Archaeologists push back beginning of civilization in Americas 400 years

GGG Ping.

They all came from Sundaland

Voyages Of The Pyramid Builders

Book Review:

Is it a mere coincidence that pyramids are found throughout our globe? Did cultures ranging across vast spaces in geography and time, such as the ancient Egyptians; early Bud-dhists; theMaya, Inca, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations of the Americas; the Celts of the British Isles; and even the Mississippi Indians of pre-Columbus Illinois, simply dream the same dreams and envision the same structures?

Robert M.Schoch-one of the world's preeminent geologists in recasting the date of the building of the Great Sphinx-believes otherwise. In this dramatic and meticulously reasoned book, Schoch, like anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl in his classic Kon-Tiki, argues that ancient cultures traveled great distances by sea. Indeed, he believes that primeval sailors traveled from the Eastern continent, primarily Southeast Asia, and spread the idea of pyramids across the globe,particularly to the New World of the Americas where they abounded until the days of the Conquistadors.

Author Biography: Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., has been a full-time faculty member at the College of General Studies at BostonUniversity since 1984. He was featured in the Emmy-winning documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx.

Eden In The East

Book Description

A book that completely changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the lost 'Eden' - the cradle of civilisation - to Southeast Asia

Synopsis

At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half-sunken continent is the Sunda shelf of Sundaland. In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in Southeast Asia was the cradle of civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete six thousand years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from Creation stories, myths and sagas, and from linguistics and DNA analysis, to argue that this founder-civilisation was destroyed by the catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in sea level at the end of the last Ice Age.

From the Author

'Eden in the East'overturns conventional ideas of the origins of western civilization in Mesopotamia. In this book I place Southeast Asia for the first time as the key to the first roots of civilisation. At the same time I provide scientific explanations for numerous, and previously unexplained, cultural links between early Eastern and Western cultures. Notable among these links are the hundreds of myths of a great flood which forced people into boats and left only a few survivors. I can now identify this flood as the dramatic rise in sea level at the end of the ice age that suddenly inundated vast areas of Eurasia. In other words the Biblical Flood really did occur. It had its most disastrous effects, however, in the continent of Southeast Asia - now a lost and half-sunken Eden.

As the Ice Age ended, there were three catastrophic and rapid rises in sea level. The last of these, which finished shortly before the start of civilization in Mesopotamia, may have been the one that was remembered. These three floods drowned the coastal cultures and all the flat continental shelves of Southeast Asia. As the sea rolled in, there was a mass emigration from the sinking continent. These flood-driven refugees, carried their domestic animals with them in large ocean-going canoes in all directions. The networks of sea trade, created by their settlements around the Indian Ocean, fertilized the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The Southeast Asian contributions to the building of the first cities in Mesopotamia may not have been solely technological. While they may have brought the new ideas and skills of megalithic construction cereal domestication, sea-faring, astronomy, navigation, trade and commerce, they may also have introduced the tools to harness and control the labour of the farmers and artisans. These included magic, religion, and concepts of state, kingship and social hierarchy.

The evidence:

While most alternative prehistories are based more on speculation than fact, I have found some very solid evidence; and have built on the work of specialists in many fields in addition to my own research, to support a comprehensive new picture.

The most solid facts come from oceanographic research of the last decade. It now appears that the great rise in sea level after the last ice age, known about for many years, was not gradual; three sudden ice-melts, the last of which was only 8000 years ago, had catastrophic effects on tropical coasts with flat continental shelves. Rapid land loss was compounded by superwaves, set off by cracks in the earth s crust as the weight of ice shifted to the seas.

Archaeology holds the most accurately dated clues to the past. I have devoted two chapters to archaeological evidence found on coasts and in caves throughout the Indo-Pacific region. All of the technological 'firsts' which signalled man's emergence from the long Palaeolithic era towards the end of the Ice Age come from the Pacific Rim islands. These include evidence of deliberate long-distance sailing and grinding of cereal flour in the Solomon islands from 30,000 years ago. The world's first pots, 12,500 years old, come from Japan. The first evidence that swamps were drained for agriculture comes from the New Guinea Highlands 9,000 years ago.

These snapshots hint at a much older history to the discovery of Neolithic skills in the East. The better archaeological preservation of the later stages of human development in Mesopotamia and Egypt, however, has given rise to the view that civilization started in the West.

I review the evidence of the spoken word in the two linguistic chapters. Experts in the history of language now recognise that Southeast Asia not Europe or West Asia was the centre of language dispersal at the end of the Ice Age. The ancestral language of the Micronesians and Polynesians did not come out of China, as has been recently assumed, but further south over 8000 years ago out of the drowning islands of Indonesia. As the Flood engulfed Indo- China and separated Sumatra from Malaysia the ancestral languages of the Khmers, whose descendants built Angkor Wat, moved west into India.

The most dramatic new findings in this book come out of my own research field. I have published more than 25 scientific papers on the genetic prehistory of the Indo-Pacific region over the past 15 years. Building on my initial work, in Eden in the East I have shown that genetic disorders can be used as people-markers revealing a new view of prehistoric migrations in the Indo-Pacific region. My latest finding, made in collaboration with the Oxford Institute of Molecular Medicine, was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in October 1998. This paper arose directly out of my research for Eden in the East. It provides compelling evidence that Polynesians and other argonauts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans originated in eastern Indonesia back in the Ice Age rather than in China, as previously thought. This finding alone forces the realisation that the Polynesians' skills of sailing, navigation, astronomy and agriculture had their origins, back in Indonesia, during the Ice Age.

Another objective tool that I use to explore ancient East-West cultural influence in the last part of the book is comparative mythology. Uniquely shared folklore shows that counterparts and originals for nearly every Middle Eastern and European mythological archetype, including the Flood, can be found in the islands of eastern Indonesia and the southwest Pacific. Southeast Asia is revealed as the original Garden of Eden and the Flood as the force which drove people from Paradise.

My multidisciplinary approach to prehistoric enquiry has been recognised in the academic fields of linguistics and comparative folklore. I have been invited to present papers on my work on prehistory at international linguistic meetings. This year I contributed a chapter to a book on Flood myths in the Moluccas published by the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, Leiden University (Netherlands). --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"Interested, Blam?"

Yes, thanks. Merry Christmas.

This title brought something back to mind that oddly, isn't the first reminder this week. Somewhere I had this stuff stored on another computer, but time flies, things get moved around, blah blah. Anyway it seems like a good time to look it up again.

A couple of years ago, I was Googling info about Hebrew inscriptions in America. One link led to another, and after looking at various alphabet charts, this item in particular caught my attention:

"Maine amulet with unusal symbols. On the other side is an eye of God -- an Old World motif."

LINK

I snooped around on the web, but it seemed that nobody who studied this amulet, knew what the symbols meant. Now maybe that's changed but I don't have the time to re-research. So I'll continue from memory (plus a little luck with image searches).

When I saw the image, it reminded me of these symbols:

One set is from Los Lunas, the other from Tel Dan. Here's the link:

http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/15_home.html

Now if you compare the symbols on the amulet, it appears that the first line of script (right to left) contains the following letters:

bet, zayin, yud, vav

I know very little about Hebrew but I like to dabble, and I enjoy word puzzles. So looking at that I read "b'ziv"; IOW, in [the month of] Ziv.

Also, the image to me suggested a reference to an eclipse or some such celestial event. The two circles at the top looked like those full moon and new moon symbols on a calendar. The "face" with the horns or rays could be the sun, if the astronomical symbolism is correct. Not sure what the "mouth" is below the two top circles, but perhaps it depicts a connection or relationship between the two circles and/or the larger circle with the four horns or rays (perhaps suggestive of a compass rose).

On to those bottom two "x"s. They looked to me like two tavs. The dot below the second tav (reading right to left), and/or the dash before both of them, may differentiate these tavs from the other letters. Perhaps the tavs represent a number (800, 400 + 400), instead of a word. I reasoned this because of the modern day practice of inserting apostrophes in letter sequences, so the letters are understood as numbers or abbreviations, instead of a word.

Far-fetched? Where did that leave me? I wondered if like today, the 800 is representative of a Hebrew year ending in 800, such as 3800 or 4800. The year now is 5765, and I've seen on calendars where the year is abbreviated to the last three digits.

Okay, so if I am on to something, the amulet marks an eclipse in the month of Ziv in a year 800.

Ziv = Zif

02099 Ziv {zeev'}
probably from an unused root meaning to be prominent; TWOT - 533; n pr m

AV - Zif 2; 2

Zif = "brightness"
1) name of the 2nd month of the year, corresponding to Apr-May

I realize that the month is normally spelled zayin vav (no yud), but the root (meaning "radiance", "brightness") is spelled zayin yud vav, so this isn't necessarily a poor hunch. The big test is that eclipse, in the spring of a year "800". Are eclipses that common that I should find one anyway, no matter what the amulet really means? Perhaps, but a visit to Fred Espenak's eclipse page reveals:

a total lunar eclipse in AD 40 (Hebrew year 3800) on May 15th, saros series 70. I have no clue where this eclipse would have been visible from (I had figured it out way back when, the instructions are on the page).

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/LEcat/LEcatalog.html

I also checked years -960/2800 (no year zero), and 1040/4800, but there weren't any eclipses in April or May.

I checked for solar eclipses also. There was a partial on April 29 in the same year, AD 40.

Perhaps the amulet speaks of that particular month, which was heralded by a solar eclipse and marked in the center by a lunar eclipse. Ironically, this during a month which means "brightness".

Coincidence? It is just a few hunches thrown together with a few tidbits of knowledge. Otherwise, what's an amulet doing in Maine with Hebrew writing, describing eclipses from AD 40?

FWIW

Ooops, "no year zero" should read "note: year zero". That is, -960 is calculated with a zero, and would correspond to 961 BC.

A primitive vessel COULD have made it from Old World to New, as well. There is no PROOF or EVIDENCE, but the possibility remains. Early mankind may have been more mobile than we give them credit.

The descendants of the ancient Olmec (Vera Cruz area of Gulf of Mexico) have legends their ancestors (7 brothers) came to their land on the backs of 7 turtles from the west. The Olmec date from approx. 2,500 B.C.or earlier. (sorry PC afficiandos, I don't use B.C.E.) Further, the Olmec and Mayan calendars have a starting date near or around 3,100 B.C. when some prominent, and as yet unknown, event occured.

You Mormon bashers won't like this, but the Book of Mormon mentions a people referred to as "Jaredites" who came to the americas shortly after the Tower of Babel (around 2,500 B.C.) in 8 ships made "...tight like a dish..." (a turtle shell would also be a good description) from the west. The core group of these Jaredites were from one family (brothers) and their friends.

Coincidence? You decide....

YEC INTREP

VERY interesting. Thanks!

Thanks farmfriend and Blam.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

You are most welcome. I am so greatful you took over the list. You are doing a wonderful job with it. Merry Christmas to you and yours.

"Jaredites" who came to the americas shortly after the Tower of Babel (around 2,500 B.C.) in 8 ships made "...tight like a dish..."

If the evidence in Brazil is the oldest, I kinda like this west africa to Brazil theory. The shortest distance (other than across Scandanavia to Greenland to Iceland to Vineland) is from the west african bulge to the Brazilian bulge.

I can then see migrations south and over to Chile and up the west coast of SA. Or up the nile and over the Andes? Etc, etc. That would account for inca, mayan and then US Indians.

I like this stuff. That stuff in New England is virtually unknown except to Blue State Bluenoses, kinda a cult.

yitbos

thanks for the link!

Thanks FF for your kind remarks. Check this out:

Birth of Gods, Graves, Glyphs eyewitness accounts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/575720/posts?page=82#82

Uh, I believe this link is to the first reply, but the "in reply to" link goes to the first of the subthread. I suppose it is sort of a GGG item in and of itself. Maybe I should post a vanity thread, using the link... ;')

Wow, talk about a fossil. Ironic that the suggestion was made by Sabertooth, now banned. I like his new picture over the old one.

Should be interesting to watch this for future reference!
3 And the judge received for his wages according to his time—a senine of gold for a day, or a senum of silver, which is equal to a senine of gold; and this is according to the law which was given.
4 Now these are the names of the different pieces of their gold, and of their silver, according to their value. And the names are given by the Nephites, for they did not reckon after the manner of the Jews who were at Jerusalem; neither did they measure after the manner of the Jews; but they altered their reckoning and their measure, according to the minds and the circumstances of the people, in every generation, until the reign of the judges, they having been established by king Mosiah..
5 Now the reckoning is thus—a senine of gold, a seon of gold, a shum of gold, and a limnah of gold.
6 A senum of silver, an amnor of silver, an ezrom of silver, and an onti of silver. 7 A senum of silver was equal to a senine of gold, and either for a measure of barley, and also for a measure of every kind of grain.
8 Now the amount of a seon of gold was twice the value of a senine.
9 And a shum of gold was twice the value of a seon.
10 And a limnah of gold was the value of them all.
11 And an amnor of silver was as great as two senums.
12 And an ezrom of silver was as great as four senums.
13 And an onti was as great as them all.
14 Now this is the value of the lesser numbers of their reckoning—
15 A shiblon is half of a senum; therefore, a shiblon for half a measure of barley.
16 And a shiblum is a half of a shiblon.
17 And a leah is the half of a shiblum.
18 Now this is their number, according to their reckoning.
19 Now an antion of gold is equal to three shiblons.

Thanks for the ping. Very interesting...

Historical Christian Site Said to Be Found
By LAURIE COPANS, Associated Press Writer

PHOTOS
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?g=events/sc/021903anthroarchaeo&a=&tmpl=ga&e=1&m=g&c=1

CANA, Israel - Among the roots of ancient olive trees, archaeologists have found pieces of large stone jars of the type the Gospel says Jesus used when he turned water into wine at a Jewish wedding in the Galilee village of Cana.

They believe these could have been the same kind of vessels the Bible says Jesus used in his first miracle, and that the site where they were found could be the location of biblical Cana. But Bible scholars caution it'll be hard to obtain conclusive proof — especially since experts disagree on exactly where Cana was located.

Christian theologians attach great significance to the water-to-wine miracle at Cana. The act was not only Jesus' first miracle, but it also came at a crucial point in the early days of his public ministry — when his reputation was growing, he had just selected his disciples and was under pressure to demonstrate his divinity.

The shards were found during a salvage dig in modern-day Cana, between Nazareth and Capernaum. Israeli archaeologist Yardena Alexander believes the Arab town was built near the ancient village. The jar pieces date to the Roman period, when Jesus traveled in the Galilee.

"All indications from the archaeological excavations suggest that the site of the wedding was (modern-day) Cana, the site that we have been investigating," said Alexander, as she cleaned the site of mud from winter rains.

However, American archaeologists excavating a rival site several miles to the north have also found pieces of stone jars from the time of Jesus, and believe they have found biblical Cana.

Another expert, archaeologist Shimon Gibson, cast doubt on the find at modern Cana, since such vessels are not rare and it would be impossible to link a particular set of vessels to the miracle.

"Just the existence of stone vessels is not enough to prove that this is a biblical site," and more excavations are needed, he said.

Based on the shards, Alexander believes the vessels found at her site were 12 to 16 inches in diameter — or large enough to be the same type of jars described in the Gospel of John.

Other evidence that might link the site to the biblical account includes the presence of a Jewish ritual bath at the house, which shows it was a Jewish community. Locally produced pottery was used at the simple house, showing it could have been from the poor village described in the Scriptures.

Stephen Pfann, a Bible scholar in Jerusalem, said that while the American dig has generally been accepted by scholars as the true site, the shards found in modern-day Cana raise new questions.

"I think there is ample evidence that both sites are from the first century, and we need more information to correctly identify either site," Pfann said.

Alexander has been digging in modern Cana since 1999.

The current find came in a last-ditch "salvage dig" before a house is built on the site. A Christian Arab family financed part of the excavation, in accordance with Israeli law, before construction can begin.

Alexander believes that with more substantial investment, the site could became a major tourist attraction and pilgrimage destination.

"We're really working very hard to save some of this site because what we do have here is a village of Jesus," she said. "And it was here that he carried out the first miracle."

Headless bodies found at mysterious pyramid By Brian Winter

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The discovery of a tomb filled with decapitated bodies suggests Mexico's 2,000 year-old "Pyramid of the Moon" may have been the site of horrifically gory sacrifices, archaeologists say.

The tomb at Teotihuacan, the first major city built in the Americas, whose origins are one of history's great mysteries, also held the bound carcasses of eagles, dogs and other animals.

"It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of clean, symbolic performances -- it is most likely that the ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed with sacrificed people and animals," Saburo Sugiyama, one of the scientists leading the ongoing dig, said on Thursday.

"Whether the victims and animals were killed at the site or a nearby place, this foundation ritual must have been one of the most terrifying acts recorded archeologically in Mesoamerica."

Of the 12 human bodies found, 10 were decapitated and then tossed, rather than arranged, on one side of the burial site. The two other bodies were richly ornamented with beads and a necklace made of imitation human jaws.

The Aztecs came across Teotihuacan's towering stone pyramids in about 1500 A.D., centuries after the city was torched and abandoned. It is not known what language its inhabitants spoke, but the Aztecs named it "The Place Where Men Become Gods," believing it was a divine site.

A major tourist site, it lies about 35 miles (56 km) northeast of Mexico City.

After 200 years of excavations, archaeologists are still largely in the dark about the origins of the city, which is believed to have housed 200,000 people at its peak in 500 A.D. -- rivalling Shakespeare's London, but a millennium earlier.

Sugiyama said the nearly complete excavation indicates the Pyramid of the Moon was significant to its builders as a site for celebrating state power through ceremony and sacrifice.

The sacrifices were carried out during the expansion of one of the city's major monuments, suggesting the government wanted to symbolize growing sacred political power.

"Contrary to some past interpretation, militarism was apparently central to the city's culture," the excavation team said in a statement.

The master-planned city-state collapsed around 700 A.D., an event as mysterious as its formation.

It was the site of a modern-day controversy earlier this year when protesters fought and lost a battle to keep the Mexican unit of retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a new store a half-mile (800 metres) away.

OH NO! the mormons were right!!