Ancient Bones Found In Honduras Said To Be Olmec

Reuters/Yahoo ^ | 11-11-2003

[blam]

[Consort]

...They wore the old-style football helmets.

[js1138]

Did somebody say oobleck?

[Dr._Joseph_Warren]

That's amazing!!

So you're saying that the Olmec were all related to Beldar from Remulak! ;)

[wardaddy]

bearded?

[blam]

"bearded?"

Yup. It looks like (from the statues recovered) all the racial groups are represented in the Olmec ruins.

[blam]

..and, BTW, their culture just appeared out of the blue. No evidence of a slow build-up, suddenly, they were just there.

[wardaddy]

rode a motorcycle from Belize City to Tikal once in the 70s when it was still primitive....been around lots of Mayan and Inca ruins.

don't know much about Olmec civilization admittedly.

[blam]

"rode a motorcycle from Belize City to Tikal once in the 70s when it was still primitive....been around lots of Mayan and Inca ruins."

Been lost in the Yucatan 'jungle' a couple times myself.

[ruoflaw]

16 figures....maybe ball players

[restornu]

CTR

[Yeti]

Top photo looks chinese, and the bottom one african.

I have known both filipinos and polynesians with those same thick lips and flat noses. My best friend when I was 8 was half filipino and half caucasian. He, his mother(filipino), and both his sisters had those same features.

[Chewbacca]

Also looks a little Samoan.

[Yeti]

Samoan, polynesian ... same difference. ; )

[Bernard Marx]

rode a motorcycle from Belize City to Tikal once in the 70s when it was still primitive

That must have been very interesting. Was your trip before or after Belizean independence? A few years ago when we visited Caracol, very near Belize's border with Guatemala, we were told the Irish Brigade was having live fire practice in the area and not to be alarmed at the sound of gunshots. Tensions with Guatemala were high after a couple of recent violent border incursions in which Guatemalan "trespassers" had been killed near Caracol. The Brits were letting Guatemala know Belize was no pushover.

Meanwhile, the Belizean ambassador to Guatemala had been taken hostage in reprisal and when we crossed the border from Belize to visit Tikal things were decidedly jittery. Something serious was afoot and our ashen-faced guide was clearly a worried man when we turistas were herded into a small room at the border crossing station. The first thing that struck us was the Guatemalan map on the wall: no Belize. It was Guatemala all the way to the Caribbean. To Guatemalans, Belize does not and has never existed.

After a lot of palaver we were allowed to continue but apart from delightful individual people and gorgeous locales, we found the mood of Guatemala very dark. We never got used to guards with AK-47s lurking in the bushes around our hotel, presumably to protect us from being kidnapped for ransom. A couple of weeks after our return home we read of an incident in a remote Guatemalan village in which a tour guide and a couple of tourists were killed by villagers. Somehow they became convinced the visitors were there to steal their children and they attacked the tourbus. I don't think I'd care for anything much more primitive than what we experienced.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1065675/posts?page=11#11

[SunkenCiv]

Just updating the GGG information, not sending a general distribution.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

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

[swarthyguy]

Gordon Cooper, Astronaut on the Olmec -- the astronaut Gordon Cooper in chapter 11 of his book A Leap of Faith. "During my final years with NASA," he writes, "I became involved in a different kind of adventure: undersea treasure hunting in Mexico." One day, accompanied by a National Geographic photographer, they landed in a small plane on an island in the Gulf of Mexico; local residents pointed out to them pyramid-shaped mounds, where they found ruins, artifacts and bones. On examination back in Texas, the artifacts were determined to be 5,000 years old!

"When we learned of the age of the artifacts," Cooper writes, “we realized that what we'd found had nothing to do with seventeenth-century Spain... I contacted the Mexican government and was put in touch with the head of the national archaeology department, Pablo Bush Romero."

Together with Mexican archeologists the two went back to the site. After some excavating, 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."

Proceeding to describe some of the amazing discoveries about the Olmecs and their achievements, Gordon Cooper continues thus:

"Engineers, farmers, artisans, and traders, the Olmecs had a remarkable civilization. But it is still not known where they originated... Among the findings that intrigued me most: celestial navigation symbols and formulas that, when translated, turned out to be mathematical formulas used to this day for navigation, and accurate drawings of constellations, some of which would not be officially 'discovered' until the age of modern telescopes."

It was this, rather than his experiences as an astronaut, that triggered Gordon Cooper's "Leap of faith": "This left me wondering: Why have celestial navigation signs if they weren't navigating celestially?” And he asks: If ‘someone’ had helped the Olmecs with this knowledge, from whom did they get it?

[SunkenCiv]

· GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach · · join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe ·
	Antiquity Journal  & archive  Archaeologica  Archaeology  Archaeology Channel  BAR  Bronze Age Forum  Discover  Dogpile  Eurekalert  Google  LiveScience  Mirabilis.ca  Nat Geographic  PhysOrg  Science Daily  Science News  Texas AM  Yahoo  Excerpt, or Link only?	Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
· History topic · history keyword · archaeology keyword · paleontology keyword · · Science topic · science keyword · Books/Literature topic · pages keyword ·