they came before columbus debunkedthey came before columbus debunked

If each piece of evidence and argument was listed, the list would be as long as the index. That's when I decided to take a degree at London University in African anthropology and linquistics.". In his book, "They Came Before Columbus," Van Sertima, a Rutgers professor, says that African influences can be found in an array of cultural similarities between Africa and the ancient Americas - pyramid construction, the use of boat litters, the parasol, the plumed serpent motif, bronze-casting techniques. Ancient Egypt is regarded as one of the greatest earliest civilizations that has captured the attention and imagination of historians and laypeople alike for years. Genome-wide ancestry estimates of African Americans show average proportions of73.2% African, 24.0% European, and 0.8% Native American ancestry, according to The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States study published by U.S. National Library of MedicineNational Institutes of Health. [5], Van Sertima completed his master's degree at Rutgers in 1977. Columbus is not just a man, he is a symbol. So, Van Sertima had his conclusion in mind first, and looked for evidence for itmeaning he was telling just-so stories. Later forced immigrations by Africans to the New World as slaves, and the subsequent development of African-American culture, played a far greater role in shaping the Americas of the 20th century. Politically correct labels have been applied to other races in the past and since Indians are always the last to be labeled for anything, I suppose our time has come. So, Van Sertima became convinced due to the writings of linguists and anthropologists, that there was an ancient, as-of-yet-looked-into connection between ancient Africa and Mesoamerica. "[20][n 2], In 1981 Dean R. Snow, a professor of anthropology, wrote that Van Sertima "uses the now familiar technique of stringing together bits of carefully selected evidence, each surgically removed from the context that would give it a rational explanation". Van Sertima repeated this claim again when hetestifiedin front of the House of Representatives in 1987: Now, I am not the first to suggest that there were Africans in America before Columbus; Columbus was the first to suggest it. A celebrated classic, They Came . The book is a special May selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and Tandom House is about to publish a second printing. This book is dense with presented evidence and deserves serious study. Mansa Musa never sailed to America. They noted that Olmec stone heads were carved hundreds of years prior to the claimed contact and only superficially appear to be African; the Nubians whom Van Sertima had claimed as their originators do not resemble these "portraits". In this book, the author presents evidence and arguments for the existence of black Africans in America before the arrival of Columbus and the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1492. On 7 July 1987, Van Sertima testified before a United States Congressional committee to oppose recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas. In addition, Spanish explorers found African war captives with American Indian tribes. All human behavioral traits are, 4150 words Introduction It is claimed that genes (DNA sequences) have a special, privileged role in the development of all traits. [15] Van Sertima claims to be referencing Columbus, but he is actually referencing Bartolom de Las Casas writings. Mike Harrington: His team looks good, even without Alex Tuch. Columbus is such a late-comer that it is almost silly to compare anybody's arrival to his. Laster that year he returned to this country to teach at Rutgers. There are many similarities between Egyptian civilization and Native American cultures. Columbus wrote: Their hair is short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horses tail. Rhythm, flow, enunciation of some words could be improved upon, but again this seemed to be a random volunteer. In They Came Before Columbus,we see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint of black Africans in pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelming impact on the civilizations they encountered. Columbus' "accidental stumbling into the Caribbean," theorist Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University said, followed incursions by native Africans who left traces in art, artifacts, maps, language, cultural influences and accounts related to early European explorers. To assuage the Christian conscience for the enslavement of a people, one could not believe that black people were intelligent enough and capable of such feats as the ancient Egyptians. In Chapter 5, called "Among the Quetzalcoatls", Van Sertima narrates the arrival of Abu Bakr II to an Aztec civilization in Mexico in 1311, describing the Mali king as "a true child of the sun burned dark by its rays" in direct and explicit comparison to the Aztec "sun god" Quetzalcoatl, as Van Sertima writes. [15] This is one of many examples of Van Sertima's theories that Mesoamerican mythologies are based on Pre-Columbian African contact theories. Anthropologist-linguist Ivan Van Sertima has set ablaze a mini-controversy with his thesis that Africans set foot upon - and made significant cultural impact on - the New World 22 centuries before Columbus sailed into the West Indies. I'm trying to follow all the rules but forgive me if this is a bit vague. Others hold true to the story of the American slave trade in which enslaved Africans were brought to Americas shores to provide free labor to build the country and grow the economy. ". And he started work, using his own money. Isnt it weird how Van Sertima and other Afrocentrists use the same type of tactics as pseudoscientists (i.e., ad hoc hypothesizing)? (renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax). [6] He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); 5000 words Introduction General Intelligence or g is championed as the hallmark discovery of psychology. When you push one door, other doors begin to open.". Recently, I've been handed a book called "They Came before Columbus" by Ivan Sertima, which asserts that Africans had discovered and traded with the native people of the Americas long before Columbus arrived. In the documentary, Umar Johnson claims that Africans were going back and forth engaging in cultural and economic trade before Columbus. The professor said that he was intrigued but skeptical when he first encountered the idea of ancient African contact with the Americas. From rhinoplasty to cataract replacement, the Hindu vedic text Sushruta Samhita documents the discovery of advanced surgical techniques centuries before they found their way into the operating theaters of western Europe. Van Sertima states near the end of the book that all civilizations are capable of independent invention, and that he aims to place his claims on the spectrum between diffusionism and isolationism, or the idea that cultures separated geographically are capable of inventing similar things without interaction between the two. ..and he [Columbus] wanted to find out what the Indians of Hispanola had told him, that there had come to it from the south and southeast Negro people, who brought those spear points made of a metal which they call guanin Raccolta, Parte 1, Vol. 1. The book deals mostly with his arguments for an African origin of Mesoamerican culture in the Western Hemisphere. Van Sertima even argued that in several writings Columbus suggested that Africans were in the Americas before he was. Van Sertima asserts that this idea is false and explains how this belief developed. He posited that higher learning, in Africa as elsewhere, was the preserve of elites in the centres of civilisations, rendering them vulnerable in the event of the destruction of those centres and the loss of such knowledge. Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and linguists alike have debunked much of the evidence that Menzies used to support his notion, which has come to be called the 1421 theory. Van Sertima never explained why he selected this particular dynasty, but his reasoning for doing so is important because he later altered the date in African Presence in Early America to 948 or circa 1000 B.C. Van Sertima was forced to alter his thesis in light of new evidence which demonstrated that the Olmec civilization was older than was originally believed, which leads me to the next issue. So anything that isnt physical (like the mind/consciousness) cant studied by science. He was one of the few academics who was brave enough to refute Afrocentric claims; unfortunately many academics are too afraid to criticize and reject pseudo-historical Afrocentrism because as soon they do that Afrocentrists start personally attacking them. This technique, as well as the ambiguity of the evidence Van Sertima used, have led to the rejection of his work as pseudoscience or pseudoarchaeology. "They couldn't be slave blacks," he said. Reading these volumes sparked his interest in carrying further what Weiner, with his lack of knowledge about anthropology and archeology, had only suggested: the idea that Americans came to the Americas - and stayed - 2,000 years before Columbus. The Eurocentric view of history is being debunked by anthropologic research. (LogOut/ His widow, Jacqueline Van Sertima, said she would continue to publish the Journal of African Civilizations. Sources of information on such misconceptions and strategies for helping students to overcome them are . Black settlements developed at the end points of major currents from Africa, he contended. Some paint their faces, others the whole body, some only round the eyes, others only on the nose. [22], In 1981, They Came Before Columbus received the "Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize". He also points to the Negroid features of giant stone heads in Mexico, our of which have been radio carbon dated at 814 B.C. The Pseudohistory of Who Discovered America", "Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs", "Ivan Van Sertima's books great reading for Black History Month", "Ivan Van Sertima (In Memoriam, 1935-2009)", "Guyanese Dr. Ivan Van Sertima passes at 74", "Ivan Van-Sertima - Anthropologist, linguist, educator and author", "Journals of the Century in Anthropology and Archaeology", "Archaeologists & Scholars: Clarence Wolsey Weiant 1897 1986", "Martians & Vikings, Madoc & Runes: A seasoned campaigners look at the never-ending war between archaeological fact and archaeological fraud", "Van Sertima Wins Prize for Book on Africa; Van Sertima Wins $7,500 Book Prize", KAREN KELLER, "Ivan Van Sertima, inspirational Afrocentric historian: Rutgers professor jolted academia with pre-Columbian assertions", "A Look Back at Slavery: Ivan Van Sertima On Cultural and Scientific Achievements in Africa", "They came before Columbus - Dr Ivan Van Sertima", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ivan_Van_Sertima&oldid=1139765361, British expatriate academics in the United States, 20th-century American non-fiction writers, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 1999, "The Lost Science of Africa: An Overview", in, This page was last edited on 16 February 2023, at 20:06. [13] This was a record of the conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 1998 on the theme of the African Renaissance. This finding flatly contradicted the claim of the historian Herodotus that the Egyptians, compared to the Greeks and other European Caucasoids, were for the most part a black-skinned and wooly-haired people. He employs a number of tactics commonly used by pseudoscientists (Cole 1980; Radner and Radner 1982: 27-52; Ortiz de Montellano 1995; Williams 1988), including an almost exclusive use of outdated secondary sources and a reliance on the pseudoscientific writing of others. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Van Sertima tells of the emergence of the Mali kingdom and its seafaring ventures, thus providing evidence for sailing capabilities of West Africans. Click Here to Get Smart on Protecting Your Family and Loves Ones, No Matter What Happens. The sickle cell trait, an adaptation to ward off malaria found mostly in people from West Africa, was also discovered in the secluded Mayan tribe, the Lancodon Indians by Dr. Alfonso de Garay, Director of the Genetic Program of the National Commission for Nuclear Energy in Mexico. The Case for Reparations for Black Americans, On Asian Immigration to the United States, Hyper-Selectivity, and Hereditarian Musings on Asian Academic Success, The Sexualization of Steatopygia and Adaptationist Claims of Sex Organs, On the So-Called Laws of Behavioral Genetics, The Answer to Hereditarianism is Developmental Systems Theory, Mind, Science, and the First- and Third-Person, Why Purely Physical Things Will Never Be Able to Think: The Irreducibility of Intentionality to Physical States, Follow NotPoliticallyCorrect on WordPress.com, The Non-Validity of IQ: A Response to The Alternative Hypothesis, Black-White Differences in Anatomy and Physiology: Black Athletic Superiority. Phil Valentine is even more confused. It has come to my attention that Van Sertimas (1972) bookThey Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (TCBC)will soon be used in certain syllabi. Barbour of the University at Buffalo. Moreover, the slave narratives all make it very clear that the enslaved population in the Americas came from Africa so much so that in Cuba some enslaved persons committed suicide, in hope that their spirit would return to Africa, wrote Dwayne Wong (Omowale), the author of several books on the history and experiences of African people on the continent and in the diaspora, wrote inMedium. [15], A chapter is also devoted to the presence of bottle gourds originally from Africa found in ancient Mesoamerican graves. The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. Van Sertima answers that Africans were indeed sailors, that a division of Negro sea captains and mariners is reported to have been in the Egyptian navy of the 19th dynasty and the East Africans sailed between their countries and China in the 13th century. The mapmaker, Martin Waldseemller, named the New World "America," after the Italian Amerigo Vespucci, who had explored the coastline of South America and was the first to realize that it was a . Though these features may be common among black people of African Ancestry, one cannot exclude that these features also exist to some degree in Native Americans. The story of Hannibal of Carthage always stuck with me since high school, though his story was told probably because of its relation to European history. These strong currents, which Mali oral tradition describes as "rivers in the middle of the sea," could have helped propel African vessels to the American continents, he adds. These discs were placed above entrances of inner chambers of temples in Egypt and above temple door lintels in pre-Columbian America. Haslip-Vierra, de Montellano and Barbour. "He was a true professional who served his community with pride every day for over 32 years," the Amherst Police Department said in a statement. [19], In a New York Times 1977 review of Van Sertima's 1976 book They Came Before Columbus, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel labelled Van Sertima's work as "ignorant rubbish", and concluded that the works of Van Sertima, and Barry Fell, whom he was also reviewing, "give us badly argued theories based on fantasies". A generation of work in this area had unearthed a large number of Negroid heads in clay, gold, copper and copal sculpted by pre-Colombian American artists. Reportedly, from American historian and linguist Leo Weiner of Harvard Universitys book Africa and the Discovery of America (Ill have to add that one to the list too) in one of Columbuss journals there is an account of a statement by the Native Americans saying that they had encountered black people prior to the arrival of Columbus. Many historians have worked at debunking the "They Came Before Columbus" and "Africans Were Already In America" myth. From 1957 to 1959, Van Sertima worked as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. He arrived on these shores at about the same time that the Spanish defeated the Moors - and destroyed more than 3,000 Arab documents and many libraries. The word for tobacco also has African roots as well as the refinement of the practice of oral pipe smoking. In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967. This statement is horribly misinformed. The truth is that Black Indians were shipped from America to Europe! 'Roots' goes back to the time when the damage was beginning. Ivan Van Sertima They Came Before Columbus : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. In Koning's telling and in Zinn's, Columbus set out to enslave a uniformly gentle people for the sole purpose of enriching himself with gold. [5] Instead, Van Sertima replied to his critics in "his" journal volume published as Early America Revisited (1998). Other stone heads have been uncovered in Mexico. Unfortunately, the scholarship that he has inspired has tended to be of a worse quality than Van Sertimas was. Some believe that Blacks were already in America and have more Native American ancestry than African. There have been a number of diffusion theories regarding the Olmec. Read more Print length 336 pages Language English Publisher Random House Trade Paperbacks Publication date September 23, 2003 Dimensions Hidden Colors also makes the argument that Africans were in the Americas before Columbus. [3][n 1], Van Sertima was born in Kitty Village, near Georgetown, in what was then the colony of British Guiana (present-day Guyana); he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. There is evidence of African cotton seeds in America. "I felt like a man who had come upon a dozen clues to a sensational murder but did not feel too confident about the evidence," he has written. "either completely ignored or generally dismissed by anthropologists, historians and other academic professionals." Dr James Thompson Psychological Comments, Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997: 431. Are you prioritizing your cable entertainment bill over protecting and investing in your family? suddenly this stream widened, and they saw in the distance what looked at first like a drifting island of black menWe estimated on examination that there might be about one hundred and fifty at the most; they appeared very well-built, exceedingly black, and all clothed in white cotton shirts. "Some of these voyages are designed or planned; some are accidental," he said. They paint themselves black, and they are the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white. In fact, that . Van Sertima was convinced there was a connection between ancient Africa and the Americas. Probably Columbus did not believe this, and that fact in itself would not be enough because the so-called Black people could be any people. Did we learn anything in there that I had simply forgotten? Van Sertima added, How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? Sailing, especially such great distances, was not an achievement that was typically attributed to Africans of that time, but it would have been necessary to reach the Americas. It sounds like someone chose to record himself reading the book and decided to upload the files to YouTube. Open Document. Highlighted Ogham found on the Isle of Man - Credit: ViewTeam (Author provided) Several words are also similar with similar meanings such as nama-tigi or ama-tigi from the Bambara of the Mandingos and aman-teca from the Nahuatl of Mexico, both of which refer to master or chief or headman. Van Sertima presents an argument for the transformation of the word banana with African origins. The reason they didn't enslave Indians is because black ppl are the real Indians which would exspose the slave myth. In 1997 academics in a Journal of Current Anthropology article criticised in detail many elements of They Came Before Columbus (1976). [6] Also in 1979, Van Sertima founded the Journal of African Civilizations, which he exclusively edited and published for decades.[6][12]. Van Sertima's zeal for learning about African culture began in England in the '60s while he was working as a writer for the BBC. One could do worse. Professor Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus A review by Femi Akomolafe, 19 January 1995. Any other significant information about the history of my people tended to start with, we were slaves. In They Came Before Columbus, Ivan Van Sertima put forward the argument that African people were in the Americas long before Columbus was. It was also concluded that it was not likely that these seeds were carried by birds. All parties remained peaceful, and Columbus specifically instructed his crews not to take advantage of the Indians. And numerous Negroid portraits and masks were found with them. In Hidden Colors, a documentary by filmmaker Tariq Nasheed, Dr. Umar Johnson, a doctor of Clinical Psychology, is interviewed and claims that Africans were going back and forth engaging in cultural and economic trade before Columbus. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble? In They Came Before Columbus, we see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint of black Africans in pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelming impact on the civilizations they encountered. Human Biodiversity, IQ, Evolutionary Psychology, Epigenetics and Evolution, Home Refuting Afrocentrism They Did Not Come Before Columbus. on Sept. 2, 1948. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Van Sertima focuses specifically on the Olmec colossal heads, saying that the characteristics of the stone faces are "indisputably" African, while Mesoamerican experts such as Richard Diehl disregards this claim, as the statues are stylized and generally accepted as representing native Mesoamericans. I noted before that Van Sertimas claims were flawed in some respects, but his arguments were still logical in certain respects and he did attempt to provide documentation for at least some of his claims even if at times the documentation he presented was misleading. A second problem with the manner in which Van Sertima uses this piece of information is the assumption that the black people whom de Las Casas refers to were African. pic.twitter.com/GRHEgWZkZb. A celebrated classic, They Came Before Columbus, dea. Bro, are you serious now?Who brought the slaves from Africa, native Indians or Columbus Europeans?When did slave trade start that Red-Indians became yall history?So in a bid to stay off Africans yall tracing your ancestry to Indians?Mehn thats something else. THEY GAME GOLUM BUS The African Presence in Ancient America Ivan Van Sertima Ncruma] has demonstrated that there is far more to hlach history than the trade. Also according to Polish craniologist Wiercinsky 13.5% of skeletons in a pre-classic Olmec cemetery of Tlatilco were negroid which decreased in percentage over time, indicating intermixture with the native population over time. Never seen a more deluded person. Van Sertima makes this claim at the very beginning of the video below. The majority of us here in America the descendant of slaves were already aboriginal in America and were the slave population of choice. [13] Van Sertima also discussed African scientific contributions in an essay for the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999 (he had first published the essay in 1983). [5] Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus is the first monographic treatment of this problem since Leo Wiener's Africa and the Discovery ofAmerica (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1920-1922), although M. D. W. Jeffreys has littered the intervening fifty years with articles on various aspects of it, often drawing heated responses This view, of course, is seen as highly fringe in the field of anthropology. ", Van Sertima said he didn't travel much to research the book. At the time that the dominant narrative of the origins of ancient Egyptian civilization emerged, the use of African slaves was well into effect. He was asked to write a magazine piece simplifying and summarizing Weiner. Even Van Sertima himself admits that the people who were trading these spears could be dark bronze people from South America as opposed to African. My best guess would be from somewhere(s) in west and/or maybe central Africa. How can these accounts be explained away? Of course I was taken aback by the bold claim. In the first place, there are no Egyptian historical records which suggest that the Egyptians ever sailed to America or even attempted such a journey. If anything, the only thing Van Sertimas book is good for is a good laugh into the delusions of someone with the conclusion in mind, working backward to prove it (meaning, hes using the type of reverse engineering that EPists use). Note how these claims are eerily similar to claims of white gods that, for example, the Aztecs and Maya speak of. This is an inference that Van Sertima makes, but he presents his inference as a fact. Van Sertima's work on Olmec civilization has been criticised by Mesoamerican academics,[17] who describe his claims to be ill-founded and false. During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. Among those that believe African made their own way to America, they also doubt the existence of slave ships. However, some of the biggest resting points of his theory attribute Mesoamerican pyramids, mummification, symbolism, mythology, calendar technology, and much of the art to African influence and guidance. Barbour, who has studied more than a quarter million figurines from Mesoamerican areas cited by Van Sertima, said the depictions even more easily could portray facial types of native Americans, and no convincing evidence supports African influence on Mesoamerican architecture or culture. [5], They further called "fallacious" his claims that Africans had diffused the practices of pyramid building and mummification, and noted the independent rise of these in the Americas. Since my earlier days of schooling, I have informally encountered bits and pieces of information such as the story of Mansa Musa, the richest man in history, but not much else. They follow that quote with this statement: "In spite of the above evidence, education and curriculum development literature are generally silent on the Olmecs" (pg 5). They wear the hairs brought down to the eyebrows, except a few locks behind, which they wear long and never cut. While many found Van Sertimas scholarship flawed, his theory has many supporters. Ivan Van Sertima is a fringe Afrocentric theorist (they all are), who argued that there was an African presence in America, long before Colombus set shore in the Bahamas in 1492. Required fields are marked *. Your email address will not be published. Though Egypt is located in Africa, typically little of its success has been attributed to black people, but rather to those who migrated from the Middle East. "I nver expected any money," he explains. However, Columbus actually sent back on a mail boat to Spain, samples of these gold-tipped metal spears. It was with the coming of Columbus that the twilight of the red and black races began. History, as taught in the Western and Western-dominated world, gives the impression that the first Africans to reach the Americas were brought as slaves, in shackles on slaves-ships. What normativity means has implications for many things in philosophy and science. So again, thanks. Ocean currents such as the Guinea and Canary currents were likely to have aided Africans sailing to America as well. Im not sure how legal that is, but I say thanks. Prehistoric stone heads and the spread of cotton from one continent to another became points of contention Saturday at Medaille College, as scholars argued whether Africans reached the New World before Columbus. "How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? I wasn't halfway through this book and I was thoroughly offended, but I finished it just to hear their point of view. [6] He became Associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers in the Department of Africana Studies in 1979. Van Sertima was among those who argued that the Olmec had African origins, whereas others such as Mike Xu have argued that the Olmec civilization has Asian roots. "I kept quiet about my work. Dan Von Hoyel ~ Black Before Columbus Came: The African Discovery of America Odd Salon DISCOVERY: Six stories of rigorous inquiry and accidental revelations, [] The belief that Africans were in the Americas before the Europeans were makes sense to me. 1337 Words. What did we do? Van Sertima also includes photos of an African man and woman for comparison, but he does not include pictures of inhabitants of the area where the artifacts were found. The g-spot has been referred to as the female prostate (Puppo, 2014) and, 2550 words Steatopygia is an extreme accumulatation of large amounts of fat on the buttocks, and is also known as obesity in the coccyx (Wallner, 2400 words In the year 2000, psychologist Erik Turkheimer proposed three laws of behavioral genetics (LoBG hereafter): First Law.
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