Thor Heyerdahl first captured world attention in 1947 when he sailed a primitive balsa craft, the Kon-Tiki, from Peru across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean to the Polynesian islands. He astonished the world again some years later when he successfully piloted Ra II,an Egyptian reed boat, from North Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
But perhaps the Norwegian explorer’s most important achievement was his less spectacular feat of investigating the Old World origins of the pre-Columbian cultures of the New World and the Pacific Islands. In Early Man and the Ocean, Heyerdahl presents his thesis soberly and compellingly. Unlike his thrilling travel accounts, this scholarly but very readable book has not found a place on the bestseller lists. What Heyerdahl has to say in Early Man and the Ocean is a powerful indictment of the humanitarian “one world” idea of cultural interchangeability in vogue almost everywhere today.
When the Spanish conquistadores first reached the New World, they were astonished to encounter highly developed civilizations, or remains of civilizations, in what are now Mexico and Peru. How had these advanced civilizations developed? Years of intensive archaeological work and painstaking excavations have not uncovered a trace of gradual evolution from primitive society to civilization. Dig after dig revealed that civilization appeared suddenly in America, in full bloom, superimposed upon a primitive, archaic society.
Even casual observers have long been struck by the similarities between the great pyramids of pre-Columbian America and those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. All of the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor which could have been the source of culture In the New World were ruled by hierarchies claiming descent from the sun. The Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians and Egyptians were all fanatic sun worshipers, just as were the Olmecs, the Mochica and their immediate successors in Mexico and Peru. Other cultural parallels are equally astonishing: A fully developed writing system, paper manufacture, complex stone-cutting techniques, mummification of great personages, long-distance aqueducts, an understanding of the zero concept, ocean-going reed boats. The same three animals served as royal symbols: the snake, the bird of prey and one or another breed of feline. The eagle of the Old World became the condor in the New. The lion was replaced by the puma.
In Mexico, the greatest cultures of the Aztecs, Toltecs and Mayas drew heavily from the highly advanced civilization of the Olmecs, an unknown people which suddenly established a fully developed culture on the swampy jungle coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There was no climactic, geographical or racial basis for a sudden blossoming of a high civilization there. We have records of various organized voyages by groups from the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations leaving the western Mediterranean to found colonies beyond Gibraltar. Around 1200 B.C., just before the Olmec culture suddenly began to flourish in Mexico, organized colonists from the cultural world of the eastern Mediterranean had penetrated to the Atlantic where trade winds and currents could easily have carried them to the Gulf of Mexico.
Perhaps the most conclusive evidence that the New World Indians were not culture creators, but only culture receivers, is the testimony of the Indians themselves. Wherever the Spaniards advanced, from Mexico and Central America to Peru, they were received with open arms and hailed as members of a legendary fair-complexioned race which had ruled and civilized their ancestors. The impressive ruins of lost civilizations were invariably explained by the local Indians as vestiges of rule by benevolent, bearded whites. The memory of this past race formed the basis of local history and religion. The arrival and activities of white teachers were described in hieroglyphics in pre-Columbian paper books and depicted on stone monuments and ceramic art. (Unfortunately, the extensive collection of books and paper records were destroyed by order of the Spanish priests, who considered everything not written in Latin script the work of Satan.) The beards of the Spaniards made an especially strong impression on the Indians, who were physically incapable of growing facial hair. Mayan priests sometimes even wore false beards in imitation of the divine founders of their religion.
The chronicler of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru recorded that some members of the Inca ruling classes were “whiter than Spaniards” and that he saw some “Indians” who were both white-skinned and blond. According to the Incas, these were descendants of their gods, the Viracochas. When the Spaniards first landed on the Peruvian coast, relay messengers quickly spread the world that the Viracochas, or “sea foam” people, had returned. The Incas had no beards, but they had a word for beard and for the white foreigner (Viracocha), which is often applied to Europeans today. At the great Inca temple at Cacha, the Spaniards found a huge stone statue of the divine priest-king Con-Tici Viracocha, represented as a long-robed man of regal bearing with a long beard. The Spaniards thought it represented St. Bartholomew. Later, realizing their mistake, they destroyed the statue and the temple that housed it.In the vast Incan empire, the Spaniards came upon huge megalithic sites of pre-Incan origin which had been abandoned centuries before and now lay in ruins. Spanish chronicler, Cieza de Leon, wrote in 1553, “When the Indians are asked who built these ancient monuments, they reply that a bearded and white people like ourselves were the builders, who came to these parts many ages before the Incas began to reign, and formed a settlement here.”
At Tiahuanaco, the hub of the empire, the Spaniards found a vast stone-dressed pyramid, megalithic walls and large statues. Cieza de Leon asked the natives:
whether these edifices were built in the time of the Incas, and they laughed at the query, affirming that they were made before the Incas ever reigned …. From this, and from the fact that they also speak of bearded men on the island of Titicaca, and of others who built the edifice of Vinaque, it may, perhaps, be inferred that, before the Incas reigned, there was an intelligent race who came from some unknown part, and who did these things.
When archaeologist A.F. Bandelier arrived to excavate the ruins of the island of Titicaca 350 years later, he was told that in very ancient times the island was inhabited by gentlemen of unknown origin similar to European gentlemen, who had cohabited with the local native women. The resulting children became the Incas who “drove out the gentlemen and held the island thereafter.”
Practically all the native accounts of how culture came to Peru are in agreement that the Incas lived more or less as savages until a light-skinned, bearded foreigner and his entourage came to their land. He was described as:
a white man of great stature who, by his aspect and presence, called forth great veneration and obedience …. In many places he gave orders to men how they should live and he spoke lovingly to them and with much gentleness, and that they should be loving and charitable to all.
The white stranger was acclaimed a god. He and his followers introduced cultivated crops and taught the Indians how to grow them in irrigated terraces. They showed the natives how to build stone houses and live in organized communities with law and order. They introduced cotton clothing, sun worship and stone carving. They built steep pyramids and erected monolithic statues.
Among the Tzendals of Mexico, the white culture hero was called Votan. A Tzendal manuscript records:
At some indefinitely remote epoch, Votan came from the far East. He was sent by God to divide out and assign to the different races of men the earth on which they dwell, and to give to each its own language. The land whence he came was called ualum uotan, the land of Votan. His message was especially to the Tzendals. Previous to his arrival, they were ignorant, barbarous, and without fixed habitations. He collected them into villages, taught them how to cultivate the maize and cotton, and invented the hieroglyphic signs, which they learned to carve on the walls of their temples. He instructed civil laws for their government, and imparted to them proper ceremonials of religious worship …. They especially remember him as the inventor of their calendar.
When European anthropologists began large-scale excavations of Peruvian Inca tombs in the middle of the 19th century, they were startled to find that some of the heads differed markedly from those of the Indians both in cranial shape and in hair color and texture. Anthropologist D. Wilson found some mummies with brown, soft, wavy hair. He was especially struck by the remains of a family of apparently high rank. Wilson described the father’s hair as “brown in color and as fine in texture as the most delicate Anglo-Saxon’s hair.”
Easter Island
Easter Island has long intrigued and baffled the world. It is the site of solid stone statues in human form weighing five to eight tons each and a vast variety of heterogeneous art. According to Heyerdahl, the monoliths were built by a race of ancient white explorers who had crossed more than 2,000 miles of ocean from Peru.
Dutch voyagers, guided by Peruvians, were the first Europeans to visit Easter Island. They arrived in 1722 and found a racially mixed group, including one islander of apparently high rank who “was an entirely white man.” A few years before Captain Cook came in 1774, a disastrous war broke out on the island. The surviving natives told the Europeans that all of the white males had been massacred.
The strange written script of Easter Island has never been deciphered. The dark-skinned islanders cannot understand it. Their forebears killed the light-skinned men who could. Neither can the brown Polynesians understand the original meaning of the monuments built by a race which has long since disappeared.
Columbus
Heyerdahl makes a convincing case for the thesis that Columbus was only able to make his first voyage to the New World because he had carefully studied the accounts of the earlier Viking voyages to North America. Columbus was very close to the Catholic Church, which kept records of the Viking colony at Greenland. He was a thorough researcher, who, Heyerdahl is convinced, must have been familiar with the Viking discovery of North America. Noting that Columbus’s son once wrote that his father had visited Iceland, Heyerdahl comments:
Only when we give the Norse discoveries of Greenland and North America the credit they deserve does Columbus emerge in proper perspective, not as a reckless navigator who accidentally happened to hit upon America because it blocked his progress to India, but because he had combined creative imagination with keen scholarship and available information to plan a search for a coast which was found where it was supposed to be.
Heyerdahl’s “diffusionist” explanation of the origins of pre-Columbian civilization in America is by no means universally accepted. The “isolationist” school contends that civilization blossomed in the New World independently. Before Heyerdahl made his Ra voyages across the Atlantic, “isolationists” contemptuously dismissed the “diffusionist” arguments with the observation that an Atlantic crossing by ancient ships was “impossible.” One of the most influential anthropologists of the century, the German-born Jew, Franz Boas, declared in 1925, “On the Atlantic side, the broad expanse of water made immigration impossible.”
The “diffusionist/isolationist” controversy is really a variation of the old “nature/nurture” debate. The “isolationists” and “nurturists,” represented by men like Boas, hold that all races are equally capable of developing sophisticated civilizations given the right environmental conditions. The “diffusionist” school, to which Heyerdahl subscribes, refutes such notions by demonstrating that some races are more inherently capable of developing high cultures than others.
The implications of Heyerdahl’s work are revolutionary. Civilization is not the achievement of “mankind.” Culture is not the fruit of something called the “human spirit.” What produces both is a flickering flame that burns in the souls of only a fraction of those whom we call human beings. The lesson of Early Man and the Ocean is that biology, not geography, is the basis of human progress.