Posted on 05/09/2006 8:58:51 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Findings at the newly excavated Tamtoc archeological site in the north-central state of San Luis Potosi may prompt scholars to rethink a view of Mesoamerican history which holds that its earliest peoples were based in the south of Mexico... Tamtoc, located about 550 miles northeast of Mexico City, will open to the public this week, while experts including linguists, historians, ethnographers and others study findings from the site to confirm their origins. The Olmecs are considered the mother culture of pre-Hispanic Mexico. Ruins of Olmec centers believed to have flourished as early as 1200 B.C. have been found in the Gulf Coast states of Veracruz and Tabasco, with only scattered artifacts found elsewhere. Workers restoring a canal at the site stumbled on the stone monolith. It appears to represent a lunar calendar and contains three human figures and other symbols in relief. At 25 feet long, 13 feet high, 16 inches thick and weighing more than 30 tons, it may date to as early as 900 B.C., Ahuja said... The 330-acre complex has three plazas and more than 70 buildings and may indicate that the Olmecs migrated northward and mingled with other peoples there, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
But surely they would reproduce? There is no genetic evidence of African genetics in south americans.
Also, there are no African skeletons found. But i admit it can be difficult to find a skeleton in a jungle.
It seems to me that it is very difficult for a foreigner to just come ashore and become leader of a people that don't even understand what the dude is saying, especially when those Olmecs already had leaders which controlled a vast army.
Im only saying what other people believe. For sake of argumentation :)
Sorry, I don't believe that to be the case. The Aboriginies of Australia arrived there at least 60k years ago (probably earlier) and are some of the most archaic humans alive today. (I suspect they're Homo-Erectus.) Some have (today) a 'heavier' brow ridge than the Neanderthals.
40,000 year old Mungo Man/woman) seems to be an exception though.
The tree-ring data worldwide recorded a severe event at 1159BC.
Troy was destroyed, the middle bronze age ended, there was the David plague and the Shang dynasty collapsed all about the same time according to Professor Mike Baillie.
We must have had a terrible volcano or a cosmic impact. Lot and lots of problems worldwide at that time probably driven by the event recorded by the tree-rings. The Chinese recorded that at the end of the Shang dynasy that "250,000 people, took to the sea."
Are you saying you believe Aboriginals aren't human but Homo Erectus?
Thanks, good idea; here's the links to the abstract and the archive, which includes the author's contact information as of Dec 2000. The read me file in the archive has some amusing things in regarding the Mayan calendar.
http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/Abstracts/app/time/chac-111.hqx.txt
http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/Archive/app/time/chac-111.hqx
Nope. We're all human. There is only one species of humans and all this Homo-this and Homo-that is hog wash.
All of the features of (so-called) 'extinct humans' can be found in humans today all over the world. If you put all the uniqueness of any combination of these 'traits' together (obtained from modern humans today) you can come up with any Homo-? you desire. It's called "The Multi-regional Theory'. The idea is covered thoroughly in Professor Milford Wolpoff's new book titled: Race And Human Evolution.
There has only ever been one human.
"It is very difficult for a foreigner to just come ashore and become leader of a people that don't even understand what the dude is saying."
So this is why it was so hard for Cortez with a few hundred men to conquer a few million Aztecs? Furthermore as blam points out in his comment about 8 or 9 past this yours, this was a period of great upheaval worldwide. From my recollections (which I know I should refresh) it was only about this time that Olmec building and power really took off. Perhaps foreign knowledge of military and civic bureaucracy whether from China or the Middle East or both had an influence. Also, perhaps the "Phonecians" already had some trading contact, and linguistic knowledge there. With a worldwide upheaval (including severe weather) it would not have been hard for a fleet to be stranded and settle in, or to escape there from strife at home. Or even take the reins of power from native rulers who had failed to protect their people from the cosmos and lost "the mandate of heaven."
As to the genetic matter. If there was no steady influx of African settlers, they blood lines of African war chiefs would soon have been diluted to the point of near disappearance. Have you looked carefully at all the light skinned "Blacks" in this country after only one or two centuries, much less 3 millenia. Furthermore, I think that only a few thousand people have been tested and compared for the studies of worldwide migrations. Perhaps no one has tested coastal Mexicans, and African areas where mercenaries were normally recruited. There is so much exciting work still to be done in that whole DNA/Mitochondria area.
New evidence supports the tales of ancient scribes and identifies brief but brutal times of worldwide ecological catastrophe. The evidence is in tree rings, which clearly show several years of cold weather that stunted growth beginning in A.D. 536 and especially after A.D. 540-541.
The rings show similar events that began in 1628 B.C. and 1159 B.C., and rare written documents of those times seem also to describe cataclysmic social collapse.
What weapon does nature wield that is powerful enough to alter the course of civilizations within a few years? The most likely explanation, the best fit with the evidence, is that described by both Chinese and Europeans as dragons in the sky: Pieces of comets (or perhaps of asteroids) crashed into Earth, spewing a veil of dust that encircled the world and dimmed the sun.
A much larger and rarer bolide (an exploding meteoric fireball) is assumed to have ended the reign of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. A smaller and more common one exploded over the Tunguska River in the Siberian wilderness 91 years ago with 2,000 times the power of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945.
And just five years ago, astronomers watched the fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plow spectacularly into Jupiter.
I believe the association between the tree-ring data and historical documents and folktales is real: Earth faced catastrophic environmental dislocation at or around 1628 B.C., 1159 B.C., and A.D. 540 (and probably in 2354 B.C. and 208 B.C., as well) because of near-miss comets, either through dust-loading of the atmosphere as Earth passed through the comet's dusty tail or through direct bombardment by cometary fragments. (They must have been near misses, because if we had been hit by a full-blown comet in the past 10,000 years or so, we wouldn't be here today.)
This hypothesis is not proven, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. The strongest evidence comes from tree rings and the science of dendrochronology.
Tree rings record the age of a tree, with a distinct ring of growth produced each year. The width of each ring depends on growing conditions, so each year's growth in a particular area leaves a unique signature (a reflection of fat, moderate, or lean growing conditions) in the tree-ring record.
By calibrating the rings through progressively older trees from a specific region, archaeologists can build millennia-long chronologies that allow them to date ancient wooden artifacts. (See Discovering Archaeology, May/June, page 45.) The pattern of tree rings in an artifact can be matched to the regional chronology to determine the year in which the tree died.
A less-well-known consequence of these chronologies is that we can now identify periods in which trees grew very little or not at all. This is indicated by clusters of extremely narrow rings, which suggest extremely cold growing seasons. A band of these narrow rings occurred after A.D. 540 and lasted about six years in parts of Europe, Asia, and North America.
Similar ring patterns are found around 1159 B.C. and 1628 B.C. These dates may coincide with the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations across Eurasia. They may also be recalled in the biblical book of Exodus and contemporary records from China.
The first inkling that tree rings might record catastrophic events came in the mid-1980s from dendrochronologist Val LaMarche and volcanologist Kathy Hirschboeck.
In the extremely long-lived bristlecone pines of the western United States, they noted a frost-damage ring at 1627 B.C. and suggested it might reflect the massive eruption of the Santorini volcano in the Aegean Sea. Similar frost rings followed the eruptions of Krakatoa in Indonesia (1883) and Katmai in Alaska (1912).
After a major volcanic eruption, Earth is veiled by a layer of fine debris circulating in the stratosphere. This layer reflects sunlight away from Earth, causing the surface to cool. As a result of their suggestion, I searched the ring patterns derived from oak logs that had been preserved in the peat bogs of Ireland.
I found that many trees exhibited the worst growth - the narrowest rings - of their lifetimes starting in 1628 B.C. Only a few other such events were seen in the rings, but two others were at 1159 B.C. and A.D. 540. Those years are close to dates for acid-rich layers (attributed to volcanic eruptions) that had been identified in ice cores taken in Greenland. We seemed to be onto something.
This comment on the Australian Aborigines seems to be AT LEAST borderline racist. Australian Aborigines ARE modern humans.
Agreed that homo erectus WAS human, along with Neanderthals. Still, those humans remains which are today labeled as homo erectus could have been branches of humanity which died out. Also, physiological appearance is not necessarily indicative of direct descent.
Go away creep. You're full of it. I don't have a problem with race and everyone whose known me on these threads for years knows it too.
oh ok.
But I still doubt it a bit. I do think it very likely that many species are really one and the same, but according to a paleantologist professort the differences between, for instance, neanderthals and humans at that time are far bigger then the difference between any two modern day humans.
I don't know how large the differences are between Homo XX
species, but if neanderthals where a different species, than I think it possible that more humanoids have diverged sufficinetly to become a separate species.
Those few hundred man had firearms. Those black people would not have had anything but comparable weapons.
I don't think it is safe to presume that there are enough indications to presume that those Olmec statues portray black people. I know that they look a bit like black people, but sometimes people have a strange way of sculpting.
Historical Review: Megadrought And Megadeath In 16th Century Mexico (Hemorraghic Fever)
"The epidemic of cocoliztli from1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population of Mexico (Figure 1). In absolute and relative terms the 1545 epidemic was one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history, approaching even the Black Death of bubonic plague, which killed approximately 25 million in western Europe from 1347 to 1351 or about 50% of the regional population."
"The cocoliztli epidemic from 1576 to 1578 cocoliztli epidemic killed an additional 2 to 2.5 million people, or about 50% of the remaining native population."
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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