Out of Africa - Fantastic Claims

“As a subject for research, the possibility of African discovery of America has never been a tempting one for American historians. In a sense, we choose our own history, or more accurately, we select those vistas history for our examinations which promise us the greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to explore the possibility that our founding father was a black man.”

~ Samuel D. Marble, quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me (Loewen 1995)

The suggestion of an early African presence in the Americas was first touched upon by Harvard linguistics professor Leo Wiener in the 1920's, but was not formally presented as a testable hypothesis until anthropologist Ivan van Sertima wrote They Came Before Columbus in 1976. Van Sertima (1976) claims that Africans reached the Americas in two stages: Nubian/Egyptian traders around 800 BCE, and then West African Mande explorers in 1311 CE. According to van Sertima and his associates, there is ample material evidence to be found in Mesoamerica to support these claims.

Cultural Evidence

In the first wave of African visitation to the Americas, Nubian rulers of Egypt collaborated with Phoenician merchants on an exploratory expedition. This initial contact inspired the Olmecs of Mesoamerica to begin sculpting huge stone heads with African features, as well as building pyramids (van Sertima 1976). Evidence given for the timing of the initial visit is engraved on a stela (stone pillar) at La Venta, dated to 800 BCE. Van Sertima (1976) argues that the figure on the stela represents a bearded Phoenician sailor, and the stela was positioned next to one of the Olmec colossal heads that depicts an African man in an Egyptian helmet.

Fig. 1. African Nuba man and Colossal Head 1 from La Venta Olmec site. (Van Sertima 1976:Plate 27).

Fig. 2. Syro-Phoenician sculpture, 8th-7th century BCE From Minerva Magazine, 2004. Fig. 3. Close-up of feature on La Venta: Stela 3. From Images of Ancient America (Miller 2002).

Fig. 4. Nubian pyramids at Nuri. From the British Museum, 2003. Fig. 5. La Venta: Mound C-1. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.

Historical Evidence

The second wave of African visitation to the Americas was reported in the writings of medieval Muslim historian al-Omari, whose manuscript Masalik-al-absad contains the story of an expedition of a Mande emperor of Mali, Abubakari II. The emperor set out with a fleet of 2,000 ships to investigate the disappearance of a previous exploratory fleet that had entered a "river in the middle of the sea" and vanished into the west. Abubakari II never returned to Mali either. Van Sertima claims that this tale was indirectly confirmed by Columbus himself, who wrote that the natives of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) told him stories of black-skinned people who had come from the south to trade gold-tipped metal spears (van Sertima 1995).

Biological Evidence

In 1972, craniologist Andrzej Wiercinski reported that 13.5% of the 76 fragmentary crania from Tlatilco, a site associated with the Olmec civilization, showed "a clear prevalence of the total Negroid pattern" (Jordan 1992). Wiercinski measured the skulls for 48 morphological traits, but focused on the traits he considered best for discriminating between the "three great races of man" (van Rossum 2004). The remains were dated to the Pre-Classic Period (1500 BCE-300 CE), well before Columbus' time.

Summary of the Fantastic Claims:

1. Olmec art depicts Caucasian and Negroid individuals and the Olmecs built African-style pyramids.

2. Historical documents record both the voyages of exploration and the presence of African people in the Americas before Columbus.

3. Pre-Columbian skeletons have definite, biological African characteristics.

Do these claims hold up under closer examination?