The Olmec: Faces of the Forbearers

The Olmec

     Before all the peoples of the Central American region - before the Aztec, before the Maya, before the Toltec or Mixtec or the Teotihuacanos - were the Olmec.  Like catching glimpses of people through a heavy fog, they fade indistinctly in and out of history so that we are really unsure of who they are. 
     As far as we know, they are the most ancient of all the Native American cultures in Central America and the pre-cursors of all that is distinctive about those cultures.  Some call them the "Mother Culture" for the Meso-American peoples.  They are the originators of all of the distinctive basics of the civilizations in Central and perhaps South America - stone working, architecture, ball courts, math.  They were even the first to use the calendar system that the Maya are famous for, but which began on August 21, 3114 B. C., thousands of years before the Maya existed as a people.
     In San Lorenzo, an Olmec water channel system was discovered.  It is complex and sophisticated and, after 3,000 years, still conducting water perfectly, although for what the Olmec used this complicated system of sluices and channels no one can even make a good guess.
     Lest we revere them too much, we need to also know that they seem to have been the first to practice human sacrifice, including the routine sacrifice of children and infants.
     We don't really know what they called themselves.  The name "Olmec" comes from the Aztec name meaning "rubber people."  The Aztec knew about these folks long after they had disappeared and knew that they lived in a region on the eastern coast of Mexico and the Yucatan, in a region known at that time to have many rubber trees - hence the name.  In their time, the Aztec revered the Olmec  - so much so that they dug up Olmec artifacts and enshrined them within their own temples. 
     The Olmec have been a problem for archaeologists since their discovery.  At the turn of the century, many archaeologists strongly believed that the Maya were the first civilization in the Americas.  
     This little theory was effectively blown out of the water when Olmec artifacts were discovered inscribed with the same dating system as the Mayans and Aztecs used.  The dates inscribed on the artifacts were hundreds of years before anything recorded by the Mayans.
     There are many disconcerting facts about the Olmec (at least, to the materialistic uniformitarians).  Let's start with the giant stone heads.
     Buried in many locations throughout Olmec territory, about seventeen of them have currently been unearthed.  All of them had been completely buried by someone, sometimes with a great deal of work (tiled surfaces on the floor of the burial areas and careful layers of multi-colored soils.)   Carved from basalt and other equally hard stone, they are impressive in and of themselves.  They are all large, rounded sculptures that depict only the head, which is probably a good thing,  as just the heads are as much as nine to ten feet in height and weigh as much as twenty tons.  The stone of which they are composed had been quarried from sites as far as sixty miles away.  While objects found in proximity to them have been dated at 1500 - 1200 B. C., you cannot date stone or when it was carved.  With no writing on them to indicate some date of construction, they could be thousands of years older and there would be no real way to determine that.
    The pictures that I have here show the precise and detailed stonework, supposedly done by people who possessed no metal stone cutting tools.  We're supposed to believe that they banged the rocks with other rocks into the approximate shapes and then rubbed sand on them to smooth out the surfaces.  
     They were chiseled and carved somewhere other than their final locations, because there is no trace of stone dust or stone chips anywhere in the area around them.  That means that they were picked up and lifted to their resting place, not rolled and then carved in place.  If they had been carved before they were brought there and then rolled, such rolling or dragging would have damaged and marked the finished surfaces.
     Their strangeness is apparent even at first glance.  Unlike any other art from the Central American cultures, the Olmec heads are all highly naturalistic.  The detail and nuance of the faces is impressive by any standards. That they portray the faces of real people is without question. 
            Such people, though!  Each of them undoubtedly represent a race other than the American Indian.  
     Some people think that they could be Asian.  The almond shaped eyes that some of the heads (but not all of them) possess supports this.  There is some evidence that certain Asian cultures may have had contact with the Western Hemisphere, so this may be the case.  
     I personally think that they all depict people of the Negro race.  They all wear some form of skull cap or helmet, which is sometimes decorated.  Some of them depict ear plugs or ear rings.

       Some people have described their expressions to be stern, or austere, or detached.  They look to me like they are mad about something.
     Compare them to the photos below.  These are statues from the Mayan and Aztec cultures.  Notice the faces have  characteristically thin lips, distinctively arching nose bridges, high cheek bones and total lack of facial hair below the eyebrows.  These are traits that are almost universal among all the Native American peoples of North and South America.

   

       So, from where then did the model of this Olmec statue (below) come?  Notice the full mustache and beard that give him a visage that is so Caucasian that it would fit into almost any setting in Europe.  Perhaps a Spanish aristocrat?

      

These two Olmec carvings (above) could also easily be portraying Asian faces, despite their Native American clothing and headdresses.

     These two carvings (above) could easily be mistaken for Semitic or other ancient Middle Eastern carvings with their full, long and squarely trimmed beards.  Ditto with the following two.

 

     What about this guy (above)?  This statue, called "The Wrestler," has a face decorated with a full mustache and features that could be Asian, perhaps Chinese.


     






















     If this guy depicted above isn't a Caucasian with a beard and mustache as big as any Celts, I'll eat my hat.  

The style of beard and crown on the ceremonial cup pictured above resemble many seen in the ancient Middle East, e.g. the Phoenicians.

How could a Native American have formed this sculpture (above) of a member of an obviously Negroid race he had never seen, with such accuracy?

     Again, the features of the sculptured heads above and below could only have been done by someone who had actually seen members of an Asian people.  You can't make this up.

     Parenthetically, cruder, and perhaps later, carvings show these Africans and Caucasians defeated and slaughtered, cut to pieces.  The slayers were not depicted, but may have been some invading peoples (perhaps even the peoples that we call Meso-American or Native Americans now - ancestors of the later Maya, Toltec, Aztec, etc.) and perhaps the reason that the Olmec culture disappeared. 
     Back to our topic of describing the Olmec, though.  The materialistic uniformitarians stoutly contend that all of the great building and trade achievements of the Mesoamerican peoples (Inca, Aztec, Maya, Teotihuacano, Toltec, Olmec) were accomplished without the benefit of the wheel.  Note the figures below.  These are children's toys - dogs or cats, perhaps, although they are very strangely proportioned.  

 

    They obviously have wheels.  Like so many toys that are dragged along dutifully on the end of a string by the children of today, these toys were meant to roll.
     It is inconceivable that peoples as obviously brilliant and clever as the Olmec and their cultural descendants would know of the concept of the wheel, but would somehow fail to think of employing it when it came time to move some of their monumental stones and other large objects.  
 




 
     Here's another problem.  As we noted previously, the Aztec would take Olmec artifacts that they found and place them in their own temples.  All archaeologists have had to contend with the fact that EVERY culture has had antique collectors, individuals who would gather items from older times and put them in their own buildings, dwellings, etc.  It's just something people do.  We like to forge links with people who have lived before us.  Modern day antique enthusiasts and historians do this all the time.  
     To illustrate the problem, let us say that an archaeologist who lives several thousand years in the future comes upon the remains of one of our modern museums.  How would he know what belongs to our own culture and what is from a previous people?  How could he date the building?
    With all the varying artistic styles, it is conceivable that at least some of these artifacts attributed to the Olmec were not created by the Olmec.  They were perhaps found by them.  That would make them inheritors of a previous, more advanced civilization and not creators.
     The problem in the case of the Olmec is compounded by the fact that the area of Mexico where the Olmec remains are found is very swampy.  Organic remains of any kind endure only a short while, in such a place.  Metal fares little better, if not worse, being corroded into nothing very quickly.
     I can tell you from personal experience that, without extraordinary measures of preservation, even here where I live in Central Texas (with a reasonably temperate climate and dry soil), organic and metallic material will be completely disintegrated by decomposition within fifty years of being placed into the ground.
     What that means for our study of the Olmec is that we have very little evidence about them.  We have no corpses, so we really don't know what they were like physically, what sort of people they were.  
     We don't know what foods they ate.  
     We don't know what language they spoke, since we've found no writing.  Unlike the Maya, who carved writing or pictures all over everything that they built, Olmec objects tend to avoid any excess decoration.  Consequently, we don't know anything about their history, their belief system or their stories.
     We can only say that we have found in certain areas, artifacts of the most durable substances (various types of stone, obsidian, jade or pottery).  These articles may have belonged to one people or they may be a hodge-podge collection of things from many different peoples, from more than one time span.  Currently, there is really no way to tell.
     Compounding the problem is the fact that we have probably found all the evidence of the Olmec that we are going to find.  The oil industry in Mexico feels that the area in which the Olmec lived is the perfect place for them to put all their oil production and refinery facilities.  The vast majority of known Olmec sites have been bull-dozed and built over.  The few sites that are left only exist because they haven't yet found oil there.

 
     So, what can we say in summary about our friends, the Olmec.  

     (1)The Olmec culture seems to have appeared out of nowhere, fully developed and complex, with no evidence of migration or development at all.  They appear in the archaeological record full-blown, fully civilized, with cities and writing and statues and large buildings and all the other accoutrement that we would consider an integral part of a developed culture.  Like Melchizedek, there is no trace of where they came from or where they went, only where they have been.

     (2)They were technically capable of advanced stone work, hydraulics and architecture, using techniques that we cannot understand.  

     (3)They were able to move huge objects and heavy weights without benefit of wheels or roads, although they were technically and organizationally capable of both.

     (4)They seemed to have possessed a detailed familiarity with many racial groups (Asian, Negro, Middle Eastern and Caucasian) which were unknown in the Americas at the time of contact with Western European culture.  That denotes travel, trade or contact of some form between continents.

     In case the recurring pattern is unclear, let me clarify.  Once again, we have an ancient people (like the Killike, the Egyptians, the Tiawanakans, the Minoans, the Teotihuacanos and others that we have mentioned on this blog) who possess advanced technical capabilities and cultural development beyond our ability to even understand.  Advanced engineering, trade, language and art without any evidence of developmental stages is all that we find.  They just have it, full-blown, highly developed, from the beginning.  
     Consider a Model T automobile versus a Mustang, built 109 years apart.  There is a distinct development from the simple to the very complex, even in that short time period.  Yet in these ancient cultures we are discussing, whether in technology, literature or culture, there is no such developmental process discernible.
     To quote Graham Hancock from his book, Fingerprints of the Gods: "The archaeological evidence suggested that rather than developing slowly and painfully, as is normal with human societies, the civilization of Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs, emerged all at once and fully formed.  Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense.  Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight - and with no apparent antecedents whatever. "
     The main evidences that we have are only in the most durable forms - the large stones, etc. - that would be capable of surviving a horrendous cataclysm (like a year long, world-wide Flood?) and thousands of years of time.
     All of this is a problem if you are struggling with the preconception that man started as a simple half-animal and developed all the skills and characteristics of civilization in a slow trial and error process.  That is exactly what the folks who hold to an evolutionary development of mankind MUST believe, so they have no way of explaining the "anomalies" in this and other cultures.  They can only ignore or suppress the plethora of facts that don't fit into their myths.
     It is no problem at all if you understand that mankind started out as superior beings of mega-genius capacity, who gradually devolved, losing both abilities and knowledge.  Traces of such technology, art and literature might be carried in fragmentary form to later generations, but only with great effort.

     Things are not as we have been told that they are.  There is more.  Stay tuned. 

 

WARNING!!

   

     The truth is there.  You just have to see it.

     
     This blog has been written with the sole purpose of using the ample evidence available to verify and support the biblical record, while refuting the copious propaganda that is shoved down our throats daily by materialistic uniformitarians. 
     It is my contention that the Bible describes God's original creation of people with extraordinary capabilities who subsequently created an advanced civilization that exceeds our own.  It was destroyed in the Great Flood and we have spent the last 4,500 years trying to either preserve or re-build that civilization.  I contend that science supports all this in multiple disciplines, but this information is ignored, discredited or suppressed by people who have an opposing agenda.

     Nothing that you see on this blog is original.  Any fact that you see here is obtainable on a dozen different websites and books.  I use these facts and photos, without violating their copyrights, under the legal principle of fair use practice.  That is, I use them one time, for educational purposes only.

     The point is, nothing here is made up.  The only thing that I do (or need to do) is assemble this information in its readily discernible pattern. 
      You might want to read through the first entry posted on this blog (Past Remembering: Thoughts toward a coherent view of our ancient past, our present and our future) in order to understand my theoretical and theological underpinnings more clearly.

Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (NASB)

That which has been is that which will be,

And that which has been done is that which will be done.

So there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one might say,

“See this, it is new”?

Already it has existed for ages

Which were before us.