Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Bucking the Archaeological Establishment
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?
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").
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Discovering the Mysteries of Ancient America"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Frank Joseph.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
