DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

1. I am a cartographer (these days known a a G.I.S. dude).
2. As important in studying cartography is studying the history of surveying. They actually had surveyors survey barely inhabited portions of the west in the mid-1800's, placing stakes in trees in the wilderness, taking measurements with chains and doing a pretty darn good job of it given the crude tools they were using.

Regarding the Americans Indians, recent genetic research has determined that about 1/3 of the genes of American Indians come from from West Siberians, not East Siberians as is usually believed, which would put them closer to modern Europeans in lineage than modern East Asians. That might explain the apparent closeness of some tribes to customs and craftsmanship of some Europeans. But bear in mind this lineage goes back farther than what we now consider modern Europeans to look like. This was all before blond hair and the like evolved.

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Mr. Charlie

We're all orginally African. Before that we were all matter in the same star - a Class M supergiant to be precise. Before that we, and everything else, were all a singularity during the birth of the universe. I guess we're all one. Those hippies, prophets and philosophers were right. Or were they?

DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

I work for an Indian tribe in Washington state, and I've seen tribal members who somewhat resemble this (and as far as I can tell, they don't have any African admixture). You have to remember that statues like this were not always supposed to be literal or accurate renditions of what someone looked like. Look at the characters on a totem pole, for example. It's an artistic style they adopted as their culture, you can't take the images literally. I'm sure the Mayans did the same.

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Lord Larehip

Ranchers and railroad barons bought up enormous areas of land and that was the real reason for the surveying.

There were all kinds of people here. Take Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man--these have been determined to be a kind of hybrid of Ainu (a Caucasoid people who inhabited Japan before the classic Japanese) and Polynesian. Yet Spirit Cave Man wore an animal skin and moccasins. The Asatru (Nordic religion) practitioners were convinced Kennewick Man was a Nordic which only goes to show the kind of nonsense that gets spread around when science doesn't want to get involved.

The belief that the Clovis were here first does not appear to be true. The evidence says there were already people here when the Clovis showed up. This was thought not possible because of the presence of ice shelves over the land making it uninhabitable but this is no longer tenable. And people likely migrated here a variety of ways with the land bridge being only one way.

In upper Michigan, there are ancient copper pits still in existence that were mined by somebody. Whoever they were, they mined a huge amount of the what is called Lake Superior copper--about 1.5 billion pounds. It turns up all over the ancient world in faraway areas. How did it get there? Trade obviously but trade with whom? We don't know anything about the copper miners despite the fact that they were here for quite some time. They left behind so few clues. They are largely mysterious. Nor do we know why they stopped. It's as though they set down their tools and just walked away one day never to return.

Then why do elephants appear in New World art?

Lord Larehip

Your photo looks nothing like the Olmec heads, sorry. They are grotesque distortions at best. And I know black people in my own neighborhood that resemble the Olmec heads in the extreme.

DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

The railroads were important, but a lot of surveying got done out of railroad-owned land, too. As long as people were going to settle somewhere, somebody had to determine parcel boundaries. The surveyors who did all this work are almost the unsung heroes of western settlement IMO.

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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

I never said that those statues, in particular, looked anything like the Olmec statues. I just put them there as illustrations that one should not take the images on tribal artwork too literally.

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Lord Larehip

They're not heroes to me. They were doing what they were paid to do. They were the vanguard of the expansionism and manifest destiny that was coming. They probably weren't bad people in and of themselves but it was what they represented. There was no heroism in that as far as I am concerned.

Lord Larehip

But the images you showed CAN'T be taken literally because they are so stylized. If you saw someone that looked like that walking towards you, you'd scream and run. There is no such stylizing of the Olmec heads. They look like real people and if you stood someone with those features on a street corner here in Detroit, he would be instantly identified as a black man.

DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

How do you know? I mean ... sure, there might have been some Africans who made their way to Central America way back then. But you can't automatically assume that. It could be that these statues feature stylized/exaggerated facial features of certain Indians back then, which happen to resemble Africans. Personally knowing at least a couple American Indians in my own job who sort-of resemble people in these statues, it's not hard for me to imagine that some Indian sculptor could, in a burst of imagination, exaggerate and stylize their features to come up with something just like those statues.

You'd need a whole bunch of other evidence that Africans made their way to Central America (before the Europeans came) in order to conclude that those statues are anything other than a coincidence. Coincidences do happen.

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