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Clyde Winters Goes in Search of Elephants in Ancient America, and the Africans Who Brought Them There

7/26/2016

18 Comments

 
It’s almost touching when a fringe history site drags out one of the classics. After so much discussion of sexually abusive aliens, white ethnonationalism, and absurdly complex religious conspiracies, there is something refreshing about seeing hoary chestnuts from a simpler time resurrected. That’s why I’ve been finding it difficult to get too worked up about Clyde Winters’s classical Afrocentrism in his recent Ancient Origins articles. He harks back to Ivan Van Sertima and an earlier era when crappy evidence and absurd claims had a certain level of charm rather than foaming, animalistic rage. Afrocentrism is, of course, the mirror image of white ethnonationalism, but the early works in the field took their inspiration more from the goofball frivolity of 1950s and 1960s UFO and “ancient mystery” books than the dark, angry, and wrathful conspiracy theories of today.
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In his latest article, Winters brings back some of the early claims about elephants in the Americas that were a staple of 1960s and 1970s fringe history books, beginning with the so-called “Elephant Slabs” of New Mexico, featured in Brad Steiger’s 1974 book Mysteries of Time and Space, from which Winters draws much of his evidence.

​The “Elephant Slabs” are tablets depicting what seem to be drawings of elephants. They were brought to the Arizona State Museum in 1950 by a man who alleged that he unearthed them in 1910. Experts believe them to be hoaxes, but fringe historians have used them as proof of everything from an invasion from India to Phoenician migrations to the literal truth of the Book of Mormon’s mention of elephants in Ether 9:19.
 
Winters, of course, does not wish to follow any of the earlier fringe interpretations that would favor Eurasian groups. Instead, he proposes that the hieroglyphic-style symbols appearing on the tablets are actually a form of the Vai script of western Africa. This requires layer after layer of assumption, but we can quickly dismiss the notion when we recall that the Vai script was invented around 1830 to represent the Vai language (a Mande tongue) and may have been modelled on the Cherokee script invented shortly before. Winters projects the Vai script back to 1200 BCE (in this article) or 4000 BCE (in earlier work) based on geometric symbols appearing on rock art, and he offers an unusual methodology of choosing to use the Vai script to read into it Maninke syllables of a different branch of the Mande language tree. While the syllabary of the Vai language does not include picture writing, Winters chooses to interpret symbols that bear no resemblance to Vai symbols, like the elephant, as picture writing for complete words.
 
It should go without saying that the characters on the Elephant Slab that he identifies with symbols from the Vai Syllabary bear no resemblance to each other. To take one example, he identifies an angular symbol resembling a stylized backward “P” as the syllable ki, which in the Vai Syllabary resembles a curvilinear “G.” The two sets of symbols appear entirely unrelated, but I suppose Winters gets to make the claim that he is proposing a proto-Vai script that allows him to alter the shapes as he wishes, without the tiresome need for facts and proof.
 
From this, Winters claims he can translate the Elephant Slabs as Maninke inscriptions, and according to him they tell the story of a lament for elephants that grew sick and died in a drought followed by a report of a barbecue of the elephants. The last sentence he gives this way: “Uncultivated land, hunt the birds, cook the elephant (it is) easy to roast, grow on the flat terrain the maize (in) arid uncultivated land. There are also bears.” (He takes the last character of the last line, a picture of what seems to be a cat, for a bear.) Even in his translation, the text doesn’t make good or clear sense, continuing the proud fringe history tradition of discovering that world traveling ancient people were utterly incoherent to the point of confusion.
 
Winters also purposely misunderstands a passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Query VI), which I will give here before discussing:

It is well known, that on the Ohio, and in many parts of America further north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled magnitude, are found in great numbers, some lying on the surface of the earth, and some a little below it. A Mr. Stanley, taken prisoner near the mouth of the Tanisee [Tennessee], relates, that after being transferred through several tribes, from one to another, he was at length carried over the mountains west of the Missouri to a river which runs westwardly; that these bones abounded there, and that the natives described to him the animal to which they belonged as still existing in the northern parts of their country; from which description he judged it to be an elephant. Bones of the same kind have been lately found, some feet below the surface of the earth, in salines opened on the North Holston, a branch of the Tanisee, about the latitude of 36½° north. From the accounts published in Europe, I suppose it to be decided that these are of the same kind with those found in Siberia.
Jefferson goes on to dispute the identification of the bones with those of living elephants for reasons he elaborates in detail.
 
Winters takes Stanley’s claim at face value and concludes therefore that elephants were alive in the northern part of what is now the United States (then Spanish Louisiana). Winters fails to note that Stanley reported the rumor of the creature’s existence at a remove—it was hearsay among his informants—and he purposely omits Jefferson’s analysis, which clearly marks these bones as belonging to the mammoth. The myth of the mammoth’s continued existence was almost certainly derived from attempts to explain the fossil bones among people who did not know about fossilization and extinction. (Europeans didn’t quite grasp the concept at the time, either.) 

For Winters, based on his own translation of the Elephant Slabs, the elephants were the legacy of a lost voyage of African people, who brought them on their ships across the Atlantic, marched them across the continent, and left not a trace of them behind except for the Elephant Slabs and some ambiguous rock art. 
18 Comments
Kal
7/26/2016 11:32:33 am

The 'elephants' in that art look more like wild boar than elephants, stumpy legs, tusks, not really trunks but snouts. The rat is also there, as is a cat like image. It could even be an anteater or something. Either that or the hoaxer was stoned on peyote.

Reply
Rose McDonald
7/27/2016 11:22:37 am

I'm thinking it's the peyote option.

Reply
Clete
7/26/2016 02:06:12 pm

What is needed to validate the claim is for Scott Wolter to examine the slabs, maybe for as long as fifteen minutes. He would find a hooked X, showing that Henry Sinclair and his party, riding elephants reached North America and rode the all the way to Arizona. After burying Rough Hurech, they returned to Minnesota, were attacked by Indians, carved and buried the Kensington Rune Stones and then, with the Ark of the Covenant and Holy Grail sailed to Oak Island and hid them for future generations to risk life and limb to recover them. Sailing back to Scotland, one of the party dropped his favorite Roman Sword overboard. Reaching Scotland the clan Sinclair then spent the years since protecting the secrets of all these truths from the legions of scientists attempting to disprove their claims.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
7/26/2016 02:12:59 pm

The first symbol of line six might indeed be a "Hooked X"!

Reply
David Bradbury
7/26/2016 02:47:48 pm

And the last symbol of line five looks rather like a hooked X upside-down. Satanic Templars?

Only Me
7/26/2016 04:58:37 pm

Clete, thanks to you I've recently shed a few pounds. My sides left the atmosphere after reading your comment. Good show!

Reply
Killbuck
7/26/2016 09:52:36 pm

The Truth is out there.

Really "out there".

Reply
Bob Jase
7/26/2016 03:54:04 pm

Elephants, heck, look at the size of those birds! Clearly New Mexicon was the home of the Roc/thunderbirds.

Reply
A.D.
7/26/2016 03:58:29 pm

Clyde Winters is a lying crook.The amount of spinning he does is crazy.

Reply
Only Me
7/26/2016 04:55:15 pm

Man, when you have to piecemeal the "evidence" for a theory this much, I think it's time to go back to the drawing board. Even if we took everything about it at face value, it makes no sense.

Reply
MPE
7/26/2016 05:10:23 pm

Sub-Saharan African's with Blue Water Ships? Ridiculous

Reply
Shane Sullivan
7/26/2016 05:56:35 pm

Winters seems to have left out the fact that the glyph for the Fishers from Outside appears several times on that slab.

Reply
Titus pullo
7/26/2016 09:38:02 pm

Every fringe theorist serms to think its easy to cross the atlantc. Its not with the designs prior to clinker based vessels of the jotse followed by the classic age of exploration ships aling with astrolabs and nav tables.

Watch out jason you could be accused of white privilege or i guess italian american privilege slamming mr winters

Reply
Killbuck
7/26/2016 10:00:42 pm

Again, another ancient civilization hops across the Atlantic, roams around the heads home... evidently unimpressed enough to say nothing to the folks at home about a vast continent of resources.

I might imagine something like this:

Where the hell have you been the last few years?

--oh, no place special... what's for dinner?

Elephant, they are easy to roast.

--oh brother, elephant again?

Reply
Graham
7/27/2016 04:17:38 am

You may think that Afrocentrism is cute now, but I suspect in a few years time that it is what is going to be taught as the truth in American schools.

Why, because the students will demand that the teaching of 'obvious' racist lies such as the discovery of Viking sites such as L'Anse aux Meadows because they are 'offended/triggered' by them.

Reply
Graham
7/27/2016 09:05:11 am

Correction the last paragraph of my post:

Why, because the students will demand that the teaching of 'obvious' racist lies such as the discovery of Viking sites such as L'Anse aux Meadows be stopped because they are 'offended/triggered' by them.

Reply
Erin
7/27/2016 06:45:39 pm

Hey, Jason. I wanted to let you know how much i respect your commitment to research and evidence, the care you take when investigating even the most silly or ridiculous of fringe ideas...but I also really appreciate and respect the *way* you discuss and expose fringe history. A big part of that is how you don't ignore the more sociological aspects -- like, for example, the history of racism and how it contributes, in varying degrees, to the different theories (and promotion of those theories) you expose. Very few of the writers/researchers from the rational/skeptical wing, who address topics that are similar to what you cover, make the effort to consider or discuss the way systemic types of oppression, like racism, affect the subject of their investigation.

On the flipside, though, few people address issues with Afrocentric theories -- those who do cover it tend to be people trying to push their own racist agenda (and usually aren't qualified or unbiased enough to do real research). And even when you try to address it an evenhanded way, the topic itself brings out the racism in the comments section.

All that said, I do have one quibble with the post, when you said: "Afrocentrism is, of course, the mirror image of white ethnonationalism..." I think I understand what you were trying to say, referring to the genre completely separate from the larger sociological context. But I do think it's important to look at the context of both branches of fringe belief, because far from being mirror images of each other, they were created in vastly different communities, designed to serve different needs. White ethnonationalism was used (is still being used) to justify and strengthen white oppression and racism, and to justify atrocities like genocide, slavery, along with more current racist polices and beliefs. Afrocentrism, by contrast, came out of oppression, and was designed to inspire dignity and pride (primarily for people of African descent, but also to force the larger culture to respect and accept the rights and humanity of Africans and their descendants elsewhere) -- especially after *centuries* of white slaveholders, colonialists (and their descendants, usually brought up in the white ethnocentric mythology of their parents) denying African history and accomplishments, insisting they were primitive, lazy, unintelligent, animalistic, etc. So while I do think it's important to point out inaccuracies and untruths in Afrocentric literature, as you do, calling them "mirror images" is a bit much.

Thanks for all the hard work you do!

Reply
Jason Colavito link
7/28/2016 12:29:00 pm

I agree with you for the most part, and my original draft actually had a much longer section on Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism, but it became too cumbersome for a blog post of this length. You're right that the two ideologies serve very different purposes, one attempting to empower the historically disempowered and the other attempting to protect and promote the power of the historically empowered. All I meant, and I agree that the edited version isn't as clear as they might be, is that the two approaches use the same methods and distortions for radically opposite and obviously unequal purposes.

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