We’ve travelled the world, and now for our final part of this series, we look at the
vast continent of Africa.
Did ancient Africans make it across the Atlantic?
Are these Olmec stone heads made to look like African traders?
Were the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt high on cocaine?
Let’s take a look.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
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Africa is a vast continent and covers a vast variety of peoples, cultures, and nations.
However, the history of the peoples of this continent often doesn't get told super well.
Many history books on Africa don’t begin until white people start showing up, which
sucks.
So, did some Africans make it across the Atlantic, or did Native Americans make it to African
shores?
Let’s start with the oldest claimed contact.
There’s a controversial archaeologist named Niede Guidon who worked in the 1970s with
some astonishingly old paintings found in Brazil, some suspected to be over 9,000 years
old.
Digging around this site, researchers have claimed they found stone tools way older than
our current model of human migration to the Americas calls for.
They argue that some of these stone tools go back almost 22,000 years.
Yes, TWENTY TWO THOUSAND.
This is a far cry from our current model.
The oldest evidence we have of Humans in the Americas come from discoveries like the famous
finds of the Clovis culture in Montana dated to 13,000 years ago.
DNA found in Oregon pushes suspected migration back as far as 14,000 years ago, and arrowheads
found in Buttermilk Creek Texas could be as old as 15,500 years old.
But this isn’t Texas, and it isn’t 15,000 years old.
This is South America, and supposedly as much as 7,000 years older than our oldest samples.
An Uruguayan archaeologist published some findings suggesting that humans were hunting
giant sloths 30,000 years ago, and in Southern Chile, at a site called Monte Verde Anthropologist
Tom D. Dillehay claims to have artefacts as old as 14,800 years old.
And so we come back to Niede Guidon.
In Brazil’s Caatinga, an arid region, Brazilian and European archaeologists claim they found
stone tools showing Humans there almost 10,000 years before the Clovis findings.
This is a tense debate in archaeological circles.
Some make claims that these findings might not be chipped stone tools, but naturally
chipped stone, or made by monkeys which do use tools.
Two decades ago though, Guidon became notorious for claiming that Humans came to Brazil 48,000
years ago based on charcoal she dug up.
Many are sceptical of her work, but she pressed on.
She believes that these older finds in Brazil suggest a migration from Africa, possibly
as far back as 100,000 years ago.
The archaeologists I could find responses from claimed that these pieces are interesting,
but to make things definitive there will need to be more digging.
Who knows, this work in South America might completely upturn the applecart of our migration
theories.
It could also be a consequence of the massive variables that come with techniques like carbon
dating, and the archaeologist’s dreams of being the expert who changed a huge model.
Now let’s talk about cocaine.
A few Egyptian mummies were found with traces of coca and nicotine, which led to some speculating
that the Ancient Egyptians might have found the New World.
This came from the work of a Toxicologist named Svetlana Balabanova.
Follow Up tests seemed to bear this out.
One documentary claimed that an examination of some mummies from Nubia, in modern-day
Sudan also had some of these fun time drugs in their systems.
The nicotine was explained away as coming from a plant that used to live in the old
world but went extinct.
Some also claim that this is just straight up fraud.
This is another case of something that comes up a lot in this series.
There is smoke, but no fire.
There is no definitive evidence of this contact, and the evidence that is here can be explained
away by other means.
For example, in the 19th century, there was a lot of smoking and a lot of… less than
careful handling of Egyptian mummies.
Simple Occam's razor will suggest that it means the theory can go on ice until something
stronger gets surfaced.
Lastly, there is a well-developed theory that the Olmecs either traded with or were descended
from people from Africa.
The primary evidence they have is the facial features of these statues.
The first proposal came from Jose Melgar, the man who found the first of these massive
heads in Tres Zapotes in 1862.
Other writers have espoused this theory, even a few narrowing it down to the West African
Mande people.
Let’s examine the evidence.
The first is that Mesoamerican writing is related to African script.
Maya inscriptions looked like something called the Libyco-Berber script in Africa, or that
the Olmec symbols looked like the Vai script.
Vai script being a Liberian script that’s actually somewhat modern and might have Cherokee
influence.
Oops.
No Mesoamerican researchers support this, and since these claims, Maya scholars have
done a lot of work translating Maya script.
It’s not African.
Olmec has still not been translated, so there’s always that straw to cling to.
Some make a claim using the very fun to say subdiscipline of archaeology, osteology, or
the study of bones.
A person with this name I’m not going to try and pronounce claims that the skulls of
Olmec people look like they have an African origin.
They claimed that the skull shape of a few sights in Mexico show black African roots.
Most Mesoamerican scholars think this work is ridiculous because he made his measurements
using the outdated Polish Comparative-Morphological method, which only categorises skulls as caucasian,
negroid, and mongoloid.
The categories themselves should show how outdated these are.
At the moment, no substantial evidence, and no DNA.
Sorry!
I actually have one more contact theory I need to mention but didn’t fit into any
of the previous episodes.
There is a claim that Indian carvings found in 1879 in central India dating to 200 BCE
has descriptions of a custard apple.
They believed the custard apple only came to India via Vasco de Gama’s arrival in
1498.
It was dismissed for quite awhile until a 2009 study found possible custard apple seeds
dating to 2000 BCE.
It seems though that the jury is still out on what they are for sure.
There are some other connections people tried to make, like the 1924 claim that a Mayan
inscription is of an elephant, but the more likely answer is that it is of the very American
native tapir.
There is lastly some carvings from 12th century India that looks a bit like maize.
However, experts on India don’t think so claiming it’s actually a Muktaphala, which
is a mythical Indian fruit that’s covered in pearls.
So here we are.
Five videos, and a lot of theories, but what do we learn from all this?
Well, we learned a lot about how archaeologists do their job, and that there is a lot of exciting
work still to be done.
Let’s put these in five categories.
There are the verified theories, like the Beringian migration and the Viking landings
in Newfoundland.
There are plausible theories lacking a smoking gun like the Polynesian contact theory.
There are those making big claims out of interesting, but not conclusive evidence, like the Zuni
theory.
Some claims are outlandish and made with made from outdated tools like the Olmec theories.
Lastly, some theories are strange, and are there because of an agenda relating to religion
or colonisation like the Mormon claims, the Welsh claims, or even to an extent the Chinese
ones.
I guess if I can have one takeaway it is this.
Archaeology is kinda awesome, and every day they’re working hard with amazing techniques
to piece together our deep story.
Lot’s of work has been done, and there’s still a lot to do, so if you want to find
some answers yourself and haven’t chosen a major yet.
There’s always a lot to dig up.
Alright, folks, we made it to the end of the Columbus series.
It only took *check watch* two years to get here.
Thanks for your patience all of you who have been here for the long and strange journey.
Which theory in the series did you find the most outlandish, or the most believable?
Be sure to tell me down in the comments.
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