GGG Ping.
These findings belong to the Moche civilization, which ruled the northern coast of Peru from the time of Christ to 800 AD, centuries prior to the Incas.The Moche civilization, its cruise ships, hotel chains, and resort communities, all disappear at the same time that the Arab conquest begins. Coincidence? You decide.
Leni
Last of the Mochicans?
This is nearly current events. The Chinese hadn't arrived yet, and the Hebrews were long gone.
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In 1959 outside the city of Puebla, about 75 miles south of Mexico City, Juan Armenta Camacho stunned the world with his discovery of a mineralized elephant pelvis with engravings of elephants, big cats, and other extinct animals.
The engravings had been made when the bone was still fresh, still “green.” Whoever made these engravings actually saw those animals, and probably even ate and prayed to them. The most amazing critter of them all was smack dab in the middle of the thing. A four-tusked gomphothere, an ancestor of the mastodon, and extinct in the U.S. for over a million years.
The real problem was that the bones were mineralized. C14 dating was useless. For six years, nobody knew how old these sites were.
Then geological science entered the fray. In 1968, a USGS geologist suggested using his new Uranium Series technique to date the bone, and that’s when everything fell apart.
The bone dates from the Tetela sites were 250,000 years old! And so opened up one of the craziest archaeological wormholes in history. That’s a quarter million years old! Modern man didn’t live back then, and all the artifacts from Valsequillo were fancy spearheads and blades - things we Mods didn’t know how to make until 30-40,000 years ago. And there was art! And Valsequillo was 250,000 years old? That’s Homo erectus Time!! And there’s art?
It not only threatened to trash the American paradigm of prehistory, it would also trash the Old World paradigm for the last phases of human evolution. This was serious. There were modern stone tools in Mexico that were 200,000 years older than the earliest modern tools in Europe and Asia and Africa. It was nuts. It was impossible any way you looked at it.
Geologists kept coming up with similar ages for the site no matter what they threw at it. And no matter what the geological sciences turned up, the archaeological community fought back with a stifling wall of absolute silence and noncomment. They would have none of it. Period. The wormhole became an academic black hole, the region became a forbidden zone, and Valsequillo dropped from the lips of credibility.
In the end the archaeologists won through silence. Irwin-Williams never published an official volume; not even site reports. And the curiousity that raged through the professional community was calmly checked at the door of credibility.
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