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mardi, 03 mai 2016

Chachapoya

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Chachapoya

By

Ex: https://www.lewrockwell.com

On the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains, in the remote San Martin Province of Peru, lie the abandoned ruins of a mysterious civilization. Modern Peruvians tell us that a people whom they call the Chachapoya, “the cloud people,” built these structures. The most notable of these is the massive Kuelap Fortress, which contains more stone than even the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The Chachapoyan civilization, which according to the carbon-14 dating method dates at least as far back as 400 AD, existed until around 1500 AD. At that time, it succumbed to two external forces that arose in short succession. First, the expanding Incan Empire, which conquered the Chachapoyan civilization around 1490 after 20 years of fierce resistance, and next, diseases that the Europeans introduced after 1492 and which started showing up among the Chachapoya around 1535, diseases to which the Chachapoya had no immunity.

The principal mystery of the Chachapoyan civilization lies in is its origin. The Chachapoyan ruins give evidence of an advanced civilization that must have required centuries to develop. Yet none of this development appears to have taken place in South America. Culturally the Chachapoyan civilization seems to have borrowed nothing from other South American civilizations and geographically the Chachapoya were not even near any of them. The Chachapoyan civilization, therefore, most likely arose in ancient times somewhere outside of South America, and then, still in ancient times, dropped down out of nowhere in Peru.

giff.jpgProfessor Hans Giffhorn of Germany has made studying the Chachapoyan civilization his life’s work and has advanced an interesting theory regarding its origin.  After many years of research starting in the 1990’s, Professor Giffhorn published a fascinating German language book in 2013 entitled Wurde Amerika in der Antike entdeckt? (“Was America discovered in antiquity?”)

Professor Giffhorn draws on scientific evidence to demonstrate that the Chachapoya probably came from the Old World. Medical examinations of Chachapoyan mummies starting around ten years ago at Quinnipiac College near New Haven, Connecticut have proved that some of the Chachapoya suffered from the disease of tuberculosis. Now tuberculosis is a disease that human beings ordinarily contract from cattle. Inasmuch as there were no cattle in the New World prior to 1492, it is logical to suspect that the ancestors of the Chachapoya contracted tuberculosis somewhere in the Old World where cattle were present and then brought the tuberculosis with them to South America.

Professor Giffhorn draws on cultural evidence to pinpoint Europe in general and the Mediterranean Sea in particular as the specific region in the Old World where the Chachapoyan civilization most likely arose.  Giffhorn drew this conclusion after noting many similarities between the Chachapoyan civilization and two civilizations of ancient Europe, the Carthaginian civilization of the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean Sea and the Keltic civilization of northern Spain. Among these are similarities in burial customs, religion, art, pottery, and the weaving of textiles. There are several pieces of evidence, however, that deserve special mention.

First, both the ancient Kelts and the Chachapoya kept the skulls of enemies that they had defeated in battle and then publicly displayed these skulls in and around their homes and other buildings. Moreover, both the Kelts and the Chachapoya customarily drilled holes in these skulls using an unusual technique requiring the use of conical drills.

Secondly, both the Chachapoya of Peru and the Kelts of ancient Spain customarily built round buildings out of stone rather than rectangular or square buildings out of wood, as was the custom throughout most of pre-Columbian South America. Separate teams of archeologists have reconstructed both sets of round stone buildings, and, as is obvious even from their photographs in Professor Giffhorn’s book, they are almost identical, in spite of the fact that the European and South American teams of archeologists were unaware of each other until after they had completed their reconstructions.

Thirdly, the Chachapoya used slingshots as military weapons. Moreover, the slingshots used by the Chachapoya resembled in many details those used by the ancient Carthaginian warriors in the Balearic Islands. Slingshots of were common weapons throughout the ancient Mediterranean. For example, recall the Old Testament story of David and Goliath.

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Professor Giffhorn tries to make sense of all of this by starting with proven facts about antiquity and then connecting them with some educated guesses. In this way he has provided a speculative but by no means impossible scenario that traces the migration of certain ancient peoples all the way from Europe to Peru.

It is known that the ancient Carthaginians were bold explorers who, starting roughly around 700 BC, mounted a series of maritime expeditions that started from the Mediterranean Sea, passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean, and then sailed a long way down the coast of Africa. Their Mediterranean neighbors, including even the Romans, had little interest in exploring the Atlantic Ocean, partly out of superstitious fears of monsters and other dangers that lurked beyond Gibraltar. This gave the Carthaginians free reign to continue their explorations without interference from rivals. Moreover, there is evidence that the ancient Carthaginians not only traveled a great distance to the south but also a great distance to the west. In 1749, Carthaginian coins were discovered on the island of Corvu in the Azores Islands. The location of Corvu at the far western end of the Azores suggests that whoever left these coins had probably been traveling from west to east when they stopped at Corvu.

Two ancient writers provide some tantalizing details regarding the Carthaginians’ explorations: Diodor of Sicily, who lived about a century before Christ, and Pseudo-Aristotle, a mysterious man whose writings were included in the works of Aristotle but who was probably someone other than the famous Greek philosopher. These ancient writers tell a similar story, some of it based on the still earlier writings of Timaios of Tauromenium, Sicily (c. 345‑250 BC). According to these ancient writers, around 400 BC Carthaginian explorers sailing along the coast of Africa lost control of their ships during a fierce storm and eventually landed far to the west on what they called the “Great Island.” Now the Carthaginians’ main interest had always been in trade, but they saw no possibility for developing a trading relationship with a land that they assumed to be uninhabited. So after the Carthaginians recovered from their misfortunes, they made their way back to their homeland without leaving any colonists behind.  At the same time, they did at least take note of the precise location of the Great Island and carefully kept it to themselves. In the event that their Mediterranean homeland were ever overrun, the Carthaginians had a safe haven whose location only they knew and where they could start afresh without interference from any of their former neighbors.

But this still leaves open the question of just where the Carthaginians had landed.  Historians have usually assumed that the Great Island was most likely Madeira, but could also have been either one of the Cape Verde Islands or one of the Canary Islands. Professor Giffhorn, however, points out that if these historians had taken the trouble to visit these islands, they might have had second thoughts before so quickly identifying any of them as the Great Island. According to the Carthaginian descriptions that have come down to us second­-hand from the ancient writers, the Great Island was a bountiful land filled with navigable rivers, fruits, wild animals, wide plains, and many species of trees. By contrast, the above‑mentioned Atlantic islands were desolate islands with no navigable rivers, few plains, and not much to offer in the way of wild game, fruits, or vegetables. Most of what they do have today was imported by modern Europeans and could not have been visible to ancient explorers.

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Might the Great Island have been a Caribbean island, perhaps one of those that Columbus discovered in 1492? It is not likely. According to the ancient writers, the Carthaginians reached the Great Island in far less time than would have been required to reach any of the Caribbean islands.

The only land that really fits the description of the Great Island is, surprisingly, the stretch of South American coast between what are now the Brazilian cities of Fortaleza and Recife. Now the reader might reasonably object that if the Great Island had really been northeastern Brazil, then that would imply that the Carthaginian sailors had been blown from the west coast of Africa all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the east coast of South America. Could such a thing have been possible? As implausible as it may seem to us, this is precisely what did happen in 1500 AD to Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral, the modern discoverer of Brazil. We should bear in mind that the eastern tip of Brazil is only about 1800 miles away from the Western Bulge of Africa, roughly the distance between New York City and Denver. Even today, objects like worn-out refrigerators tossed into the Atlantic Ocean by West Africans have been known to wash up on Brazilian beaches.

For a long time, the Carthaginian civilization thrived to the extent that the Carthaginians had no need to worry about the future of their homeland. Eventually, however, they found themselves up against a powerful new enemy in the Romans. In 146 BC, the Romans captured and destroyed the city of Carthage on the north coast of Africa in what is now the nation of Tunisia. Although the Romans had conquered Carthage, the Carthaginian colonies in the Balearic Islands continued for the time being to remain free of Roman control. But their inhabitants were undoubtedly aware of the downfall of their mother-city of Carthage and may have concluded that it was only a matter of time until they suffered the same fate. Rather than stand by and wait until their turn came, the more enterprising persons among them made plans to move permanently to the half-forgotten Great Island. Before setting sail, however, the Carthaginians brought in their old friends and allies from northern Spain, the Kelts, as junior partners. It was a far-sighted move. The Kelts had considerable experience in agriculture, something that might prove handy on the Great Island and something that the Carthaginians themselves sorely lacked. For their part, the Kelts might not have needed much persuasion to join the Carthaginians on their journey to the Great Island. The Kelts despised the Romans as much as the Carthaginians did and might have shared their fears as to what would happen to them if they too fell under Roman control.

After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the Kelts and the Carthaginians probably landed near what is now the city of Recife. Instead of being content to settle right where they landed, however, the Europeans began looking for an opening into the interior of South America. The newly arrived Europeans might have been motivated by fears that Roman pursuers were hot on their heels and ready to drag them back to a life of slavery in the Roman Empire. Such fears might not have been entirely unfounded. The ancient writers tell us that shortly after the destruction of Carthage, the Romans sent a naval expedition, led by one of the military commanders involved in the destruction of that city, down the coast of Africa to approximately the latitude of the Cape Verde Islands. After not finding what they were looking for, the Romans turned around and sailed back to the Mediterranean empty‑handed. Just what the Romans had been looking for was not recorded, but perhaps it was runaway Kelts and Carthaginians.

In their search for a suitable opening into the interior, the Kelts and the Carthaginians proceeded north along the Brazilian coast and eventually bumped into the mouth of the mighty Amazon River. They might have been initially tempted to settle there permanently. Agriculture was possible there, and at least the Kelts had experience in agriculture. But the Kelts’ experience had been in Europe, so they might not have had the skills to succeed in the lower Amazon, where different conditions might have required a different set of skills. Moreover, remaining in the lower Amazon would have meant facing hostile and numerically superior Indian tribes. So the Kelts and the Carthaginians started up the Amazon River and just kept going and going. Eventually after years of working their way up the river, they found the homeland they had been looking for in Peru. In addition to providing them with a somewhat familiar climate and an opportunity to practice a form of agriculture that they did understand, the new land offered them security. Distance protected them from the brutal Indian tribes to the east and the towering Andes Mountains protected them from any potential enemies to the west. So here the Kelts and the Carthaginians settled down after their heroic odyssey and started a new life that lasted until around 1500 AD.

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Although the Carthaginians probably conceived the plan to migrate to the Great Island, in the end, it was the Kelts who put the greater stamp on the civilization that emerged in Peru. Professor Giffhorn has provided a medical explanation for this disparity. When the Carthaginians teamed up with the Kelts in their joint move to the Great Island, they did not realize that the Kelts, who had mainly been farmers, had a long history of contact with cattle and exposure to tuberculosis. Now by this time the Kelts themselves had developed immunity to tuberculosis, but the Carthaginians, who had not been farmers, had had no such contact and had developed no such immunity. So the intermingling of the Kelts and the Carthaginians might have hit the Carthaginians very hard, with many of them succumbing to tuberculosis that they contracted from the Kelts even as the Kelts themselves remained healthy.

The Chachapoyan civilization is long gone and the conventional view has it that the Chachapoyan people died out without leaving any descendants. In three remote Peruvian villages, however, there live people who look remarkably like Europeans. Having fair complexions, freckles, often red or blond hair (combined, oddly enough, with brown rather than blue eyes), the Gringuitos, as they are called by the Peruvians, resemble Irishmen more than they resemble South Americans. According to local lore, the Gringuitos had already been in Peru centuries before Columbus and are not descended from any of the Europeans who arrived after 1492. We can find a possible explanation for the origin of the Gringuitos in the writings of Spanish soldier and poet Garcilaso de la Vega (1501-1536). According to the latter, around the time that the Chachapoyan civilization was beginning to crumble, some of the Chachapoya saw the handwriting on the wall and fled into remote regions for their own safety. Such a flight might have protected them from both Incan warriors and from European diseases and enabled them to continue their lives and culture in another location, even down to the present day.

Modern DNA technology might throw some light on this subject. Archeologists would like to use DNA analysis on the above-mentioned Chachapoyan mummies, but the Peruvian Government up to now has not permitted such testing, perhaps out of fear that the results might offend Peruvian pride by showing that the Chachapoyan civilization was only European in origin. Professor Giffhorn and his team, however, were at least able to conduct DNA testing of saliva samples provided by a small number of the Gringuitos. The results of this random testing show a strong resemblance to the pattern of DNA found in northern and northwestern Spain, precisely the regions controlled long ago by Kelts. It would appear possible, therefore, that the Gringuitos are descended from the Chachapoya, who in turn were descended from the Kelts and the Carthaginians. If that is indeed the case, then the Gringuitos would have to be reckoned among history’s greatest survivors. Twice in their history, they escaped extinction in the nick of time. The first time, around 150 BC, they fled their Mediterranean homeland to escape from the Romans. Then after about 1500 BC, they fled their Chachapoyan homeland to escape from the Incas and the Europeans.

00:05 Publié dans archéologie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : chachapoyas, archéologie, pérou, amérique du sud, andes | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

jeudi, 18 décembre 2014

Les Celtes ont-ils découvert l’Amérique 1.500 ans avant Colomb?

Les Celtes ont-ils découvert l’Amérique 1.500 ans avant Colomb?

Aux confins des Andes et de l’Amazonie, des archéologues ont trouvé les traces d’un peuple depuis longtemps disparu, plus ancien que les Incas et dont l’origine reste un mystère : les Chachapoyas.

De leur passage restent quelques vestiges, notamment des nécropoles et la plus grande citadelle connue du continent américain, à Kuelap, au Pérou.

Depuis des années, le chercheur allemand Hans Giffhorn collecte des indices tendant à prouver que les Chachapoyas descendaient des Celtes. D’étonnantes analogies lient en effet les deux civilisations : constructions en pierre de forme ronde, symboles religieux, représentation des divinités, techniques de trépanation médicales ou cultuelles, ou même certaines armes comme les lance-pierres.

Une thèse étayée par les écrits de l’historien grec Diodore de Sicile, au Ier siècle avant J.-C., affirmant que les Carthaginois connaissaient des terres mystérieuses très loin à l’ouest de l’Atlantique. Auraient-ils affrété des navires dans cette direction en embarquant des Celtes dont ils prisaient les qualités de soldats d’élite ?

De nombreux descendants des Chachapoyas du Pérou ont aujourd’hui la peau claire et les cheveux blonds : seraient-ils des Celtes arrivés avec les Carthaginois ?

mardi, 04 novembre 2014

Chachapoya of Peru Are Probably Carthaginians and Celts Who Fled from Rome in 146 BCE

PBS: Chachapoya of Peru Are Probably Carthaginians and Celts Who Fled from Rome in 146 BCE

Ex: http://www.jasoncolavito.com 
 
See also: ARTE's Broadcasting: http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/048610-000/karthagos-vergessene-krieger
 
9783406645204_large.jpgHoly crap! PBS has become America Unearthed. In an episode of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead running on local PBS stations this week and available online for streaming, the venerable public broadcasting channel asserts that blonde-haired, blue-eyed Celts and also some incidental Carthaginians discovered the Americas in Antiquity. (The blue eyes don’t make the show but show up on the show’s web page.) “Carthage’s Lost Warriors” was produced by ZDF, a German television production company associated with the long-running series Terra-X, which traffics in all manner of fringe theories, and the large number of dubbed German interviews testifies to the recycling of a German program. Archaeologist K. Krist Hurst called the show “baloney.”
 
The show opens with a “Celtic-style bronze axed” found “deep in the Amazon” and the narrator, Jay O. Sanders, asks if—heaven help us!—the Chachapoya are truly the blond, Caucasian descendants of prehistoric superhero warriors (martial prowess specified explicitly) who crossed the Atlantic at some unspecified date to penetrate the continent with their manly thrusts until they fertilized Peru with the glory of Old World culture.

The program is based on the work of the show’s chief expert, Hans Giffhorn, a professor emeritus of cultural studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Hildesheim and documentary filmmaker. Griffhorn’s dissertation on aesthetics outlined his belief that science is dogmatic and rigid and excludes evidence and theories that fail to conform to paradigms, and that a lack of cross-disciplinary interaction has led to erroneous findings and conclusions.

Griffhorn wrote a German book, still untranslated, on his belief that the Chachapoya are white Europeans in 2013.He believes that the Carthaginians did not “simply vanish” after the Carthaginians were defeated by the Romans in 146 BCE, and he refuses to believe Roman accounts that the city’s population was enslaved or killed under Scipio Aemilianus. He wants to know where they went. To find the Carthaginians—and here he is looking for just one boatload—he starts at the Balearic Islands, where Carthage found its fiercest soldiers. Giffhorn feels that the Carthaginians were not enslaved in their entirety, so for him it is only logical that they fled to Kuelap, the Chachapoya fortress in Peru. He believes that in the western Mediterranean the Carthaginian exiles teamed up with Celtic people from Iberia to escape the Romans, who were also taking over the Carthaginian territories of what is today Spain.

Celtic prowess combined with Carthaginian sailing skills to cross the Atlantic.

culture-civilisation-chachapoyas-266x280.pngGriffhorn believes the Diodorus Siculus proves that the Carthaginians reached the Americas. Diodorus (Library of History 5.19-20) first describes an island, not a continent, “over against Libya”—meaning off the African coast—and states that it contains stately towns and fruitful plains when the Phoenicians discovered it:
The Phoenicians therefore, upon the account before related, having found out the coasts beyond the pillars, and sailing along by the shore of Africa, were on a sudden driven by a furious storm afar off into the main ocean; and after they had lain under this violent tempest for many days, they at length arrived at this island; and so, coming to the knowledge of the nature and pleasantness of this isle, they caused it to be known to everyone; and therefore the Tyrrhenians, when they were masters at sea, designed to send a colony thither; but the Carthaginians opposed them, both fearing lest most of their own citizens should be allured through the goodness of the island to settle there, and likewise intending to keep it as a place of refuge for themselves, in case of any sudden and unexpected blasts of fortune, which might tend to the utter ruin of their government: for, being then potent at sea, they doubted not but they could easily transport themselves and their families into that island unknown to the conquerors. (trans. G. Booth)
ubicacion chachapoyas.GIFHe, of course, leaves out the information Diodorus—and, crucially, pseudo-Aristotle three centuries earlier, unacknowledged here—gave about the location of this mysterious island, which regular readers will of course remember quite well from when these same texts were used by Harry Hubbard to claim ancient knowledge of North America, and also from America Unearthed, when Mark McMenamin used the same text from Diodorus to claim that the Phoenicians, not the Carthaginians, discovered America.

Pseudo-Aristotle (De mirabilis auscultationibus 84) writes that:
In the sea outside the Pillars of Hercules they say that an island was discovered by the Carthaginians, desolate, having wood of every kind, and navigable rivers, and admirable for its fruits besides, but distant several days’ voyage from them. But, when the Carthaginians often came to this island because of its fertility, and some even dwelt there, the magistrates of the Carthaginians gave notice that they would punish with death those who should sail to it, and destroyed all the inhabitants, lest they should spread a report about it, or a large number might gather together to the island in their time, get possession of the authority, and destroy the prosperity of the Carthaginians. (trans. Launcelot D. Dowdall)
This land was in frequent contact with Carthage before 300 BCE—not a one-time chance encounter in 146 BCE—and was only a few days’ sail from the Pillars. Brazil is about ninety days’ sail from the Pillars, according to the show’s own estimate. It’s a bit of a difference between three months and a few days.

Griffhorn suggests from such texts that the Carthaginians had had secret communication with Brazil but kept it secret. This seems rather odd considering that the Carthaginians put up in the public square a commemoration of the voyage of Hanno to central Africa, where he saw chimpanzees. Surely they would have kept that secret, too, had that been their typical practice, as Griffhorn suggests.

At this point, the Carthaginians virtually vanish from the show because they were needed solely to give the Celts something they lack—ships—for Griffhorn’s real thesis, that the Celts are the ancestors of the Chachapoya and once reigned over South America.
 

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The program tries to make the case that a boat could have crossed to Brazil using the ocean currents. Griffhorn places the discovery of Brazil by the Carthaginians and Celts at “1500 years before Columbus,” which would be about 10 BCE, long after the fall of Carthage. This makes no sense since Diodorus wrote between two and five decades earlier and pseudo-Aristotle three centuries before that—and both claimed the story reported much older events.

Griffhorn believes that the Carthaginian boat pilots traded with local cannibals (with what?) to survive, and Griffhorn believes that four symbols on the ancient petroglyphs on the rock of Ingá in Brazil aren’t just coincidentally close to geometrical shapes used in Celtiberian alphabets but are actual Celtic letters. Apparently the Carthaginian merchants were the merchant class serving the Celtic warrior elite.

Based on no evidence whatsoever, Griffhorn suggests that the Carthaginians and Celts on this voyage of discovery sailed up the Amazon. “No account exists, and we can only imagine” what they did, the narrator says, substituting early Spanish and Portuguese accounts to give an idea of what the Carthaginians “would have” seen and done. So, to recap: Everyone admits that no evidence exists, but they will nevertheless reconstruct an entire adventure based on analogies.

The narrator suggests that brightly-colored vases with geometric patterns made by the Marajoara culture of Brazil are “reminiscent” of Greek vases from the Classical period, decorated with Celtic spirals. This is a subjective judgment, and to my eyes the pots look nothing like the form of actual Greek vases, nor do the decorations bear more than a superficial resemblance to Old World patterns—no more so than any other Native geometric art. Geometric shapes tend to be the same everywhere. The trouble is that the Marajoara culture flourished after 800 CE, far too late to have anything to do with Mediterranean Greek vases from 1,000 years earlier.

We return to the metal axe from the opening that the show calls Celtic. It has no provenance, and was purchased from a merchant who said he found it in the jungle. The metal part of the axe is copper-zinc bronze, meaning that it was from the Old World, but the handle was made of Paraguayan wood. According to tests that the show says were run on the axe, the wood is 1500 years old. The most parsimonious explanation is that a Spanish, Portuguese, or African object was added to a sacred and ancient handle during the Contact period, but instead the show wants us to believe that Celts from 146 BCE dropped it en route to Peru where it was reused in 500 CE.

This brings us to the Chachapoya, and the show demands to know how mere Native people could possibly have learned how to build buildings, particularly round ones, without European help. Prof. Warren Church explains that the Chachapoya were quite able to build their own buildings, of which none date earlier than 500 CE. Griffhorn, however, sees the round buildings as unique in America and therefore of obviously Carthaginian extraction—700 years or more after the fact! He points to a carving of a face on a temple wall and says this is reminiscent of Celtic beheadings, as though no one else on earth ever drew faces or beheaded enemies. He also cites trepanation among the Celts and Chachapoya as another “connection.” Michael Schultz, a paleopathologist, makes an astonishing claim: that “Hippocratic accounts” from 500 BCE describe Chachapoyan trepanation! This is entirely untrue, and I have no idea where he got the idea that the Chachapoya were discussed in Greek literature.
 

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Griffhorn believes that Spanish fortresses that are round must be connected to the Chachapoya’s round houses, even though this is about all they share in common. The show picks out painted images of shamans with antlers in both the Amazon and among the Celts and decides this must be a connection—even though, unacknowledged here, art from Mohenjo-Daro shows the same thing, as, in fact, does shamanic art everywhere, going back to the Stone Age.

This is really going nowhere fast.

Schultz returns again to assert that pre-Contact Chachapoya mummies suffered from tuberculosis, a disease previously thought only to have come with the Spanish. This “new” fact, however, has been known since 2002, and the presence of tuberculosis in the pre-Columbian Americas has been known since 1994—it’s been found beyond just the Chachapoya—but Griffhorn takes this as a revelation that the Carthaginians brought “Classical” tuberculosis (whatever that means—he seems to think the disease was different in Antiquity) with them in 146 BCE, where it lay dormant for a thousand years. Archaeologists suggest that the disease arose from llamas, who are known to carry the bovine form of tuberculosis—or even from the Polynesians who reached South America before Columbus.

Next, various Chachapoyan traits are compared to Spanish, Majorcan, and other cultures from various time periods, as though the Chachapoyans simply adopted one trait from each of the ark of cross-cultural European outcasts from multiple time periods who sailed up the Amazon to meet them.
 

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The show points to the fair-skinned, blonde-haired Chachapoyan descendants as evidence that that some Chachapoyans are “distinctive” from the “dark haired” and “brown-skinned” Natives, and we hear what Cieza de Leon had to say about this, though the paraphrase offered by Warren Church sounds to me like he’s running together bits and pieces from both Cieza de Leon and from Pedro Pizarro, who famously wrote:
The Indian women of the Guancas and Chachapoyas and Cañares were the common women, most of them being beautiful. The rest of the womanhood of this kingdom were thick, neither beautiful nor ugly, but of medium good-looks. The people of this kingdom of Peru were white, swarthy in colour, and among them the Lords and Ladies were whiter than Spaniards. I saw in this land an Indian woman and a child who would not stand out among white blonds. These people [of the upper class] say that they were the children of the idols. (Relation of the Discoveries etc., trans. Philip Ainsworth Means, p. 430)
By contrast, Cieza de Leon (Chronicle of Peru 1.78) was rather less expansive on the particulars:
These Indians of Chachapoyas are the most fair and good-looking of any that I have seen in the Indies, and their women are so beautiful that many of them were worthy to be wives of the Yncas, or inmates of the temples of the sun. To this day the Indian women of this race are exceedingly beautiful, for they are fair and well formed. They go dressed in woollen cloths, like their husbands, and on their heads they wear a certain fringe, the sign by which they may be known in all parts. After they were subjugated by the Yncas, they received the laws and customs according to which they lived, from them. They adored the sun and other gods, like the rest of the Indians, and resembled them in other customs, such as the burial of their dead and conversing with the devil. (trans. Clements Markham)
Rather than put this down to indigenous genetic diversity (which the show briefly acknowledges as possible), the show suggests that this is due to Old World contact. The Carthaginians not being known to be blondes, I guess this is why Griffhorn proposes Celts, whose presumed red hair he wants to equate with reports of fair hair. German geneticist Manfred Kayser tests some Chachapoya hair and finds that the living individuals have some European ancestry tracing back to the Celtic areas of northern Spain, but at this point—500 years after Contact—it’s not possible to determine when the genes mixed. The homeland of the Celtic people Griffhorn fingers is the same as that of the Spanish who traveled to Peru in the 1500s; the Celts didn’t simply vanish after the Roman conquest of Spain (218 BCE to 19 BCE) but contributed to the gene pool of medieval and modern Spain, though the language and culture died out around the fifth century CE. No ancient Chachapoyan mummies were tested, which is a major omission.

The show concludes that there is no “smoking gun,” only suggestive indications that the Chachapoya are not really Native Americans on the same stripe as the brown ones but owe their culture, their art, their religion, and their very genes to a boatload of Carthaginians and Celts who sailed up the Amazon in 146 BCE and, by dint of their superior European prowess, took over to such an extent that their potent DNA still rules the region 1,868 years later, largely undiluted by the intervening centuries.

I guess this means that they’re all inbred, but the show doesn’t go there.

This was really terrible, and the only significant difference between this show and America Unearthed in terms of quality of evidence and the desire to find hidden white people in the Americas is that this show searched South America rather than North America, and its hero never claimed that there was a conspiracy trying to suppress his work.

Kamen die Kelten bis nach Amerika?

Chachapoyas2.jpg

Kamen die Kelten bis nach Amerika?

von FOCUS-Online-Autor

Ex: http://www.focus.de

In der Antike segelten Mittelmeerbewohner über den Atlantik und ließen sich in den Anden nieder – sagt der Forscher Hans Giffhorn und präsentiert eine Fülle von Indizien. Doch andere Wissenschaftler sind skeptisch.

Christoph Kolumbus war nicht der Erste, der von Europa nach Amerika segelte. Spätestens seit Archäologen vor einigen Jahrzehnten die Siedlung L’Anse aux Meadows an der Nordspitze Neufundlands ausgruben und damit eine alte isländische Saga bestätigten, war klar: Die Wikinger hatten den Atlantik bereits 500 Jahre vor dem italienischen Seefahrer überquert und sich zumindest für kurze Zeit in der „Neuen Welt“ niedergelassen.

Uneinig sind sich Historiker und Archäologen allerdings, ob noch anderen der Sprung über den Ozean gelungen sein könnte – möglicherweise lange bevor die Nordmänner zu ihren Entdeckungsfahrten aufbrachen. Dem irischen Mönch Brendan vielleicht, der – wie eine im Mittelalter weit verbreitete Erzählung berichtet – eine Insel weit im Westen gefunden haben soll? Muslimischen Seefahrern oder zuvor schon Griechen, Römern oder den Alten Ägyptern? „Eine Zeit lang hatten solche Ideen Konjunktur, doch inzwischen werden sie weniger und auch kritischer diskutiert“, sagt Ronald Bockius, Experte für antike Schifffahrt am Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum in Mainz.

Hochentwickelte Kultur am Ostrand der Anden


Kann nun ein neues Buchder Diskussion wieder Auftrieb geben? „Wurde Amerika in der Antike entdeckt?“ lautet sein Titel, verfasst von dem deutschen Kulturwissenschaftler Hans Giffhorn. Darin entwirft er das Szenario, karthagische Seeleute hätten im 2. Jahrhundert vor Christus zusammen mit keltischen Kriegern und Söldnern aus Mallorca den Atlantik überquert. Ziel sei es gewesen, den Römern, die damals die rivalisierende Metropole Karthago in Nordafrika zerstörten, zu entkommen. Ebenfalls per Schiff hätten die Flüchtlinge anschließend das Amazonas-Gebiet durchquert und zuletzt im Nordosten des heutigen Perus eine neue Kultur begründet: die der Chachapoya.

Bis heute wissen Forscher nur wenig über das Volk, das einst am Ostrand der Anden siedelte. Um 800 nach Christus – so der bisherige Kenntnisstand – tauchten die Chachapoya aus dem Dunkel der Geschichte auf. Die Überreste einer riesigen Stadt, eine mächtige Festung mit 15 Meter hohen Mauern, Sarkophage und Mumienfunde zeugen von einer hochentwickelten Kultur. „Nebelwaldmenschen“ nannten die Inka die Chachapoya, die angeblich sehr kriegerisch waren – trotzdem mussten sie sich im 15. Jahrhundert der neuen Großmacht geschlagen geben. Die Überlebenden verbündeten sich später mit den Spaniern und halfen ihnen, das Inkareich zu zerstören. Doch es half ihnen nichts: Ihre Freiheit erlangten sie nicht zurück, stattdessen gingen sie an aus Europa eingeschleppten Krankheiten zugrunde.
 

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Europäische Stammväter eines Indiovolks?


Können antike Kelten und Karthager wirklich die Stammväter dieses rätselhaften Andenvolks sein – auf einem anderen Kontinent, rund 9000 Kilometer entfernt? Auf den ersten Blick klingt das nach einem phantastischen Konstrukt à la Erich von Däniken. „Früher war ich auch der Meinung, eine solches Szenario sei vollkommen unrealistisch“, sagt Giffhorn. „Aber mittlerweile – nach vierzehnjähriger Forschung zu dem Thema – halte ich es für die plausibelste Erklärung zahlloser bislang rätselhafter Phänomene.“

Bei seinen vielen Reisen sei ihm zum Beispiel aufgefallen, wie sehr die Rundbauten der Chachapoya den Überresten keltischer Wohnhäuser im nordwestlichen Spanien glichen, sagt Giffhorn. Kaum ein anderes Indiovolk habe auf diese Weise gebaut. Auch seien die Chachapoya wie die Kelten Kopfjäger gewesen. Und die kriegerischen Andenbewohner hätten mit Steinschleudern genau wie die Bewohner Mallorcas gekämpft – um nur einige Indizien zu nennen, die der Kulturwissenschaftler zur Untermauerung seiner These anführt.
 

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