Ancient American, Polynesian, Asian Civilization

[MarathonTmatt]

I am starting this thread because this has been on my mind lately. I think there is evidence of a pre-historical civilization with culture and influence linking together the Americas, Polynesia, and different places in Asia.
Lets start by analyzing the statues of Easter Island. They are large statues depicted with long ears, a top knot on the head, and they have their hands over their navels. These statues are very old. Now let's look at how Buddha is depicted in different statues, etc.- long ears, a top knot, with hands over navel. Hmm.

Could it be that the statues of Easter Island depict a deity or cultural concept that pre-dates Buddhism, which modern Buddhism as we know it today, was influenced from? (but maybe modern people have "cultural amnesia" of this); or perhaps vice versa?

There have also been little Easter Island statues found in South America, in places like Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, as well as other small statues which depict people with long ears, wearing a head-dress, sitting in a lotus position. Easter Island is very easy to get to from South America, in fact it was (and maybe still is?) under colonial rule from Chile.
We know that the Polynesian culture made their way up to what is now parts of North America- certain NDN Nations, such as in California, have very Polynesian-like language, customs and even water-craft.
Some of the lesser-known stone works of Easter Island such as family heirlooms, look very Meso-American. The Pacific Ocean is also the birthplace of Tsunamis- look what has happened to the Phillipines the other month, Japan and Indonesia in recent years. Researchers and professionals have found sunken Archipelogo's of Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Now think. If this was thousands of years ago, wouldn't these now-sunken archipelogo's of islands have made it easier to island-hop, and to navigate from Asia to the Americas and all through-out Polynesia? Could there be a shared historical culture here that the "experts" are missing?

For instance I heard of one shrine in Bangkok Thailand houses a faithful reproduction of a relic, a gold stone, that commemorates the loss of an early homeland. And don't some of the Polynesian ceremonies have a striking resemblance to Asian ceremonies, such as hand gestures in dances, etc. Lastly I would add that some of the pre-Incan temples in Peru have strikingly the same design as the earliest known temples in Japan. Does anybody else have any more insights about a Native American, Polynesian and Asian homelands connection?

(Note: Please do not bring up the Bering Strait theory. First of all, it is just a theory, not scientific fact. There is carbon dated charcoal evidence that people were in Central America 50,000 yrs. ago, and 30,000 yrs. ago in Texas, USA and Peru. The oldest sites in Connecticut (USA) archeologists dug was 18,000 years ago. So sorry, if people came over to the America's over the Bering land bridge 10,000 years ago, that only accounts for one group of Native peoples, not all Native peoples of Turtle Island. A great book to read I recommend is Vine Deloria Jr's books "Red Earth, White Lies" and "God is Red.")

As someone of Native American descent (from the north-eastern United States/Canada) I find this area of research interesting. It is time to once and for all set the record straight about who we are, and not what the white man wants us or tells us to be. Also, Charles Darwin is one of the biggest scientific frauds in human history. This kind of research is in it's infancy, and if anyone has anymore insights into a pre-historical American/Polynesian and Asian connection, then let's use this thread for that. This kind of research could get into things like:
Is the concept of Buddhism, and Buddhist relics (as highlighted by Easter Island examples) be older than modern people realize? Were these teachings practiced in the ancient Americas, in Polynesia and ancient Asia? Could it be that the way people perceive and depict Buddhism these days (even for a few thousand years) just be the latest incarnation of this very old concept?? Was there an ancient shared civilization between these places?

[GoldenBrain]

A recent genetic study pretty much confirms that nearly all Native Americans from Canada down to S. America are decedents of NE Asia, or rather Siberia. Polynesians DNA has been found in some of the tribes of S. America, but this was way after the Clovis. I don't think there is much if any polynesian DNA that made it to N. America and Canada. I could be wrong. The Clovis study is below, with some quotes from the article.

Published in Nature, the boy’s genome sequence shows that the present day indi*genous population groups spanning North and South America are all descended from a single population that trekked across the Bering land bridge from Asia (M. Rasmussen et al. Nature 506, 225–229; 2014). The analysis also points to an early split between the ancestors of the Clovis people and a second group, whose DNA lives on in populations in Canada and Greenland.

The approximate estimate is that some 80 % of all present-day Native American populations on both American continents are direct descendants of the Clovis boy’s family. The remaining 20 % are more closely related with the Clovis family than any other people on Earth.

“We can see that the Clovis boy shares about 1/3 of his genes with the 24,000 year old child from Mal’ta at the Siberian Lake Baikal who we have analysed previously. The same goes for all present day Native Americans. Therefore the encounter between East Asians and the Mal’ta group happened before Clovis.”

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index....erican-lineage

[Jimbo]

I heard that there are some interesting similarities (connections?) between the Zuni language and ancient Japanese, along with similar creation myths, etc., etc.

[pazman]

The Easter Island heads were made about 500 years ago.

[MarathonTmatt]

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index....erican-lineage

Quotes from the article:
[Today there exists only one human skeleton found in association with Clovis tools and at the same time it is among the oldest in the Americas. It is a small boy between 1 and 1.5 years of age – found in a 12,600 old burial called the Anzick Site, in Wilsall, Montana, USA.
We can see that the Clovis boy shares about 1/3 of his genes with the 24,000 year old child from Mal’ta at the Siberian Lake Baikal who we have analysed previously. The same goes for all present day Native Americans. Therefore the encounter between East Asians and the Mal’ta group happened before Clovis.”]

My comments: Well, it's good that the researchers know that the clovis boy is Native American now, and not European. That's a win. They used to say the Bering Land Bridge was 10,000 yrs. old. They keep pushing the date back as they publish new evidence like this. And then of course there is evidence, such as 50,000 yr. old charcoal remains in Brazil, that they do not widely publish because it challenges the theory that these people's works are based on. In my opinion, this is evidence and research done on only 1 skeletal remains, and they can make it fit into the Bering Strait Land Bridge theory quite well, by pushing the land bridge theory back a couple thousand years. But don't be surprised if there are older skeletal remains still that will once again stump these people in the future. What about the other 2/3 of this ancestor's genes? IMO there is some credit to the Bering Land Bridge with some groups, but people give it too much credit, no way does it account for the entire population of the America's from Alaska to Peru.

[MarathonTmatt]

The Easter Island heads were made about 500 years ago.

"How do we set this most powerful group of scholars to look beyond doctrine and begin to consider alternative interpretations? Many discoveries of early man, in fully modern form, have been made in the Western Hemisphere but they are dated very late because of doctrinal considerations, not because of the evidence gathered by scientific excavations..." -Vine Deloria Jr.

The archeologists and anthropologists WANT the Easter Island heads to only be 500 years old, even though most of them were buried beneath many feet of dirt in a tropical climate. I also reject that the Mayan and Aztec temples are only 600 hundred, 700 hundred years old also. Even the pyramids in Egypt are older than what they claim. What we have here, in these cases, are huge structures such as temples and statues which cannot be ignored. Since they cannot be ignored and do not fit with these professional's agendas concerning human civilization, they slyly slap a later date onto these structures, which is the best tool they have to dismiss them, they can no longer destroy these places at the rate they did in colonial times, too much awareness now has been raised. Heck, 100 years ago people thought that Cahokia and the Mississipian Mound building culture could not have been indigenous American Indian. Today most people know better and it is recognized that yes, these are ancestral Native American temples, cities, etc.
I don't have all the answers, I am only asking questions and pointing some things out. But I would encourage anyone to do their own research.

[MarathonTmatt]

here is a very good 8 minute clip on YouTube about Cahokia, the ancient city outside present-day St. Louis and Illinois In the United States. Note the high temples, artwork, etc:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLoqU...yer_detailpage

[David Jamieson]

here is a very good 8 minute clip on YouTube about Cahokia, the ancient city outside present-day St. Louis and Illinois In the United States. Note the high temples, artwork, etc:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLoqU...yer_detailpage

When the Ice age finished up. Lots of migration and cultural shift happened.
Some of the species of humans who flourished during the ice age, were poorly adapted to deal with the fading of it and so, they died off. Mainly speaking of Neanderthals (who are only called that because of where the example of them was found).

We know that there was seafaring technology in ancient times. As far back as early dynastic egypt.
It is probable that some sailors undertook to travel afar and got set adrift etc and wound up in far off places.
Easter Island could have been Tamil sailors. there is a rock wall in California that could have been built by Ming Chinese, there is absolute certainty regarding Norse in North America 500 years before Columbus.

What we find and try to understand is a mere fraction of what there was.

What I find interesting is just how poorly we transition from age to age. We are a frightfully stupid species unable to trace back with much certainty if any for beyond a few generations an then it gets foggy. We commit war upon each other and in efforts to save face, we destroy entire other cultures and steal from them what we like of theirs.

I honestly don't think the world would be worse off without us entirely. We are more like a plague than any sort of help to this world. I don't mean to throw a dark rag over it. But I have a great difficulty seeing humanity as something of value to this world, or even to itself. Historically speaking, we just get more violent, more greedy and we move on to more and more destruction until finally, we ourselves will have to move on to some other world where we will likely continue, or we sputter out like a used candle in the same manner of most other species that have lived on this world before us.

[MarathonTmatt]

Thanks david for the insight. no, you are not sounding too dark or cynical, more people should think like that so they realize what they're doing!

Here is some info about sweet potatoes. as far as researchers can tell, they originated in central and south America almost 10,000 yrs. ago. yet, they are also found in Polynesia, such as Hawaii and Easter Island for a couple thousand years back. So, how else did they get to the Polynesian islands if it wasn't for cultural exchange thousands of years ago between south America and Polynesia? Here is some info from the article I dug up:

{The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a root crop, probably first domesticated somewhere between the Orinoco river in Venezuela north to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The oldest sweet potato discovered to date was in the Tres Ventanas cave in the Chilca Canyon region of Peru, ca. 8000 BC, but it is believed to have been a wild form. Recent genetic research suggests that Ipomoea trifida, native to Colombia, Venezuela and Costa Rica, is the closest living relative of I. batantas, and may be its progenitor.

The oldest remains of domesticated sweet potato in the Americas were found in Peru, about 2500 BC. In Polynesia, decidedly precolumbian sweet potato remains have been found in the Cook Islands by AD 1000-1100, Hawai'i by AD 1290-1430, and Easter Island by AD 1525. }

The domestic form of the sweet potato cannot be grown from seed and has to be propagated by tuber cuttings (a bit like a some commercial varieties of normal potato). It also gets killed by seawater. Yet it is grown widely across the tropical and sub-tropical Polynesian islands of the Pacific and appears to have been grown there since pre-Columbian times.

Perhaps most revealing is the sweet potato’s name, generally variants on the word ‘kumara‘ in Polynesian dialects (including Easter Island’s)%. If it had been brought by Spanish or other European sailors it would have had names reflecting that European origin, such as ‘batata‘, ‘kamote‘ or some such. However, the name is remarkably similar to a Quechua (Peruvian) name for the sweet potato, ‘khumara‘.

[MarathonTmatt]

When the Ice age finished up. Lots of migration and cultural shift happened.
Some of the species of humans who flourished during the ice age, were poorly adapted to deal with the fading of it and so, they died off. Mainly speaking of Neanderthals (who are only called that because of where the example of them was found).

We know that there was seafaring technology in ancient times. As far back as early dynastic egypt.
It is probable that some sailors undertook to travel afar and got set adrift etc and wound up in far off places.
Easter Island could have been Tamil sailors. there is a rock wall in California that could have been built by Ming Chinese, there is absolute certainty regarding Norse in North America 500 years before Columbus.
.

Yeah, that is all true. It's funny, how there are only 88 pyramids total in Egypt. In North and Central America, there are thousands of pyramids (in North America a lot of the pyramids are earthern-built, not stone built so the colonists called them "mounds.") Yet, North America isn't really famous for it's pyramid mounds or other ceremonial landscapes when it clearly should be. It's my understanding the Chinese also had earthern pyramids built at one point back in time. Some people could even argue that a type of early civilization started and came out of America, certainly this idea is on the table in my opinion. Also some of the American Indian traditions are eerily similar to other culture's beliefs such as the Egyptians, such as reverence for the high priest "The Great Sun," and the list goes on, and the rabbit hole gets deeper. I have met and talked with other Native American people, members of the Native American Church who are convinced that this is the case when analyzing the evidence.

Yeah, it's incredible how the Egyptians and other old cultures had far superior sailing fleets and ship-making skills than the European colonists who came here in the 1500's. Yet anthropology and archeology take a dominantly euro-centric stance when it comes to their worldview, I for one don't trust it.

Wow, David, you are citing a link between the Tamil (from India) and Easter Island. Now that's interesting!!

[MarathonTmatt]

There are a number of obsidian artifacts found in New England, such as obsidian stones incorporated in Native American cairn fields (www.nativestones.com), and arrowhead points, etc. Obsidian is a very sharp stone formed from lava, it is sharper than a piece of sharp glass, for instance, very easy to cut with (and perform surgery with- the indigenous culture of the America's and Polynesia did in fact use Obsidian for surgery.) Obsidian was widely used in the American West Coast and in Polynesia.
However, Obsidian cannot be obtained in New England, it is not found there, the closest sources would have had to of been traded from as far away as places like Utah, California, Washington and Oregon states in the USA. So this is yet more evidence of extensive pre-colonial trade routes, we are talking about thousands of miles.
I have seen examples of these obsidian artifacts in New England with my own eyes. An interesting article some professionals did you can Google is: "Analysis of an Obsidian Bi-face Reportedly Found in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont."

[pazman]

There are many interesting things to talk about with this subject:

Pre-Columbian contact


I was born in Colorado and later moved to Southeast Missouri. I've seen the ruins at Mesa Verde and many "mounds". Pictures in books don't do them justice. I don't think there is any question that contemporary scholars believe that there was a vast trade network across the Americas, with well developed cities providing the links. Have you visited Cahokia?

I'd like to go back to the original post, though. The idea of some proto-Buddhist pan-Pacific civilization is really stretching it. Buddhism and the traditions it grew out of are pretty well understood...people have been writing about it for thousands of years. If you are referring to sitting in lotus position and meditating, that's a pretty world-wide phenomenon, and that is an interesting subject. I picked on your Easter Island comment because there is no evidence for them being "thousands " of years old, unless you have some to share. I get the feeling you say they are "thousands" of years old because that's what fits the sort of narrative you'd like to hear. Unfortunately, this is no better than the ignorant archaeologists of the 19th century or the arrogance of claiming aliens built them because "primitive" people can't do it by themselves. I should amend my original comment to say they were built over a long period of time, perhaps starting a thousand years ago, which still makes them awesome as hell. But I think if you were to claim they were influenced by some sort of proto-Buddhist art, you'll have to add some further evidence.

[MarathonTmatt]

There are many interesting things to talk about with this subject:

Pre-Columbian contact


I was born in Colorado and later moved to Southeast Missouri. I've seen the ruins at Mesa Verde and many "mounds". Pictures in books don't do them justice. I don't think there is any question that contemporary scholars believe that there was a vast trade network across the Americas, with well developed cities providing the links. Have you visited Cahokia?

I'd like to go back to the original post, though. The idea of some proto-Buddhist pan-Pacific civilization is really stretching it. Buddhism and the traditions it grew out of are pretty well understood...people have been writing about it for thousands of years. If you are referring to sitting in lotus position and meditating, that's a pretty world-wide phenomenon, and that is an interesting subject. I picked on your Easter Island comment because there is no evidence for them being "thousands " of years old, unless you have some to share. I get the feeling you say they are "thousands" of years old because that's what fits the sort of narrative you'd like to hear. Unfortunately, this is no better than the ignorant archaeologists of the 19th century or the arrogance of claiming aliens built them because "primitive" people can't do it by themselves. I should amend my original comment to say they were built over a long period of time, perhaps starting a thousand years ago, which still makes them awesome as hell. But I think if you were to claim they were influenced by some sort of proto-Buddhist art, you'll have to add some further evidence.

I have not visited Cahokia, I have family in Chicago- my brother has been there. I have seen many extraordinary places, including mounds, in the Northeast.

Yes, the scholars are getting better, the younger generations are more progressive, but some of them are still considered to be "rogue" if they think outside the box- usually it takes someone outside the boxes of the archeology community to express ideas.
When I re-read my first post it does sound rant-ish in parts I wish I had elaborated that better. Ah well.

And, my post was concerning the latter- that there may be some sort of proto-Buddhist art/ cultural influence. Yes, more evidence is needed but it's on the table, up for debate- I am open to hear and think about people's ideas, interpretations, etc. Also I agree- the lotus-position statuettes found in South America and other places not in Asia is an interesting subject.

Also I do not believe in Darwinism, but not from a religious perspective, I do not believe we evolved from animals, such as apes. When people believe this, than what is their self-image and sense of possible supposed to be, individually and collectively? If the powers-that be (the Pope, Roman Church, world governments, etc.) control people's history and perception of themselves then that is a dangerous thing. Again, it is his theory of evolution, not his "fact" of evolution, but I guess that's another subject altogether. Man (people) in my opinion have always been intelligent, more or less the same as we are today, capable of greatness.

There are many flood stories in fact thousands from all over the world. There are sunken archipelogo's of islands in the Pacific. There could be cultures that have come and gone that modern people are not formally aware of. There could be an entire spread of civilization, culturally linked. Did you see my thread about the sweet potato in Polynesia? It came from Peru in pre-colonial times. The word for sweet potato is the same in Peru as well as Polynesia.
Also, researcher's know that rats from Southeast Asia introduced in pre-colonial times to Easter Island could have been a contributing factor to the decline of the island's forests.

So, in Polynesia we see sweet potatoes introduced by man from South America, and rats by way of SouthEast Asia. Keeping in mind the fact that there are sunken archipelgo's, it's not really much of a stretch to hypothesis a cultural link(s) between Asians, Polynesians and Native Americans through the Pacific Ocean in the ancient world.

[MarathonTmatt]

Hey wow, thanks Pazman for that Wikipedia article. It only gets more and more interesting after reading that!

[MarathonTmatt]

Here are some awesome-looking pics of pre-colonial statuettes from South America! They are sitting in a lotus posture!

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/im.../life48_36.jpg