[language] Ancient Voices

[H.M.Hubey]

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"Ancient Voices": BBC2 1st Sept 99 UK

"The Hunt for the First Americans"  (ceefax p623)

The program concentrated on Serra da Capivara - a rocky outcrop of
cliffs
and valleys in NE Brazil.  (About equidistant from the mouth of the
Amazon,
the point of deepest projection of the Pacific into S America halfway up
its
west coast, and the Atlantic (South of the eastermost point of S
America)).

Walter Neves (University of SaoPaulo) said:

"This is very clear in South America: all populations I have in my data
set
from the whole of South America, from 7,000 to the present, they're
absolutely classic Mongoloid.  Everything I have more than 9,000 is
absolutely non-Mongoloid..."

The program reported the rock paintings in Serra da Capivara are "Much
older
than the American Indians.  The hunters are chasing giant armadillos.
The
animal flourished during the ice-age - long before the arrival of the
Indians."  There was said to be a playful feel to the pictures,
including a
standing couple leaning over and kissing.

Portrayed were: "a net to catch deer", a stick for getting honey from
beehives, 3 people helping someone give birth...men in disguise dancing
with
women.

One of the wall paintings shows a number of figures, but have been
interpreted as a single person running, jumping and spearing someone
else.
These scenes of possible conflict only begin to appear after the arrival
of
the Mongoloids.  This was the only suggestion as to might have painted
them.

French diggers found what looked like quartzite hand axes in levels
40,000
years old.  At 50,000 year old levels they seemed to find hearths with
nearby food (animal) leftovers.  Anne-marie Pessis, one of the workers
there, tells a story of some modern fishermen off the coast of Africa,
making it to Brazil, to illustrate how possible it is. (It took three
weeks.
It really is relatively quite easy to make that crossing.)

9-12,000 year old skulls found elsewhere in Brazil were said to be the
oldest in the Americas.  A solid reconstruction was made of the oldest
of
them all ("Lucia" [sp?]) by Richard Neave of Manchester Uni, who said
"That
to me is a Negroid face [...] it has all the features you'd
associate..."

It shared features with types found traditionally around the Indian
Ocean
rim.

Flashing now to Australian rock shelters with images painted "10's of
thousands of years ago"...  One contains a high prowed boat (thought
therefore to be ocean going) and thought to be the oldest boat picture
in
the world.  Graham Walsh (Aus rock-art specialist) says their
distinctive
head-dresses associate the figures in the boat with a type of figuration
called "Simple Northern Figures" found in that part of the North
Kimberley
(which are considered "pre-spear throwers" since conflict scenes of that
type elsewhere do not show them, and woomeras are first seen 17,000
years
ago).  He talks in terms of "Up to 50,000 years ago" for the boat
picture.
[Of course the boats would have been used a long way from *that*
painting,
but anyway we already knew the first Australians had to cross - is it
200
miles? - by boat, even if it were at a time of low ocean water level.]

It has convinced me.  (Odd they never made Madagascar though.)

More recent skulls from Tierra del Fuego are said to show more
similarity to
the Australian model.  (Good 70-year-old footage of Fuegans and their
huts,
canoes (with constant fires, on layers of damp grass), bows and
arrows...)

>From a perhaps more on-topic point of view, male Fuegans (70 years ago)
revealed that their secret ceremonies referred to times in the distant
past
when society was run by women, and it would not do to let them know that
today, lest the men lost their grip on power.  Similar legends are said
to
have been recorded among modern Australian aborigines.   [That would be
a
long time for a legend to last though.  The legend of the first horse
amongst N American indians didn't last very long - in any tribe].


John V Jackson

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