What do you think about this?
In 1862, a farmer clearing a field in Veracruz, Mexico hit something with his plow. Not a rock. A face. Carved in black basalt, taller than a man, with full lips, wide nose, heavy brow, and an expression somewhere between calm and command.
That was the first of them. To date, archaeologists have catalogued seventeen colossal stone heads carved by the Olmec civilization, the so called mother culture of Mesoamerica. They date from around 1500 to 400 BC, which puts them roughly contemporary with the building of the Parthenon.
Each head was carved from a single block of basalt. The largest weighs in at twenty five tons. The quarries are sourced to the Tuxtla Mountains, between fifty and a hundred miles from where the heads were finally placed. The Olmec did not have the wheel, did not have draft animals, did not have iron tools. They moved these blocks through jungle, across rivers, with rope and human hands.
And then the faces themselves. Mainstream scholars call them portraits of Olmec rulers, and there is good evidence for that. But the features have been debated for over a century. Some researchers see clear African characteristics and have argued for trans Atlantic contact long before Columbus. Others see indigenous Mesoamerican features misread through a colonial lens.
Either way, the achievement is staggering. A civilization with no metal, no wheel, no horse, moving twenty five ton stones through swamp, then carving them into faces that still look you in the eye three thousand years later.
Makes you wonder what the story we have been told about who came first is really missing.
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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