UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
A LOST ADVANCED CIVILIZATION OF the Ice Age with global navigational and mapmaking skills equivalent to our own in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would have had the capacity to establish outposts on every continent but must also have had a homeland.
Since that homeland has not been found after 200 years of diligent archaeology, most diligent archaeologists conclude—quite reasonably on the face of things—that it did not exist.
But there are other options.
It might be underwater now—the immense Sunda Shelf around Indonesia, for example, submerged by sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age.
It might be under ice, perhaps in Antarctica, if we’re willing to accept that some rather extraordinary geophysical events occurred in the past 100,000 years.
IMAGE: EARTH 18K BCE BY DONALD L. EDWARDS.
It might await rediscovery in the unexplored heart of the Amazon rainforest.
It might lie beneath the sands of the Sahara desert.
Or perhaps its homeland has all along remained hidden in plain view in the very last place that anyone has thought to look—North America?
There are surprisingly few “known knowns” in American prehistoric archaeology and good reasons why there are so many “known unknowns”—reasons that in turn suggest that the third Rumsfeldian category,1 of “unknown unknowns,” the “things we don’t know we don’t know,” may ultimately prove to be far larger and more significant than either of the other two.
First and foremost, the Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere.
This immense and extraordinary deluge, “possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,”2 swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today—a devastated blank slate (described at length in Magicians of the Gods) littered with 10,000-ton “glacial erratics,” immense fossilized waterfalls, and “current ripples” hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high.3
If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone.
If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.
And if an advanced antediluvian civilization had flourished anywhere within 500 kilometers of the southern edge of the ice cap, not only in the Channeled Scablands but all the way along the ice margin, the flood alone might have been sufficient to ensure that not a trace of it would be left for archaeologists to misrepresent 12,800 years later.
Washington displays flood-ravaged scablands, but so, too, does New Jersey much farther to the east. Washington is notable for its fields and hillsides strewn with huge ice-rafted erratics, but so, too, is the state of New York. Interestingly also, just as Washington has its coulees, New York State has its Finger Lakes. These latter were long thought to have been carved by glaciers, but their geomorphology closely parallels that of the coulees of the channeled scablands, and some researchers now believe they were cut by glacial meltwater at extreme pressures—a process linked by sediment evidence to “the collapse of continental ice sheets.”4
Likewise in Minnesota, on the Saint Croix River, there is a spectacular array of more than eighty giant glacial potholes. One is 10 feet wide and 60 feet deep, making it the deepest explored pothole in the world. Others, as yet unexcavated, are even wider, and probably deeper as well. And all of them, without exception, were formed by turbulent floods at the end of the Ice Age.
We are looking then at vast expanses of North America that were literally scoured.
And this is before we get to the other effects of the Younger Dryas impacts explored in previous chapters—including direct hits on populated areas, searing heat and shock waves from airbursts, continent-wide wildfires, an impact winter, icy ejecta, and so on and so forth.
All in all, if North America is where a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity vanished, then by far the most significant problem we face in investigating it is the way that the “crime scene” was systematically “wiped down” by the cataclysmic events at the onset of the Younger Dryas.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: CONQUEST
THE EUROPEAN INVASION OF THE American mainland began 500 years ago with the Spanish conquest of Mexico. In 1519, when Hernán Cortés first set foot on the shores of the Yucatán, more than 30 million people lived in Mexico. A century later, after the brutal genocide of the conquest itself and immense loss of life to smallpox epidemics, the population had fallen to just 3 million.5
The entire pre-Columbian literature of Mexico, a vast library of tens of thousands of codices, was carefully and systematically destroyed by the priests and friars who followed in the wake of the conquistadors. In November 1530, for example, Bishop Juan de Zumarraga, who had shortly before been appointed “Protector of the Indians” by the Spanish crown, proceeded to “protect” his flock by burning at the stake a Mexican aristocrat, the lord of the city of Texcoco, whom he accused of having worshipped the rain god. In the city’s marketplace Zumarraga “had a pyramid formed of the documents of Aztec history, knowledge and literature, their paintings, manuscripts, and hieroglyphic writings, all of which he committed to the flames while the natives cried and prayed.”6
More than 30 years later, the holocaust of documents was still under way. In July 1562, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in the Yucatan), Bishop Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings, and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He boasted of destroying countless “idols” and “altars,” all of which he described as “works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity.”7 Noting that the Maya “used certain characters or letters, which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences” he informs us:
We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously and which gave them great pain.8
Any of us today interested in the truth about the past share the pain of those horrified Native Americans—for what, we cannot help but wonder, was written in their lost books concerning “the antiquities and sciences” of the ancients? What exactly went up in smoke there?
I have explored the mysteries of the Maya, and of their predecessors the Olmec, in my earlier work, so I have not retold their extraordinary story here. I will mention in passing, however, that in 1998, long before I knew of the Mississippi Valley civilization and its afterlife beliefs concerning the constellation Orion and the Milky Way, I drew attention in Heaven’s Mirror to a discovery by archaeologists Jose Fernandez and Robert Cormack establishing that the settlement core of the Maya city of Utatlan was designed “according to a celestial scheme reflected by the shape of the constellation of Orion.”9
Fernandez was also able to prove that all of Utatlan’s major temples “were oriented to the heliacal setting points of stars in Orion,”10 and noted that the Milky Way, alongside which Orion stands, “was thought of as a celestial path connecting the firmament’s navel with the centre of the underworld.”11
This should be familiar territory to the reader by now and hopefully you can guess what comes next. “Very much like the ancient Egyptians,” I reported in Heaven’s Mirror, the Maya regarded the
Milky Way as a particularly important feature of the heavens:
They conceived of it as the road that led to their netherworld, Xibalba which, in common with other Central American peoples, they located in the sky.12
I also commented on Mexican traditions of the postmortem journey of the soul in which the deceased, just as in the ancient Egyptian Duat, would face a series of ordeals and “a final judgment in the terrifying presence of the death god.”13 Noting numerous other striking similarities in beliefs and symbolism around the mysteries of death and the afterlife, I concluded:
In Egypt, as amongst the Maya, the stellar context involves Orion and the Milky Way. In Egypt as in Mexico a journey through the netherworld must be undertaken by the deceased. In Egypt as in Mexico religious teachings assert that life is our opportunity to prepare for this journey—an opportunity that should under no circumstances be wasted.14
Such correspondences led me to speculate that both ancient Egypt and ancient Mexico had shared in the legacy of an even more ancient cosmological religion, “wrapped up in sophisticated astronomical observations” and specifically focused on the afterlife journey of the soul. Neither Egypt nor Mexico had originated this religion, nor had they transmitted it directly to one another. Rather each of them had inherited it from a third, as yet unidentified, civilization.15
It was a hypothesis. What would help to strengthen it, and perhaps even confirm it, would be evidence of other civilizations with no direct relationship in which the same legacy could be identified.
This evidence, I submit, now exists in the astonishing proximity of the religious beliefs, iconography, and symbolism of the Mississippi Valley to the religious beliefs, iconography, and symbolism of ancient Egypt outlined in part 6. These deep structural connections are, in my view, unexplainable by any means other than a shared legacy from a very ancient source—a source predating the separation of peoples when the Americas became isolated from the “Old World” by the rising oceans at the end of the Ice Age.
Let’s take a brief look at the most ancient Native American book still in existence—the Dresden Codex, so called because it’s kept in a museum in the German city of Dresden.16
It is a thought-provoking document for many reasons, not least the scientific character of the mathematics and astronomy incorporated in it. For example, the eminent Mayanist Sylvanus Griswold Morley noticed that on pages 51–58 of the codex, “405 revolutions of the moon are set down; and so accurate are the calculations involved that although they cover a period of nearly 33 years, the total number of days recorded (11,959) is only 89/100th of a day less than the true time computed by the best modern method.”17
Also of great interest is the way that numbers set out in the Dresden Codex keep on getting longer and longer in the final pages:
Until, in the so-called “serpent numbers,” a grand total of nearly twelve and a half million days (thirty-four thousand years) is recorded again and again …
Finally, on the last page of the manuscript, is depicted the Destruction of the World, for which these highest numbers have paved the way.
Here we see the rain serpent, stretching across the sky, belching forth torrents of water. Great streams of water gush from the sun and the moon. The old goddess, she of the tiger claws and forbidding aspect, the malevolent patroness of floods and cloudbursts, overturns the bowl of the heavenly waters. The crossbones, dread emblem of death, decorate her skirt, and a writhing snake crowns her head.
Below, with downward-pointing spears symbolic of the universal destruction, the black god stalks abroad, a screeching bird raging on his fearsome head. Here, indeed, is portrayed with graphic touch the final all-engulfing cataclysm.18
Dresden Codex—the final page of the manuscript depicting the Destruction of the World. PHOTO OF PUBLIC DOMAIN ARTWORK: THE SAXON STATE LIBRARY [MSCR.DRESD.R.310].
It’s curious—this mixture of science, cataclysm, and time. “Calculations far into the past or lesser probings of the future occur in many a Maya hieroglyphic text,” notes archaeologist J. Eric S. Thompson:
On [a] stela at Quiriga a date … over 90 million years ago is computed; on another a date over 300 million years before that is given. … These are actual computations, stating correctly day and month positions, and are comparable to calculations in our calendar giving the month positions on which Easter would have fallen at equivalent distances in the past. The brain reels at such astronomical figures, yet these reckonings were of sufficient frequency and importance to require special hieroglyphs for their transcription.19
All that can be said for sure is that embedded in the Mayan material, together with core religious beliefs very similar to those of the ancient Egyptians—and now we know very similar to those of the ancient Mississippians also—is evidence of an interest in complex scientific calculations and immense expanses of time. I’m reminded of the passage from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted in chapter 3, in which the Sun God Ra is praised for his travels through the “untold spaces” of the cosmic void “requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over”—a chronology on a similar order to the Mayan scheme of things but, one would have thought, irrelevant to the concerns of agricultural societies. And the same goes for the immense geometrical mounds and enclosures of the ancient Egyptian Duat that are matched by the immense geometrical mounds and enclosures of the Hopewell of Ohio and the immense geometrical mounds and enclosures now emerging from the Amazon rainforest.
What the evidence suggests to me is that something extraordinary, something that the theories of mainstream archaeology cannot account for, was going on behind the scenes of prehistory. All the indications are that Mexico, with its ancient tradition of literacy, was once a vast archive of the “antiquities and sciences” of former times and that the records the Spaniards destroyed in their zealous stupidity may have been as integral to the memory of humanity as the library of Alexandria. I think it is very possible, had the Mayan documents survived in sufficient quantities, that they would have shed light on the mystery of the lost common source of inspiration that appears to have kick-started civilizations in both the Old World and the New.
In the event, however, out of the tens of thousands of Mayan codices in existence in 1519 just four are still with us in the twenty-first century.20
After the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the conquest of Peru soon followed, again accompanied by the destruction of a high civilization—in this case the Inca—in the lineage of the First Americans. Though they had their quipus (a means of communication and calculation using knotted string), the Inca were not a literate people like the Maya and thus possessed no documents for the Spaniards to destroy. As in Mexico, however, a sustained and determined effort was made to stamp out local religions and traditions and replace them with Roman Catholicism. Once again, this effort, officially sanctioned as “the extirpation of idolatry,” called for cultural destruction on a grand scale, calculated to erase the memory banks of the population within a generation or two and replace their deep connection to their own past with the new dispensation.21
The Spaniards did venture into North America, of course—most eccentrically and unproductively in the form of an expedition led by Hernando de Soto, who landed in Florida in 1539 with more than 600 men.22 After losing half his force along the way, de Soto spent the next 3 years until his own death in Louisiana in 1542 wandering all over the southeast and deep south of what is now the United States, passing many of the great mound sites, and engaging in ruinous pitched battles with the locals. The most disastrous by-product of his visit, however, may have been smallpox, which his expeditionaries appear to have brought with them and which afterward devastated the indigenous population of the region.23
We may say, therefore, that from its earliest days the European conquest of the Americas was an agent of chaos, genocide, and cultural extinction for Native Americans and that this, too, was very much part of the process that wiped down the “crime scene,” leaving us scratchin
g our heads trying to make sense of the few clues left behind.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: WITNESS AMNESIA
THE EXTIRPATION OF VITAL EVIDENCE concerning the past of our species across huge swaths of the Americas was by no means limited to the effects of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, or to the subsequent much later cataclysms of militant Christianity and smallpox. Once the calamitous century of the initial encounters was over, a more insidious but equally deadly process of erosion began to grind down the little of the past that the previous millennia had spared. During the sixteenth century, apart from a few failed raids like de Soto’s, North America was not much affected, but from the early seventeenth century onward, following the first European settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, everything changed.
Thereafter, with monotonous, depressing regularity, either for their agricultural potential or for the prospect of gold, lands held sacred in the possession of Native American tribes for eons were snatched from them and their inhabitants driven off or slaughtered. These murderous land grabs only accelerated and became crueler as the seventeenth century was followed by the eighteenth and as the eighteenth century rolled on into the nineteenth:
From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.24
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