About three thousand years ago, an Indian culture arose on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, which was called the Olmec culture. This code name was given by the name of the Olmecs - a small group of Indian tribes who lived in this territory much later, in the Xl-XIV centuries. The very name Olmecs, which means "rubber people", is of Aztec origin.
The Aztecs named them after the area on the Gulf Coast where rubber was produced and where the Olmecs of their day lived. So the Olmecs proper and the Olmec culture are not at all the same thing. This circumstance is extremely difficult to understand for non-specialists like G. Hancock, who devoted many pages to the Olmecs in his book "Traces of the Gods". Such publications only intimidate the problem, while at the same time not explaining the essence of the case.
The civilization of the ancient Olmecs, the beginning of which dates back to the second millennium BC, ceased to exist in the first years of our era and one and a half thousand years before the heyday of the Aztec empire. The Olmec culture is sometimes called the "mother of cultures" of Central America and the earliest civilization of Mexico. Oddly enough, despite all the efforts of archaeologists, nowhere in Mexico, as well as in America in general, have not yet been able to find any traces of the origin and evolution of the Olmec civilization, the stages of its development, the place of its origin, as if this people appeared as already formed. Absolutely nothing is known about the social organization of the Olmecs, nor about their beliefs and rituals - except for human sacrifice. We do not know what language the Olmecs spoke, what ethnic group they belonged to. And the extremely high humidity in the Gulf of Mexico area has led to the fact that not a single Olmec skeleton has survived.
The ancient Olmec culture was as much a "corn civilization" as the rest of America's pre-Columbian cultures. The main branches of the economy were agriculture and fishing. The remains of the cult buildings of this civilization - pyramids, platforms, statues - have survived to this day. The ancient Olmecs cut stone blocks and carved massive sculptures out of them. Some of them depict huge heads, known today as "Olmec heads". These stone heads are the greatest mystery of the ancient civilization …
Monumental sculptures weighing up to 30 tons depict the heads of people with undoubtedly negroid facial features. These are practically portraits of Africans in tight-fitting helmets with a chin strap. The earlobes are pierced. The face is cut with deep wrinkles on both sides of the nose. The corners of the thick lips are bent down.
Despite the fact that the heyday of the Olmec culture falls on 1500-1000 BC, there is no certainty that the heads were carved in this era, since radiocarbon dating of pieces of coal found nearby gives only the age of the coals themselves. Perhaps the stone heads are much younger.
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The first stone head was discovered in the 1930s by the American archaeologist Matthew Stirling. He wrote in his report: “The head was carved from a separate massive basalt block. She rested on a foundation of rough boulders. When cleared from the ground, the head had a rather frightening appearance. Despite its considerable size, it is crafted very carefully and confidently, its proportions are perfect. A unique phenomenon among American Aboriginal sculptures, it is notable for its realism. Her features are distinct and clearly of the Negro type."
By the way, Stirling also made one more discovery - he discovered children's toys in the form of dogs on wheels. This innocent, at first glance, find actually became a sensation - it was believed that the civilization of pre-Columbian America did not know the wheel. But it turns out that this rule does not apply to the ancient Olmecs …
However, it soon turned out that the Maya Indians, the southern contemporaries of the ancient Olmecs, also made toys on wheels, but they did not use the wheel in their economic practice. There is no big mystery here - the roots of this ignorance of the wheel go to the mentality of the Indians and to their "corn economy". In this regard, the ancient Olmecs differed little from other Indian civilizations.
Unfinished head.
In addition to the heads, the ancient Olmecs left numerous examples of monumental sculpture. They are all carved from basalt monoliths or other durable stone. On the Olmec steles, one can see scenes of the meeting of two clearly different human races. One of them - Africans And in one of the Indian pyramids, located near the Mexican ro family of Oaxaca, there are several stone steles with scenes carved on them of captivity by Indians of bearded white people and … Africans.
Olmec heads and images on steles are physiologically accurate images of real representatives of the Negroid race, whose presence in Central America 3000 years ago is still a mystery. Where did Africans come from in the New World before Columbus? Maybe they were the native inhabitants of America? There is evidence from paleoanthropology that as part of one of the migrations to the territory of the American continent during the last ice age, people of the Negroid race did indeed. This migration took place around 1500 BC.
There is another suggestion - that in ancient times there were contacts between Africa and America across the ocean, which, as it turned out in recent decades, did not separate the ancient civilizations. The statement about the isolation of the New World from the rest of the world, which for a long time dominated in science, was convincingly refuted by Thor Heyerdahl and Tim Severin, who proved that contacts between the Old and New Worlds could have taken place long before Columbus.
The Olmec civilization ceased to exist in the last century BC. But their culture did not die - it organically entered the cultures of the Aztecs and Maya. And the Olmecs? In fact, the only "calling card" they left behind were the giant stone heads. African heads …