The Philadelphia Inquirer said, ?? researchers identified the carved symbols as those of the Olmec civilization, an urbanized people who lived along the Mexican Gulf Coast from about 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C.? ?Anthropologists believe the Olmec heartland was in the modern Mexican Gulf (of Mexico) states of Veracruz and Tabasco. Since the 1940?s, researchers have found Olmec artwork, jewelry, and giant carved heads. The Olmec were skilled jade carvers, and built earthen pyramids and the first true cities in what is now Mexico. The later Olmec probably overlapped with early Mayan society, University of Pennsylvania professor Simon Martin said.?

In the second paragraph of this article, I described the Veracruz stone slab discovery as ?sensational,? because the Olmecs, Mexico?s first great civilization, were part Africans, and this was a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ. According to Ivan Van Sertima in They Came Before Columbus, the influence of Negro-Africans on Olmec culture was considerable. Even more profound was the impact of Olmec culture upon all future civilizations in Mesoamerica. As Michael Coe, the distinguished authority on Mexico, has pointed out, ?There is not the slightest doubt that all later civilizations in Mesoamerica, whether Mexican or Maya, rest ultimately on an Olmec base.?

It is not I who should be discussing these matters, but rather, the professional education establishment in Belize. They will not discuss these matters, because the professional educational establishment in Belize is controlled by the Christian churches, who have had 1492 as their sacred point of reference for Mesoamerican history, because the rapist and genocidal murderer, Christopher Columbus, is supposed to have commenced the civilizing and Christianizing of native American pagans and cannibals in that ?blessed? year.

To even begin to understand what happened with the Olmecs, who were a people derived from Mongoloid, African and Mediterranean elements, you must have a sense of what was happening in ancient Egypt around the time that the African presence amongst the Olmecs is established in stone. Let us consider the stone before we go to Egypt.

In 1862 the colossal granite head of an African was found in the Canton of Tuxtla. The historian Orozco y Berra declared that there had to be an important and intimate relationship between Mexicans and Africans in the pre-Columbian past. At that time, however, the African stone heads found in the Veracruz and Tabasco regions of Mexico could not be conclusively dated. According to Rutgers University professor Van Sertima, ?We now know, without the shadow of a doubt, through the most modern method of dating, that some of the Negroid stone heads found among the Olmecs and in other parts of Mexico and Central America are from as early as 800 to 700 B.C.?

Eleven African stone colossi were found in the Olmec world – four at La Venta, where there was one major Mediterranean ?type Caucasoid. Other African stone heads were found at Tres Zapotes and San Lorenzo. These heads were carved out of volcanic basalt stone more than two thousand years before Columbus ?discovered? the New World! In September 1974 the Polish craniologist Dr. Andrzej Wiercinski disclosed to the 41stCongress of Americanists, held in Mexico, that ?some of the skulls from Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alb?n (all pre-Christian sites in Mexico) show, to a different degree, a clear prevalence of the total Negroid pattern.?

It is quite interesting to note that of the four African heads found at La Venta, the largest one ? nine feet high, had its top flattened so that it would function as an altar. A speaking tube was found going in at the ear and out at the mouth. It was used as an oracle, a talking God. This was startlingly similar to the ?Talking Cross? cult at Noh Cah Santa Cruz which the Maya leaders used to sustain the morale and maintain the obedience of their people during the Caste War.

This column considers some of the evidence which shows that African people were major contributors to Mexican civilizations. There was a time, you see, when Africans were not slaves. In fact, the greatest world civilization, from four thousand years before Christ was born, was an African civilization ? Egypt. But most Belizeans still think Cleopatra looked like Elizabeth Taylor, and that Egypt, the most fabulous civilization in history, was European.

First of all, the Egyptians of today are different from the ancient Egyptians. Egyptian civilization collapsed just before the Christian era, and there was a massive Arab movement into North Africa. The fact is that modern examination of the skeletons of ancient Egyptians, according to Van Sertima, shows them to be ?of roughly the same racial composition as the blacks of a modern Caribbean island, with a predominantly Negroid base and traces of Asiatic and Caucasoid admixtures. The Nile was the meeting place of races, but the Negro-African element both before and during several of the dynasties was a dominant racial element.?

As early as 1905, the research of David Thomson, an Oxford University professor of anatomy, and Randall McIver, an Egyptologist of the same university, established that from the early predynastic period to the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, 24 percent of the males and 19.5 percent of the females were ?pure Negro.? Between the Sixth to the Eighteenth Dynasty, about 20 percent of the males and 15 percent of the females were ?pure Negro.? An even larger percentage were ?intermediates? with ?Negroid? physical characteristics.

During the period between 800 and 700 B.C., the period when the Olmecs in Mexico were influenced by African civilization, Egyptian civilization was ruled by black Pharaohs ? Nubians from a land south of the Egyptians. The black princes of the Twenty Fifty Dynasty (from circa 751 to 654 B.C.) dominated the Egyptian empire from the shores of the Mediterranean to the borders of modern Ethiopia.

There is no way to explain the Olmec civilization, based on the evidence we have, unless we concede that Egypt made contact with what we now know as Mexico. Van Sertima?s evidence is overwhelming. Next week I will discuss how the Egyptians reached Mexico more than two thousand years before Columbus. For now, I will close with a quote from Van Sertima (page 32) in They Came Before Columbus, first published by Random House in 1976:

?Is it not strange that it is in this very period when the Negro-African begins to appear in Mexico and to affect significantly the Olmec culture that the first pyramids, mummies, trepannated skulls, stelae and hieroglyphics begin to appear in America? Is it not strange that it is during this very period that a Negro-African dynasty gains ascendancy in Egypt, and black Pharaohs (Negro-Nubians) don the plumed serpent crown of Upper and Lower Egypt? No mummies, no pyramids, appear in this hemisphere during the heyday of these things in the Egyptian world, but suddenly they spring up in full flower at the same point in time as the Negro-Nubians usher in an Egyptian cultural renaissance, restoring these features that had long lapsed in Egypt and for which there are no evolutionary precedents in America.?