"LONG BEFORE COLUMBUS"

There's this document that's been making the rounds: 10 Pieces of Evidence That Prove Black People Sailed to the Americas Long Before Columbus, posted by Taylor Gordon. It touches on so many interesting historical and cultural themes and offers a whole slate of broadly appealing provocations. It suggests, no less, that we've all been witness to or, better, co-conspirators in a centuries-old effort to suppress the truth. It's perfect social media content. The trouble is that it is so full of assumptions and assertions so outlandish that no serious scholar would ever waste their time addressing it. I think that's a real problem. Not only do I come across egregiously baseless insistances of just this sort in curriculum and scholarship all the time but people find this sort of thing compelling and, as a result, often repeat and share them widely. All of that is surely reason enough to address what's presented.

What I find interesting about the document is that nearly every line contains what should be clear red flags, statements that immediately tell any reader the author is not attempting to be scrupulous and deliver the goods. Any person with basic media literacy skills (acquired merely by casual exposure to almost any news) or just a healthy skepticism reflex should bristle at the abundant, emphatic assertions about what counts as "evidence" and what such accounts and findings "prove." But that doesn't happen. In fact, the document is presented as an extreme example of honest and critical skepticism offered by those who have, doubtless, developed a hair-trigger skepticism reflex that serves them very well. And folks meeting a similar profile pass it along. More amazing and confusing still, if the countless warning signs were not enough, so much of what is offered falls apart on its own reasoning, in light of other stated evidence within the piece, or from little more than a cursory web or library search of just the names or quotes offered. And yet this and other documents that are nearly identical in theme and tone persist and spread like wildfire.

So, what follows are the ten points offered in the article, numbered and in italics. Below each is my response. I offer this rebuttal because I feel what's presented as evidence and offered as their implications couldn't be farther from any version of reality. What's framed as a celebration of African cultures and the genius and diversity therein, lands on me not merely as something closer to a rejection of all of the above but more like the packaging and sale of an ill-concealed dismissal or even hatred of so many of the cultures of the Americas. That seems worth pointing out and pushing back against.

1) Columbus Himself

According to renowned American historian and linguist Leo Weiner of Harvard University, one of the strongest pieces of evidence to support the fact that Black people sailed to America before Christopher Columbus was a journal entry from Columbus himself. In Weiner’s book, "Africa and the Discovery of America," he explains that Columbus noted in his journal that the Native Americans confirmed "black skinned people had come from the south-east in boats, trading in gold-tipped spears."

At the outset, citing work from a century ago, published in 1922 and by someone, Weiner (1862–1939), schooled in the 19th century, and then calling the author "renowned" without mentioning dates or any additional research (or really any info at all, particularly his area of expertise, as in his obituary "professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literature") serves no purpose other than to mislead. Of course, we also have Harvard professors from this same period writing papers arguing all manner of pure nonsense. So, we may wish to have something other than appeal to authority and tenure at Harvard as validation.

Then, from what's offered, there doesn't appear to be any reason at all to infer that Columbus or his native informants meant anything like "Africa" or "the continent across the sea" when what they said was "black skinned." That's obvious, isn't it? Columbus arrived in and bounced around the Caribbean, so we can be sure darker skinned people would most certainly come from anywhere south of there, that is: closer to the Equator. And this is what he reports.

Further, the only place I can find the offered quote is in someone's thesis from 2019. There, the author provides a direct quote and cites a page number in a publication from 1903, titled Christopher Columbus: His Life His Works, His Remains, by John Thacher. This cited quote is not what appears in the book, as far as I could find. The quote there is "…he thought to investigate the report of the Indians of this Espanola who said that there had come to Espanola from the south and south-east, a black people who have the tops of their spears made of a metal…" As above, no mention is made of Africa or another continent. As such, there's no reason at all, as far as I can tell, to believe there exists anything like what is asserted to be key evidence of Africans in the Americas.

2) American Narcotics Discovered in Egyptian Mummies

The discovery of American narcotics in Egyptian mummies has left some historians amazed. Recently, archaeologists discovered the presence of narcotics only known to be derived from American plants in ancient Egyptian mummies. These substances included South America cocaine from Erythroxylon and nicotine from Nicotiana tabacum. German toxicologist Svetla Balabanova reported the findings, which suggest that such compounds made their way to Africa through trans-Atlantic trade that would predate Columbus’ arrival by thousands of years.

To start, I'm not sure who we're talking about. We have references to historians, archaeologists, and a toxicologist. These are different fields. The toxicologist did the discovering of the narcotics. As far as I can tell there were no archaeologists or historians involved. As such, this seems like an attempt to pad the statement with a spectrum of authority based on nothing at all.

Then, the mummy in question, Henut Taui (aka Henuttawy), was alive around 3,000 years ago. This is essential to any claim about trans-Atlantic crossings. If there was strong evidence for Egyptian travel to or trade with the Americas more recently, but not before, we would still be left with unresolved problems... So why, in any serious context, not spell out clearly the age of the mummy or the importance of such a date to this whole thesis unless you're trying to obscure? This vagueness, like the omission of the dates of the century-old scholarship of the Harvard professor, should alert any reader. More importantly, in this light, what explains trans-Atlantic trade with the Americas only involving coca and tobacco? Why no reports of a continent of abundant and exotic riches of precious metals, stones, and gems – or signs of these either, especially when we know Egyptians were seriously preoccupied with luxury goods? Why no mention of burials including the common foodstuffs of the Americas, such as maize, avocado, cacao, beans, tomato, quinoa, or potato? Why no remains of colourful macaw feathers or toucan skulls, no exotic jaguar and ocelot pelts, either? Perhaps more importantly, why no traces of any of these anywhere in their writing, murals, maps, but only in trace amounts in chemical analysis of hair or tissue? Was only one trip ever made? Is that the suggestion? If only one, why, given their arrival "thousands of years" prior to Columbus and the trip taking only a matter of months? Certainly Egyptian technology and seafaring skills didn't diminish and the empire only grew in wealth and resources in the many centuries following. And didn't Egyptians have a long history of conquering land, pursuing resources and trade routes to control, and happily enslaving Africans to put to work further engorging their pharaohs? What was so unappealing about American minerals, animals, and peoples that a very small volume of cheap consumables, coca or tobacco, was brought over and not the much more valuable gold, pelts, or slaves? (And, in our present age of pandemics, we might also ask by what magic only edibles and smokables changed hands but no devastating communicable illnesses?) Alternatively, why wouldn't these substances arriving in Egypt suggest at least as strongly that it was Mesoamericans who travelled to Africa or traded with other Egyptian trading partners, perhaps from Asia or Europe? As I understand, at the very least the Maya were avid maritime traders, with many ports and foreign trading partners in the Gulf and Caribbean. To me, though the timeline is off, this is as substantive as any suggestion that Africans went west.

Next, the problem of contamination is hugely significant given that Henut Taui was found in her resting place in Egypt, extracted, and moved to Germany in the 19th century. From there, her coffin was transferred to and resided in Spain for some time and then eventually returned to Germany. This reality of so much movement and what could only be a non-sterile and uncertain chain of custody, is unaddressed in the German toxicologist's work. Unsurprisingly, the work of the German toxicologist, Balabanova, came out in 1992 and was not the final word on this topic. A 2008 investigation of this issue is found in a collection titled Egyptian Mummies and Modern Science, edited by Rosalie David. In it, there is an essay called Intoxicants in ancient Egypt? Opium, nymphea, coca and tobacco, by David Counsell. On the topic of nicotine, Counsell writes:

Cartmell and Weems (2001) suggest a cut-off point of 2 ng/mg to distinguish between regular tobacco smokers and those exposed passively to smoke or ingesting nicotine in the diet, with levels greater than 20 ng/mg being reported in previous studies on South American mummies. This is consistent with the range reported by Parsche et al. (1993) in modern addicts. It seems clear therefore that the nicotine found in Egyptian mummies is from a dietary source. The ubiquitous presence of nicotine in all the populations tested, all at dietary levels, supports the validity of these results.

Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Database lists twenty-three nicotine-containing plants in addition to tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum). Of these, two – Withania somnifera and Apium graveolens – were known to the Egyptians (Manniche 1993), and the latter, celery, was the more likely to be used as a food. In 1994, as a result of the 'Cocaine Mummies' television documentary, seven samples (six of tissue and one of hair), taken from mummies in the Manchester Museum collection, were sent for analysis at the Medical Toxicology Laboratory at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London, UK. Three of these samples tested positive for nicotine and none for cocaine. Concentration levels were not reported. On traces of cocaine, Counsell reports:

In addition to the seven aforementioned samples, hair, bone and tissue samples have been tested from a variety of mummies in the Manchester and Leicester collections. These include four mummies from Manchester: Asru (No. 1777, Thebes, c. 700 b.c.), Nekht-Ankh (No. 21470, Rifeh, c. 1900 b.c.), No. 1770 (Ptolemaic Period, c. 300 b.c.) and No. 1766 (Fayoum, c. 100–200 a.d.) and four mummies from Leicester. To date, none have tested positive for cocaine, using methanol solvent extractions of tissue samples, tested using GCMS to a sensitivity of 0.1 μg/mg of material.

If the theory of trans-Atlantic trade were correct, surely the results obtained by either Cartmell or Manchester would corroborate the discovery of cocaine in at least one of the Egyptian mummies that have been tested by these teams. This lack of results suggests that either Balabanova and her associates are misinterpreting their results or that the sample of mummies tested by them have been mysteriously exposed to cocaine.

The levels of cocaine recorded for South American mummies in these studies compare favourably with reported levels in modern coca chewers, in the range of 1.0–28.9 ng/mg (Henderson et al. 1992) and 1.4 and 50.6 ng/mg (M ̈oller et al. 1992). By comparison, the levels in the Egyptian mummies are very low, close to the 0.1 ng/mg limit of detection reported by many investigators at the time of the study (Henderson et al. 1992, 1995) and consistently lower than the 0.3 ng/mg suggested by Cartmell et al (1993) as a cut-off point "to differentiate a 'negative' and a 'positive' result consistent with previous hair studies." (The paper actually states 3ng/mg. This would contradict the interpretation of the results given by the authors. Therefore we might suspect a decimal point error was made, as a cut-off value of 0.3 ng/mg would be consistent with the results shown and the interpretation given.) According to this interpretation, the results for cocaine reported by Parsche and Balabanova are negative. All this suggests to me is that the above poses far more questions and problems for African trade with the Americas than it resolves.

3) Egyptian Artifacts in North America

For years, Eurocentric archaeologists have largely turned the other cheek when it came to the discovery of artifacts from ancient Egypt being discovered in the Americas. According to Dr. David Imhotep, the author behind the book “The First Americans Were Africans: Documented Evidence,” “Egyptian artifacts found across North America from the Algonquin writings on the East Coast to the artifacts and Egyptian place names in the Grand Canyon” are all signs of an early arrival in the Americas by Africans. This is also paired with a much earlier account of Black people with incredible skills at sea. Back in 445 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of King Ramses III leading a team of Africans at sea with astounding seafaring and navigational skills. Together, both accounts would point to Africans sailing over to the New World before Columbus.

On Eurocentric archaeologists: there are countless non-Eurocentric scholars and researchers, including renowned Egyptologists, and all with connections to and funding from museums and universities around the world, who would do anything to find a scrap of evidence like this. (To name a few: Zahi Hawass, Salima Ikram, Mahmoud Maher Taha, Hussein Bassir, Orly Goldwasser, Jiro Kondo, and Sakuji Yoshimura. Go Google these folks.) If no such examples existed, it would still be a radical assessment that says there are far greater motivators for and likelihood of concealment than desire to expose such artifacts.

Then, "Egyptian place names in the Grand Canyon" is a curious mention. These names were given by the US Geological Survey in the 20th century. This is well-documented and is as easily found as looking up an address or phone number. One also wonders what the author thinks of the Hindu place names in the Grand Canyon? Is this irrefutable evidence of South Asian presence in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans or maybe predating those we think of as indigenous? (Perhaps unsurprisingly, David Icke, author of the 1999 book The Biggest Secret, frames this same Grand Canyon discovery as evidence of our reptilian overlords. I think there may be more evidence for a non-human cabal of lizards manipulating world events than ancient Egyptian artifacts arriving in the Americas millennia ago. But I'd love to see some evidence of either.) Curiously, the only reference to any of the above appears in an article from the Arizona Gazette, from 1909 – back when almost anything was said in papers, and commonly so, just to sell more papers. In it, the author talks about someone finding an entire underground Egyptian city. Needless to say, no effort has been made to go looking for this lost city of gold in the middle of the Grand Canyon and none of the eleven Native American communities with connections to the Grand Canyon region have anything to offer on this topic.

On the accounts of Egypt by Herodotus: it seems widely accepted that Herodotus was confused and misinformed about much, as he was only in the region for a few months, didn't speak the language, and relied upon Greek-speaking Egyptians who seem to have offered all sorts of wild stories, commonly reporting folktales as first-hand accounts. I also can't find reference to "black sailors." Regardless, this may be considered meaningless at the outset. The previous point insists Egyptians arrived in the Americas eons before Columbus and, therefore, finding capable sailors mere centuries before Columbus doesn't really help the narrative.

Of course, if we grant that there were astounding seafarers, this doesn't suggest for a minute that they sailed the 8,000km to Newfoundland or 11,000km to Cuba. After all, here's no suggestion they ever arrived in what is now Spain or France, just 4,000 km away. (To me, this is something like claiming the Spanish arrived in the Pacific Northwest before ever landing on the East coast of the Americas and did so in 3000 BCE.) On this point alone we have a whole series of extraordinary claims, all lacking even a shred of the most flimsy evidence. All of this also arrives alongside the knowledge that ancient Egyptians were avid cartographers. What of that? Egyptians were wont to visually represent everything from their own gardens and fields to their dikes, canals, and riverways. They created countless maps and blueprints of their own tombs, mines, forts, and all of their conquered lands. They even pictorially recorded all of the cosmos and their afterlife. They mapped every inch of their entire universe in this way. They wrote on papyrus, painted on pottery, and etched it all into giant stone murals. We all know this. And we have many such maps from thousands of years prior to Columbus. Plenty of them even survive on extremely fragile sheets of crude paper. As such, it's just so hard to imagine Egyptians failing to document trips to the Americas, any trade goods, artifacts, or discoveries they made along the way, over there, or on the route back.

On Dr. David Imhotep, author of The First Americans Were Africans: Documented Evidence, it appears he has an online degree (maybe?) from a school that doesn't look to offer a degree in his stated field. He also seems to exist only on Facebook and LinkedIn. I couldn't find other education history or research interests, no thesis or dissertation, no other publications or affiliations of any kind. If I had to bet, I would guess he's closer to an author of fantasy fiction than a scholar, but I could be wrong. (Obviously, if I discovered anything at all no one would take me seriously and by this same set of biases I'm operating with here...)

4) Ancient Pyramids

Constructing pyramids was a highly specialized and complicated task that took the ancient Egyptians a lot of time to master. In ancient Egypt, there are signs of progression from the original stepped pyramid of Djoser to the more sophisticated pyramids that now stand at Giza. According to historians, it would be impossible for any group of people to have built those same complex pyramids without going through the same progression. Professor Everett Borders noted the presence of completed pyramids in La Venta in Mexico but the unusual absence of any earlier forms of the pyramids. According to Borders, it’s a sign that Africans, having already mastered the construction of pyramids in Egypt, sailed over to the New World and constructed these dual-purpose tombs and temples in the Americas.

The main problem that I see with this evidence is that pyramids are nearly ubiquitous across time and around the globe. Pyramid-building seems to have happened almost everywhere, including North and South America, Europe, Persia, Asia, and Southeast Asia. And where they exist they are of different style, shape, size, material, orientation, and purpose – making the notion of requisite knowledge and skill transfer from Egyptians extremely doubtful. Skills and tools for cutting and moving small sandstone or volcanic rock are different than those for large granite blocks, which are different again from fabricating and stacking small clay bricks. So, to my mind, none of this suggests contact with Egyptians was critical, in the same way that house-building or boat-building doesn't appear to be proprietary or geographically isolated, despite common features and forms and similar materials found among most of the houses and boats across the world.

Then, looking into more specifics about "The Great Pyramid" at La Vanta, noted above, one of the earliest known pyramids in Mesoamerica, it is understood to be a stepped pyramid. So, at the simplest level they didn't skip what is said to be requisite design learning and first build a smooth-sided pyramid. Too, this pyramid is rectangular, built of clay, and filled with soil; so, really, not anything like the pyramids of Egypt which are square and commonly built of carved stone. And then the dates don't jive either. If Africans/Egyptians arrived 2,000-3,000 years before Columbus with unique pyramid building skills, why and how were major pyramids in Mesoamerica not built before those associated with the Olmec, around 800 BCE? In light of this timeline, more interesting to me than the pyramids would be how Africans passed on their highly specialized construction skills across twenty generations without doing any building in the intervening eons? And, given how specialized their knowledge, and seemingly stylized their works, how did they never produce even one Egyptian-style pyramid anywhere in the Americas? (To me, most seem far closer to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia: those terraced rectangular compounds built of brick and topped with a temple. Did the ancestors of modern Iranians sail to America?)

5) Ancient African Skeletons Discovered in the New World

There have been many instances of archaeologists discovering skulls and skeletons that they believed clearly belonged to people of African descent. Polish professor Andrzej Wiercinski revealed the discovery of African skulls at Olmec sites in Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban. Even more ancient African skeletons that would clearly predate Columbus' arrival in the Americas were discovered throughout Central America and South America with some even being unearthed in what is now California.

To being with, as far as I can find, there does not appear to be "many instances" of archaeologists discovering the ancient remains of Africans in the Americas. What seems to be accurate in the above statement is that this guy, Wiercinski, found what he felt "clearly belonged to people of African descent." That is very different from what is implied: that there are skeletons of African origin that "clearly predate Columbus' arrival..."

Everyone in the worlds of anthropology and archaeology would love to find whole bones (allowing for DNA extraction and radiometric dating) that would rewrite everything we currently believe. So, where are these "many" bones and skulls now? We're told that finds like this are continually being unearthed. If that were so, these would be generating so much buzz, so many news, magazine, and journal articles, that people would hardly be able to talk about anything else. And yet the two sentences offered above are the only sources of this information. What schools are doing this work and where? Who are the primary investigators? Where are the teams of grad students daily Tweeting about all of this? If this is happening it occurs with a Manhattan Project level of secrecy for some unknown reason.

Further, the work of professor Andrzej Wiercinski is rejected today in no small part because he relied upon an outdated framework requiring skulls to be sorted into narrow, eugenics-type groupings such as "Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid" (based only on sample skulls from Poland, Uganda, and Mongolia). Under this regime it's widely understood that peoples of the Americas were commonly and wrongly lumped under one of these as a comparative best-fit, resulting in false assumptions clearly based on sample bias. That sounds in line with what I know about anthropology from fifty years ago. Also, in the '60s and '70s, when his work was done and then published, Wiercinski didn't have access to DNA analysis. Were these skulls and bones tested today and found to have African DNA, that would be amazing and we would all enthusiastically share these findings. I would be among the first. But it's safe to say that anthropologists, archaeologists, as well as Mesoamerican scholars unanimously reject these claims of pre-Columbian contact with Africa on the total lack of anything even approximating evidence.

6) A Clear Link in Religion

The similarities in Native American and African religions also suggest that Africans had to have had early contact with the Native Americans by sailing to the New World. Before Columbus stumbled upon the Native Americans’ land, there were prominent figures of deities with dark skin and coarse hair throughout their religion. Today, many surviving portraits reveal these deities who were clearly crafted in the likeness of Africans. Historians also point to wall paintings in caves in South America that depict the ancient Egyptian "opening of the mouth" and cross libation rituals.

This may be the least coherent of these points. Like most of the other statements made here, the opening sentence is wild and chocked full of red flags. Most obviously, what similarity between religions would require contact (and the sailing across oceans)? The human condition is far more similar than different from place to place. (On this premise do similarities between social organization or food preparation presuppose contact between seemingly disparate groups? How and why?) But all of that is getting ahead of things a bit. Even the suggestion that "North Americans" (whoever that is) had both deities and religion is such a radical and false generalization and so insensitive to meaningful cultural differences that I don't even know how to deal with it here. However, like much of the above, this highlights how what appears to be an effort to combat racism, uplift communities, and take down the dominant Eurocentric paradigm can make far greater strides in the opposite direction.

7) The Accounts of Other European Explorers

Christopher Columbus wasn't the only European explorer who made note of an African presence in the Americas upon his arrival. Historians revealed that at least a dozen other explorers, including Vasco Nunez de Balboa, also made record of seeing "Negroes" when they reached the New World. The accounts match up with the reports from the natives in Mexico. Nicholas Leon, an eminent Mexican authority, recorded the oral traditions of his people and ultimately kept track of a key piece of evidence that Black people made it to the New World far before their European counterparts. His reports Dr. Julian Whitewright, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton revealed accounts from natives saying "the oldest inhabitants of Mexico were blacks. [T]he existence of blacks and giants is commonly believed by nearly all the races of our sail and in their various language they had words to designate them."

Who are these historians who suggest that Europeans reported encountered Africans in the Americas? I can't find any. And then, neither the above quote attributed to Whitewright or any part of it returns anything anywhere I search for it. Further, if such a "key piece of evidence" exists, this doesn't even vaguely imply these people crossed the Atlantic or arrived from Africa.

8) Africans Were Master Shipbuilders

Some people insist that Africans couldn't have made it to the New World first simply because they didn't have the skill and resources to sail across the Atlantic. As it turns out, that's completely false. Historians have discovered evidence that suggests Africans were masters at building ships and that it was actually a part of their tradition. Shipbuilding and sailing are over 20,000 years old in the Sahara, and cave wall paintings of ancient ships were displayed in National Geographic magazine years ago. With those shipbuilding skills and the navigation skills that were noted by other historians of the time, the myth that Africans wouldn’t have been able to sail to the New World becomes officially debunked. As explained, the voyage from Africa on ancient ships was "quite a plausible undertaking, based on the capabilities of the vessel of the period and historical material stating it took place.”

To begin, despite having seaworthy ships of great size thousands of years ago, Egyptians were not renowned sailors and there is no evidence I can find of as little as common shipping routes even just within their own neighbourhood of the Red Sea or Mediterranean. So who are these "master shipbuilders" and expert trans-oceanic sailors? And why is there not one region or culture or person or date offered?

Next, the above quote comes from the aforementioned Dr. Julian Whitewright; however, he's NOT talking about Africans but Phoenicians (those folks from present-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel) who had ocean-going craft, travelled throughout, and monopolized trade in the Mediterranean. And Whitewright is talking about Phoenicians very much NOT crossing the ocean but it being plausible that they travelled around the African continent, most likely close to shore (which is nothing at all like hitting the open sea.) Too, these Phoenicians were NOT operating 20,000 years ago but closer to 2500 BCE.

Importantly, there's an account from the Greek historian and storyteller Herodotus suggesting Phoenicians did circumnavigate Africa around 600 BCE, and did so over a period of three years. Herodotus reports the Phoenicians did so stopping every Autumn to repair their ships and sow crops of wheat and then waited around to harvest these rations before the next leg of the voyage. Not only is such a strategy not possible when crossing the ocean but it's an account that was doubted by people of the time, such as Ptolemy, who insisted the voyage was impossible given their craft and the known currents and winds. And, as far as I can tell, this seemingly mythical trip around Africa was not reproduced until the Portuguese mariner Bartolomeus Dias did so in 1488 (2,000 years after Herodotus claimed the Phoenicians were said to have pulled it off.) However, there remains no evidence of contemporary documentation of this more recent voyage. No official proclamations of the voyage happened at the time, nor was there any recognition of Dias for this notable accomplishment, despite him and his crew travelling many thousands of kilometres farther than previous sailors and, obviously, as required, discovering a route around Africa's southern cape. Instead, account of the voyage comes from a 16th century historian, written 60 years after the trip was said to have been made. It's all very curious.

9) Gigantic Stone Heads in Central Mexico

The Olmec civilization was the first significant civilization in Mesoamerica and deemed “Mother Culture of Mexico” by some historians. This civilization dominated by Africans is best known for the colossal carved heads in Central Mexico that serve as even more evidence that Africans sailed to the New World before Columbus. The heads are clearly crafted in the likeness of Africans. The same civilization that created these giant heads was also responsible for introducing written language, arts, sophisticated astronomy and mathematics to Mesoamerican civilization, ancient African historian Professor Van Sertima explained.

Van Sertima (1935-2009), in his book They Came Before Columbus, argued that ancient Africans and Phoenicians made their way to what is now the Gulf of Mexico in joint voyages 2,200 years before Columbus. Evidence of African influence there, he claimed, is seen in an array of material, but most impressively in the four colossal "Negroid stone heads found near La Venta, Mexico." Trouble is, virtually no one who studies these peoples or places agrees. Van Sertima's work was largely ignored by historians and anthropologists at the time of writing – while being taught widely by Afrocentrists in African-American studies programs throughout the US from the '70s through '90s. But by the late 1990s some felt the need to point out the racist and pseudoscientific nature of this work, highlighting how it diminishes or entirely denies Indigenous cultures by insisting that knowledge and skills could only have arrived from superior civilizations across the Atlantic.

Further still, a key problem for Van Sertima and followers, and Gordon, the author of this list, is that within decades of his publications, the origins of Olmec culture were pushed back many centuries and no longer correspond with the requisite timelines and the whole premise of this hypothesis. Talk of Olmec heads, then, acts not as support but as counter-evidence. Other than that, we're told by our best Mesoamerican scholars and anthropologists that there are vast differences between ancient Egyptian and Nubian facial features (Northeast African) and those found in Olmec sculptures. Further, what are suggested to be uniquely West African features (such as flatter faces, broader noses, and thicker lips, as well as characteristic eyes) are found all over the world and, like skin pigmentation and other survival adaptations, correspond with certain climatic regions. Rather inconveniently, those features are also found among native Mexicans and others in the Americas.

10) A Long History of Trade by Sea

According to Paul Alfred Barton, the author of “A History of the African-Olmecs: Black Civilizations of America from Prehistoric Times to the Present Era,” ancient kingdoms in West Africa have a long history of trade by sail, which made it all the more likely that they eventually expanded their trade to the Americas. While the Sahara is a dry desert today, its past as a lake-filled, wet and fertile place has been well-documented. African ships often crossed these large lakes to get from place to place and traded with other African civilizations along the way. After expanding their trade to the Americas, they certainly made their mark as things like African native cotton were soon being discovered all across North America.

Most obviously, to me, the above makes a bunch of assertions that import modern realities into the distant past. For example, it was unimaginably more difficult to cross the continent, north/south or east/west, 3,000 years ago than circling the globe has been at any point in the last five centuries; and, as such, East and West Africa of many eons ago may as well be thought of by any modern person as entirely different continents. And that's just to talk of distance. Of course, peoples and cultures of East and West Africa are tremendously distinct in their languages, beliefs, technologies, and more. So, folks arriving from what is now Benin or Angola and influencing the cultures of the Americas would be very different from Egyptians or Nubians doing the same. Was it a mix? Or are we proposing some generic Africans? If we're now talking about West Africans (or Phoenecians?) and not Egyptians, due to the Olmcec head premise, are we throwing out the whole pyramid thing? Otherwise, where did the pyramid-building knowledge transfer arrive from? What is going on? I can’t find details of peoples from what is now Lebanon or Israel building pyramids (or recording any trips across the Atlantic.)

To get into the details, it is claimed that "ancient kingdoms in West Africa have a long history of trade by sail." Reading this might cause one to ask, radical as it may be, which ancient kingdoms of West Africa are we talking about? The author established that African trans-Atlantic voyages came "thousands of years before Columbus," Olemc civilization "was dominated by Africans" and "Olmec heads were clearly crafted in the likeness of Africans." All of this puts African arrival in the Americas no later than 900 BCE but perhaps closer to 1500 BCE. So, what ancient kingdoms/empires/civilizations existed within West Africa that falls into the author's requisite timeframe? I find three: the Kintampo Complex, Tichitt culture, and perhaps the Nok civilization.

The Nok, with artifacts found within what is now Central Nigeria, are known for their beautiful terracotta sculptures and iron-working. They are not known to be seafaring, nor can I find anyone who suggests they were. And I'm fairly sure the dugout canoes of the region would not get a person across the open ocean, or even around Africa or just north to Egypt, either intentionally or by accident. (If a miracle did occur in one direction the same miracle would certainly not return a voyager home again.) The Tichitt culture were Saharan pastoralists from the region around what is today the deserts of Mauritania. More temperate in ancient times, these people are known for their animal husbandry, cereal farming, stone axes, and rock art – not sailing or ocean-based (or ancient lake) trade. The Kintampo Complex is similar. Found largely in inland regions of modern-day Ghana and eastern sections of Côte d'Ivoire, the people here at this time appear to be forest dwelling horticulturalists and pastoralists. And, across the dozens of Kintampo archaeological sites studied to date, we have evidence of skilled beadwork, pottery, figurative art, and stone axes. No sign of boats or sailing, never mind active global seafaring.

So, it appears these authors, Barton and Gordon, have done a great deal of research and uncovered an abundance of hidden treasures of the ancient world, with field studies, accompanying artifacts, and research they have kept hidden away from the rest of the world, all of which promises to rewrite nearly everything everyone knows about history and civilization. I mean, maybe. But, sadly, I couldn't find much information about the cited author, Paul Alfred Barton, who wrote A History of the African-Olmecs: Black Civilizations of America from Prehistoric Times to the Present Era. An obituary from 2010 says he was a business major and mail clerk and that he "obtained many degrees through college, one in Architecture as well as many other accomplishments." Without buying the book, I don't know where he sourced his information or, if speculative fiction, what any of it was based on.

Critically, the map offered, showing a pair of extinct lakes in Central Africa, is wild. The northern lake, Lake Mega-Chad, is of a radically different size than any maps I've seen previously or any I can find now. When I go looking, African geographers, historians, and hydrologists appear to agree on the location and extent of former Lake Mega-Chad. And they agree on its dimensions based on evidence, observations from the ground and from space where one can clearly see what were shorelines, beach ridges, and sand spits. These observations place the ancient shores of the lake hundreds of kilometres from the modern shores of Lake Chad (which we've seen shrink considerably in recent decades alone.) These observations set the ancient area of this lake at more than 400,000 square kilometres – larger than the largest lake presently on Earth. But that's not enough for the author who would increase this area by about 600% (and with no stated reasoning.) I imagine one could learn to row or sail on a 400,000 sq/km lake, the actual Lake Mega-Chad (equal to 245 Lake Pontchartrains or 21 Lake Ontarios) just as easily as they could on something like what is pictured, a fictional lake of maybe 2,500,000 sq/km.

One wonders what all this extra volume to this one lake does for the story? Why would West Africans (people from modern day Senegal or Mali? Who are we talking about?) need huge freshwater lakes to train on in the middle of the continent, far from what I think of as the vast majority of West Africa, when they have the Atlantic? Additionally, it's hard to see what the above narrative does but subliminally signal to readers a conspiracy to suppress not merely all of history but geography as well, concealing the existence of the world's largest lake by a secret society of nefarious African PhD hydrologists, doubtless in cahoots with NASA and the world's archaeologists and anthropologists, and probably some lizard people, too.

In sum, for me, all of the above is closer to a hatred for history and culture, African or otherwise, than any kind of celebration of it. I don't know what else to say.