stanford, went himself to Siberia, where he found that older or contemporary spear-heads bore no resemblance to Clovis points. Stanford concluded that the Siberian hunters who supposedly walked into northern Alaska were not armed with Clovis technology. Perhaps
most convincing of all, Hadingham reports on mitochondrial DNA testing undertaken on living Native Americans by Dennis Wallace, a geneticist at the University of California at Irvine. From these subjects, he and his colleagues were able to identify five distinct lineages, which demonstrated four or more separate waves of migration into North America long before 20,000 years ago. Hadingham cites Mercyhurst College author, James Adovasio, in his book, The First Americans, to the effect that conventional scholars, despite the contradictions of new discoveries, continue to depict the parting of the Bering Sea ice sheet similar to the parting of the Red Sea by some “Clovis Moses” leading his deeply prehistoric people into a new world.
Clearly, the days of that long-discredited portrayal are numbered, if mainstream magazines such as The Smithsonian are finally discussing the facts Ancient American has been publishing since 1993. Though we heartily congratulate Mr. Hadingham on the appearance of his enlightening article, we may be permitted to allow ourselves a friendly “we told you so!”
Joseph, F (2006). Discovering the mysteries of ancient America : lost history and legends, unearthed and explored. USA: Mark Book Press
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