'Oldest' New World writing found. Olmecs

Have any of you seen these symbols before?

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Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 900 BC, new evidence suggests.

The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists.

Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World.

The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads. (Pasted from BBC News)

This is a picture of the slab.

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This is the link to the full article.
news.bbc.co.uk...

Apologies if this has been posted in a previous post- I'm new to ATS.

If it turns out to be a copy of the Rosetta stone, I'm going to laugh so hard my eardrums explode.

Well, it would blow almost everyone's theories out the water.

But it does seriously look like a child's inscription of the old Egyptian scribbles.

Nice find.

For some reason it reminds me of a menu board at Baskin Robins... I have a sudden craving for pineapple icecream with bug sprinkles.

That certainly would ruffle a few feathers, if it is then the scientists might open there ears to other theories

LOL mythatsabigprobe!

What is worrying is that it was discovered in 1990 and has only just been examined by archaeologists earlier this year, that’s 16 years later!!!!

What other evidence could be just out there which has already been discovered but just forgotten about or ignored or maybe part of a personal collection not for public eyes.

Not really. They'd just ignore it like they do everything else.
A few of them have already put out that speculation because the Olmecs have very negroid faces.

Most of them usually are. It's the contention that it's hard to study something when it's in the limelight without having speculation form the peanut gallery (like us, the news, or more likely, hobby archaeologists) tainting the actual data....irrrelevant of whether or not you'd get real help from such a sorce. Plus, it's a matter of who has the right to study something. The archaeologist who find the pieces often don't have the right to study since it's a national treasure they don't always want the finder (often not a local) studying something a local should have first crack at. That's everywhere, though.
Blacks in South America

[edit on 15-9-2006 by jlc163]

Sometimes I wonder if civilization in our side of the world is as old as the civilizations in the Middle East from where all civilizations supposedly sprouted.

More and more is evidence that perhaps our side of the world has its own ancient stories to tell.

Is many areas in Central and South America that are now been discovered. What many have seen as part of natural land marks are found to be ancient pyramids bury under dirt and sand.

A very interesting post. For the Olmec to take time and expend resourses on creating a stone tablet, the message must be of paramount importance.
I have looked at some Olmec sites and most of the language/glyphs appear to be horizontal not vertical.

There's quite a bit!

The problem is, while it's fairly easy to collect and document, getting the material sorted and described and labeled takes a LOT longer! I worked on documenting a site once -- it took the student archaeologists a week to collect the material. It took me and a class of 20 students a full semester to describe and rebag the material. It's not on display anywhere (nothing exciting, but the arrowheads were interesting though not museum quality) and basically just waits until someone needs to examine it.

Same with the dinosaur bones I'm working on. It took them two months to collect the huge skeleton (Alamosaurus -- and it's only part of it) and will probably take me 4 years to clean a single (very huge) neckbone out of the rock. Meanwhile, the head paleontologist has gone off to another dig in Alaska and has brought back 4 TONS of rock-crusted fossil bones.

There's eight of us volunteers who dig dino bone out of rock. We could stay busy for several lifetimes!

So, yes, there's a lot of material there. The way to get involved with it is to take some archaeology or paleontology courses or basic science courses and work as a museum volunteer.

No, it's not. Humans have been here in the New World only for about 50,000 - 20,000 years. Humans have been in Africa and the Middle East and Asia (etc) for 80,000 years and more (homo sapiens. Earlier humans (erectus, heidelbergensis, habilis, etc) have been there even longer.)

I also found a link to a story on this on the National Geographic website.

National Geographic Article

Pretty much the same information, but says that the tablet was found in 1999. I wonder why it took so long to become a newsworthy find? Maybe it had to do with with verification of the tablet's authenticity? Does anyone know if this might be the case? (looking at Byrd)

Genetically speaking, there's proof positive that the Americas have had at least 3 seperate human migration with the last coming about 12-13,000 years ago. They're fairly certain that eastern North America was inhabited by people at 20,000 years ago from what is now Spain and France. South America was possibly inhabited as far back as 40,000 years by the peoples of Polynesia and Australia. Most of the Western North America was inhabited by people from Central Asia. By the time of the Vikings and Columbus got here they're was no place in the Western Hemisphere that wasn't inhabited by humans.
The Chinese, ancient Phoenicians and the most of the Eastern Asia tribes knew of North America. Studies of ancient metals are showing that there was possible trade of gold and copper between east and west.
The sad part about this latest news is that some folks on the Western civilization superiority band wagon are saying that this is proof that the Egyptians influenced the Americas and I say bunk. The Olmecs are just as capable of developing an written language as anyone else.
I believe that when Columbus returned to Spain the Vatican sent the Jesuits over to destroy evidence of ancient contact between the 2 hemispheres. The Aztecs were expecting the Feathered Serpent to return from the East. If the priests of the old religions(Middle Eastern) had instructed priests of the new religion( Romans Catholic) as has been done for thousands of years, the Vatican knew of the Americas long before Columbus set sail. It has long been my belief that the Vatican has been keeping its worshippers ignorant of a great many things from the ancient past. With almost no exceptions, the priesthood of the new religions were made up of rebel priest of the old religion.

The problem with archaeology is that it is purely political and mostly whatever's socially attractive at the time. There are damn few archeologists who looking to rock the boat and turnover the academically accepted theories that exist right now. If there was an ancient civilization with technology far advanced than ours they would have whipped or avoided the problems we face as civilization right now and simply left the planet. They might not have any contact with primitive tribesman or seemed like gods to them. What evidence will we have of current air travel or wireless communications in a thousand years? Zero. All ships wreck made out of metal will have long since disintergrated. Modern humans are believed to be at least 100,000 years old. We can barely trace out human settlements that are 10,000 year old right now. We know very little right now about the people who built the pyramids near Mexico city and they've only been gone less than 2000 years.

The last ice age would have wiped most evidences of civilization from the face of North America. I'm not surprised that we are beginning to see older and older artifacts where those mile thick glaciers didn't scrape and pulverise everything into silt.
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Edited to bold the 'didn't' bit.



[edit on 17-9-2006 by masqua]

I'm not surprised it was them. But the ancient history of the Americas is seemingly "lost" and all we have outside the physichal evidence is the myths, legends, and stories, that are in all of the different native cultures here.

The warming from it, perhaps. But remember that the glaciers only got as far as Montana. The seacoast was several feet lower than it is now, so any coastal material got flooded as the planet warmed.



Actually, we aren't finding any artifacts in glaciers. While I wouldn't be surprised to find the occasional mummy (as we've found in Europe), there won't be any other material from the glacier areas.

The glaciers were barren places -- so nobody actually went there unless they had to. But there are large areas of the Americas that never received any glaciers and were suitable for hunter-gatherers. That's where the artifacts are coming from.

How do you figure?

You mean like they're ignoring this find???

The stone faces look like.....the people that live in the area of the stone faces. Not everyone in latin america looks like modern mexicans.

Indeed, there's an incredible amount of material that has been recovered, but not examined, cataloged, etc.


Civilization in the americas started independantly of that in sumer and egypt. Indeed, there seem to be several locations where civilization more or less started on its own.

A researcher named Jared Diamond makes an arguement that I find pretty compelling, as to why 'civilization' seems to have started later in the americas. Eurasia is wide, the americas are narrow. That means that there are wide bands of territory, stretching from spain to china, that are basically similar. This means that people, ideas, and goods, can cross back and forth. Whereas in the americas, there's allways interupting deserts, plains, forests, jungles, mountains, etc etc. He also notes that all the domesticated animals, except one, the llama, were domesticated in/relatively native to Eurasia, AND that eurasia, aided once again by its swaths of similar climates, has an abundance of high calorie, energetically worthwhile crops, like wheat, barely, rice, etc, whereas the rest of the world has tubers (potatoes, yams, etc), which don't lend themselves torwards easy cultivation (excluding corn of course).

So his ideas, in very basic details, might explain a heck of a lot of history.


I don't know the specifics on this particular peice, but it could've been collected, marked as 'stone tablet with drawings', and then put away in a closet for years before anyone came around to check the dig reports, go over the tablet, research the region, figure out a relative date for it, etc etc.


I think you would be hard pressed to find many geneticists that would agree with that.

Every archaeologist out there would probably sell their mother's remains if they could overturn everything we know with some spectacular new find or new series of finds. People don't get involved in archaeology for the money, they want to be the next schliemann or evans.

And why do


There are shipwrecks from well over a thousand years ago, and plastic hulls tend to not disintigrate. Not to mention the ports that were used to load them, the shipyards used to build them, the founderies to smelt and work the raw metal, the mines to get the metal, the schools to train the kids who get into the universities that study naval architecture, nor the rest of civilization needed to support those kids in the first place.

And some people don't know much about their own neighbhors on their block. What does that matter?



Keep in mind, this artifact was never anywhere near any region that had people that ever even heard of glaciers back then.


What do you consider lost?

Look up Dr. Douglas Wallace of Emory University. He's considered a pretty well credentialed DNA specialist. I first heard of his work on a TV program called Stone Age Colombus.
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Mod Edit - fixed quote




[edit on 19-9-2006 by masqua]

It seems that I need to clarify something, since I'd prefer not to be seen as doltish. The quote used by both Nygdan and Byrd in relation to the glacier and the paupacy of relics beneath where they scraped was this;



That's a 'didn't'...meaning those areas which were not scraped by their crushing movement. I even bolded the word didn't after Byrd's post referred to it.



And, now Nygdans post...



Hate to be nit-picky, but hate to seem stupid even more.