It only took one, carrying the magic higher knowledge. And maybe some energy bars.
… and some strange urge to add a fourth side.
Both the Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids have four sides.
(As do pyramids in Peru, dating back to roughly the same time that Egypt’s great pyramids were being built.)
(Those Egyptians would have had to reach East Africa, THEN discover the Canary Islands, THEN cross the Atlantic, THEN cross the Amazon, THEN cross the Andes, THEN build pyramids. Without leaving any trace of a colony or settlement along the way.)
Not sure why I thought they had 3. I stand corrected.
BTW, there are pyramids on the Canary Islands
In 1990, adventurer and publisher, Thor Heyerdahl, became aware of the “Canarian Pyramids” by reading an article written by Francisco Padrón in the Tenerife newspaper “Diario de Avisos” detailing “real pyramids on the Canaries”.
[…]
Heyerdahl hypothesised that the Canarian pyramids formed a temporal and geographic stopping point on voyages between ancient Egypt and the Maya civilization, initiating a controversy in which historians, esoterics, archaeologists, astronomers, and those with a general interest in history took part.
It turns out the pyramids were constructed in the 19th century.
To give credit to Spain and diminish African involvement in knowing about or discovering the navigational importance of the Canary Islands. Columbus was not the first person to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. You would be hard pressed to find many educational systems that teach accurate history about Columbus leaving from Africa to cross the Atlantic Ocean–or the truth that Columbus was not the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean or that he did not discover America, because there were already people living here when he arrived.
From article by afrocentric historian Legrand H. Clegg II: Before Columbus: Black Explorers
of the New World
The best evidence of the Black presence in America before Columbus comes from the pen of the “great discoverer” himself. In his Journal of the Second Voyage, Columbus reported that when he reached Haiti the native Americans told him that black-skinned people had come from the south and southeast in boats, trading in gold-tipped medal spears. At least a dozen other European explorers, including Vasco Nunez de Balboa, also reported seeing or hearing of “Negroes” when they reached the New World.
Nicholas Leon, an eminent Mexican authority, recorded the oral traditions of his people. Some of them reported that “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.”
Early Mexican scholars were convinced that the impact of the Black explorers on the New World was profound and enduring. One author, J.A. Villacorta, has written: “Any way you view it, Mexican civilization had its origin in Africa.” Modern excavations throughout Latin America appear to confirm Villacorta’s conclusions.
The Olmec civilization, which appears to have been of African origin or to have been dominated by Africans, was the Mother Culture of Mexico. Of this, Michael Coe, the leading American historian on Mexico, has written that, “there is not the slightest doubt that all later civilizations in [Mexico and Central America], rest ultimately on an Olmec base.”
Ivan Van Sertima, the foremost authority on the African presence in ancient America, has built a strong case demonstrating that many Olmec cultural traits were of African origin: “A study of the Olmec civilization reveals elements that so closely parallel ritual traits and techniques in the Egypto-Nubian world of the same period that it is difficult to maintain [that] all these are due to mere coincidence.” Other scholars believe that Africans introduced a calendar, writing, pyramid and tomb construction, mummification, as well as certain political systems and religious traditions to the native Americans
Because of Spain’s genocide against the aboriginal people, during its colonization of the Canary Islands, which are still under Spanish exploitative, corrupt political and military control today–or as Spain calls the Canary Islands, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/jml34/Canary.htm
Spain colonized the Canary Islands beginning in 1483, and by the time of Columbus’s voyages to the New World, the Canary Islands were firmly under Spanish control. The indigenous Guanche language disappeared shortly after the Spanish conquest of the islands, but left a legacy of scores of place names, and some regional words. From the outset, the Canaries were regarded as an outpost rather than a stable colony, and the islands’ livlihood revolved around maritime trade.
why would you trust anything on Rense?
Perhaps that’s because Columbus set sail from Spain?
The Guanche lived in the Canaries before Spain colonized them in the early 1400s. The Guanche were the only known inhabitants prior to Europeans. They were African, but Berbers and definitely not a group you’d call “black.”
Local legends of black-skinned people and giants living in the pre-Columbian Americas are interesting as legends (and maybe Mali/Abu Bakr II did make transatlantic voyages) but until there’s archaeological evidence of the black-skinned people or giants it’s just legends and is as reliable as stories about Babe the giant blue ox or stories of Noah’s Ark.
Every ancient civilization developed a calendar and the Olmec and Egyptian calendars use different periods/principles, the Olmec writing system’s unrelated to the Egyptian, and mummification wasn’t practiced by the Olmec or other Mesoamerican cultures. Mummification was practiced in S. American cultures where the climate permitted, using very different techniques than the Egyptians, and dates earlier than Egyptian mummification. It’s always easy to blurrily look at political/mythological systems and draw parallels. The lack of the transfer of the wheel, bronzeworking and metallurgy in general, glassworking, etc. are all huge holes in the theory of transatlantic influence.
It was earlier than that. Also there’s no evidence of a genocide, the Guanche were conquered, converted, and marginalized, but AFAIK they were assimilated.
I’m curious about this too. @khepra, why are you citing this neo-Nazi/white supremacist?
What people?
I’ve never heard that claim, but like just about every other province of Spain, there is a strong independence movement. Geographically though, it’s off the coast of the border between Morocco and Western Sahara, which Morocco claims as its own.
Two tangential points about the Canary Islands - Colombus can thank Beatrix de Bohadilla, who was Queen Isabella’s lady-in-waiting, for using her influence with the queen and as marquesa to plead his cause as one of his most avid supporters. She also had a younger sister Eleonora, who got a bit too close to King Ferdinand and was sent off to the Canary Islands to marry the governor of the second smallest of the islands, La Gomera (which is probably my favourite from a number of perspectives, including linguistic). He died not long after and she became the Governor of La Gomera by the time Colombus arrived. There were many rumours about Eleonora and Colombus, but none were conclusively proven or disproven (she was at least very enthusiastic in her welcome of him and his officers). In any case, by the fourth voyage she had married the Governor of all of the Canary Islands, and Colombus made himself more scarce.
Secondly, there are (allegedly) ancient step pyramids in a number of locations in Tenerife (as @RogerStrong mentioned) , although they are quite disappointing in comparison with the more famous ones around the world. You can visit a few of them and some replica reed boats in the north of the island. There is a not insignificant opinion that the pyramids were just a place for farmers to put the volcanic rock out of the way and that the museum is a way to attract gullible tourists. AFAIK, there’s still doubt about the actual age of the pyramids, but the locals didn’t seem particularly impressed to me.
From Wikipedia:
An autosomal study in 2011 found an average Northwest African influence of about 17% in Canary Islanders with a wide interindividual variation ranging from 0% to 96%. According to the authors, the substantial Northwest African ancestry found for Canary Islanders supports that, despite the aggressive conquest by the Spanish in the 15th century and the subsequent immigration, genetic footprints of the first settlers of the Canary Islands persist in the current inhabitants. Paralleling mtDNA findings, the largest average Northwest African contribution was found for the samples from La Gomera.
(The samples from La Gomera had an average of 42.5% NW African ancestry). There are a number of traces of Guanche culture in the Canaries, including the Silbo Gomero register of the Spanish language (which was previously used with Guanche languages) and food like gofio, which is flour made from roasted grains and was a staple of the Guanches.
Random trivia: another source that has been cited here as evidence of an Egyptian presence in South America, Thor Heyerdahl, believed that the ancient civilization of South America was white-skinned. (He, likewise, is completely wrong.)
Ivan Van Sertima’s “strong case” involves so many timeline discrepancies that time-travel would be required in order for things to make sense. (e.g.: Dating has shown that in reality the Olmecs started pyramid construction hundreds of years after it had disappeared from Egyptian culture. Attempts to push that date around so that it aligns with either the end of Egyptian or the start of Nubian pyramid construction then causes other bits of his evidence of contact to no longer align temporally.) His arguments effectively amount to a combination of saying “these things don’t look dissimilar, therefore they must be related” and wishful thinking.
For anyone who wants a good paper on the many, many flaws in Van Sertima’s thesis, I recommend Gabriel Haslip‐Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, and Warren Barbour: “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs”.
It’s the most in-depth scholarly critique I know of that both addresses all of his various arguments over the years and is available to read for free.
Again, while there’s doubt about the exact age, the finds found in and under them establish that they cannot be older than the 19th century.
Reinforcing: Thor Heyerdahl was an awesome dude, and The Kon Tiki Adventure is very much worth the read.
But, when it comes to anthropology, Thor was wrong about pretty much everything.
I had never paid much attention to Van Sertima before, but having spent a little while catching up, it’s amazing and disturbing to see how much he adopted the old white supremacist views of history, but just swapped who the “master race” was. His work’s a hot mess of shoddy history and reifying a racist agenda. Horrifying.
Books by Ivan Van Sertima (Author of They Came Before Columbus)
Avg rating: 4.48 2,089 ratings 94 reviews
Two similar biographies on the late Dr. Ivan Van Sertima~
From: Dr. Ivan Van Sertima
He is the author of They Came Before Columbus: The African Prese nce in Ancient America, which was published by Random House in 1977 and is presently in its twenty-ninth printing. It was published in French in 1981 and in the same year, was awarded the Clarence L. Holte Prize, a prize awarded every two years “for a work of excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the cultural heritage of Africa and the African diaspora.”
He also authored Early America Revisited, a book that has enriched the study of a wide range of subjects, from archaeology to anthropology, and has resulted in profound changes in the reordering of historical priorities and pedagogy.
Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University, Dr. Van Sertima was also Visiting Professor at Princeton University. He is the Editor of the Journal of African Civilizations, which he founded in 1979 and has published several major anthologies which have influenced the development of multicultural curriculum in the United States.
These anthologies include Blacks in Science: ancient and modern, Black Women in Antiquity, Egypt Revisited, Egypt: Child of Africa, Nile Valley Civilizations (now included within the pages of Egypt: Child of Africa), African Presence in the Art of the Americas, African Presence in Early Asia (co-edited with Runoko Rashidi), African Presence in Early Europe, African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, Great Black Leaders: ancient and modern and Golden Age of the Moor.
As an acclaimed poet, his work graces the pages of River and the Wall, 1953 and has been published in English and German. As an essayist, his major pieces were published in Talk That Talk, 1989, Future Directions for African and African American Content in the School Curriculum, 1986, Enigma of Values, 1979, and in Black Life and Culture in the United States, 1971.
Dr. Van Sertima has lectured at more than 100 universities in the United States and has also lectured in Canada, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. In 1991 Dr. Van Sertima defended his highly controversial thesis on the African presence in pre-Columbian America before the Smithsonian. In 1994 the Smithsonian published his address in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View of 1492
From: http://aalbc.com/authors/ivanvan.htm
Guyanese born Dr. Ivan Van Sertima (January 26, 1935 to May 25, 2009) is a literary critic, linguist, anthropologist, and writer. In 1977 he wrote They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, now in its sixteenth printing, for which he won the Clarence L. Holte Prize for excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the cultural heritage of Africa. He is the editor of the Journal of African Civilizations, and has edited numerous recent books including African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, and Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern.
An author and editor, his prize-winning They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America is in its twenty-first printing; he has defended this highly controversial thesis before the Smithsonian, which has recently published his address.E
Finally, you can eat cereal in virtual reality with a dead Egyptian queen
Some things just fit together — classic pairings like fish and chips, ham and eggs, and peanut butter and jelly. Or, you know, cereal and 3,000-year-old Egyptian queen Cleopatra. The intrinsic link between historical royalty and dried breakfast food is not one I’d considered before, but cereal pusher Kellogg’s apparently thinks it’s so obvious that it’s created a virtual reality experience that will see UK participants “transported back to ancient Egypt to eat breakfast alongside Cleopatra.”
Wow, the world finally has a compelling reason to embrace VR. But…
Cleopatra VII was born in 69 BCE, so their dating’s off by around 1,000 years.
