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Review of America Unearthed S02E10 "Lost Relics of the Bible"

2/2/2014

153 Comments

 
This week’s episode of America Unearthed, S02E10 “Lost Relics of the Bible,” concerns itself, sometimes literally and sometimes thematically, with the Lost Tribes of Israel, who vanished from history following the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 722 BCE. According to myth, all Jews trace their origins back to one of Jacob’s twelve sons, but ten (by tradition) of these groupings disappeared. The Jewish historian Tudor Parfitt—who believed he found the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant among the Lemba tribe in Africa—declared in The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (2004) that the Lost Tribes were a pious fiction, and one designed to reinforce ethnic and colonialist claims: “...this myth is a vital feature of colonial discourse throughout the long period of European overseas empires, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, until the later half of the twentieth.” And now again today.

And so we begin our quest for Lost Tribes and other wandering Jews, but to understand why anyone would think God’s Chosen People were hiding out in America, we have to trace the European and later American efforts to create an acceptable history for the Americas.

Background

When Europeans realized that the lands where Columbus had ventured were not in fact Asia as the Admiral had claimed but were instead something new, European scholars tried to figure out how to incorporate two massive continents and a plethora of unknown islands into their preexisting worldview. Since this was the Renaissance, there were two primary models available for incorporating the New World into the framework of the old: Classical learning and the Bible.

Classical models were popular, and a goodly number of writers tried to identify the Americas with unknown lands beyond the Pillars of Heracles alluded to in Classical writers like Pliny, Diodorus, and Ptolemy, or even hypothetical “opposite” continents some philosophers had speculated were necessary to keep the earth balanced. (These imaginary lands, called Terra Australis, gave rise to maps that show what modern fringe theorists wrongly think are Antarctica before the ice.) This was, for example, the view of Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who though Diodorus’s magical island (Library 5.19) was in Mississippi. Both Francisco López de Gómara and John Dee adopted Plato’s Atlantis as the most likely Classical reference to the Americas. The Spanish historian Gómara identified Atlantis with Mexico (“in Mexico they call water atl, a word that seems like, if it is not already, from the island”), safely within the Spanish-controlled area. Dee, a Welshman, naturally claimed that the Appalachians and New England were Atlantis, “nowe named America,” since those were territories controlled by the English sovereign, who also reigned over Wales.

But the Classical model had stiff competition from the Biblical model, which had the benefit of serving colonial interests by generating fictive reasons justifying the mass conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. According to the Biblical model of history, all human beings descended from one of Noah’s three sons—presuming Native Americans were humans. Some Spanish friars though they may have been created by the Devil to mock Europeans, while the French essayist Montagne wondered if they were a separate creation. Others seriously considered that the Native Americans were a people from before the time of Adam who somehow survived the Flood.

In short order, though, most decided that Native Americans were both humans and part of the great family tree of Noah (as the Church insisted they must be to make it worth saving their souls). Therefore, they had to be connected back to the Old World. There was active debate as to which of Noah’s sons gave rise to the Native Americans: First Japeth and then Ham were proposed as their “father,” but neither was satisfactory. Japeth was the father of the Europeans, and the Natives were clearly inferior to Europeans. Ham was the father of the Africans, but the Spanish quickly determined that Native Americans were not as good a slave as the Africans, nor as dark of skin. Ham was out. That left Shem, father of the peoples of Asia, and by 1650, most authorities had agreed that the Native Americans were descended from Shem.

This led to two conclusions: First, to be Asian meant that the Native Americans had crossed to the New World from Asia—a coincidentally correct conclusion. Second, if they were Semitic, then it made it possible that the Native Americans might just be a people who were lost to the ages: the Lost Tribes of Israel! In this, limited geographic and ethnographic knowledge, combined with Biblical inerrancy, made the myth all but inevitable.

Spanish writers speculated about whether Native people were the Lost Tribes almost from the beginning. Peter Martyr said as much in 1511 (the 1555 English translation of his Decades made calls America the “Spiritual Israel”), and two Catholic missionaries of the 1580s made the same claim. However, these speculations found little favor in Britain, where colonial interests first required a more directly British connection—hence John Dee’s promotion of “Welsh” Indians to justify English claims to North America.

The Portuguese Jew Antonio de Montezinos claimed in 1644 to have met Lost Tribes of Jews living among the Inca in part of Peru near Quito (now Ecuador), and the news spread fast when a rabbi in Amsterdam published the claim a book called The Hope of Israel in 1649 after having spoken to Montezinos and become convinced that the Messiah would soon return now that the Lost Tribes had been found. The author, Menassah ben Israel (who had been born a Portuguese Marano Christian during the Inquisition), petitioned Oliver Cromwell to let the Jews back into England in anticipation of the end of the world, which he and Cromwell apparently had penciled in for 1666.  Menassah laid down the foundation of everything that would follow with the claim that America was originally peopled from the Mediterranean and that the current Native Americans all but exterminated the pure Old World race, who were left but few in number:

I doe like of, in part, the opinion of the Spaniards who dwell in the Indies, who by common consent doe affirme that the Indians come of the ten Tribes. And truly they are not altogether mistaken, because in my opinion, they were the first planters of the Indies; as also other people of the East-Indies came by that Streight which is between India, and the Kingdome of Anian. But that people, according to our Montezinus, made warre upon those Inhabitants the Israelites, whom they forced up unto the mountaines, and the in-land Countries, as formerly the Brittaines were driven by the Saxons into Wales.

Oh, and, of course, these remaining lost Jews were “white, and bearded men […] who had never commerce with the Spaniards; and whom you cannot affirme to be any other than Israelites…” Thus Native legends of white gods and Spanish accounts of light-skinned Natives were really tales of these lost Jews—the very template for every crazy fringe history diffusionist claim down to the present, including Ignatius Donnelly and Graham Hancock and all their lost white race fantasies.

But why should the great colonial rivals of England, Spain and Portugal, have the honor of playing host to God’s Chosen Ones in their American lands? Surely England, as the future home of the Fifth Monarchy—the world empire that would herald Christ’s return—should have the Lost Jews under its protection. Therefore, also in 1649, an English cleric named Thomas Thorowgood published a widely-read pamphlet for use in New England called Iewes in America; or, the Probabilities That the Americans are of that Race in which he expanded Montezinos’s claims from simply some Natives in Peru to all Natives everywhere in the Americas, placing a goodly number under English control to give England its glorious due just before the Millennium he believed was about to dawn, when the Lost Tribes converted and the Fifth Monarchy would pave the way for Jesus to return. This book set the stage for all later claims for Lost Tribes in North America, given its intent to provide instruction of New England missionaries. He compared Native Americans, particularly the Aztecs, to the Jews and found what he thought were stunning similarities. I swear I am not making these up.

  • Both considered women unclean while menstruating
  • Both wore jewelry and enjoyed dancing
  • Both had lunar calendars and showed hospitality to strangers
  • Both had the death penalty for crimes
  • Both believed in a great flood

He further adduced that the Natives lacked a single word for God, which must be due to the prohibition on the speaking of the Jewish name for God, the Tetragrammaton.

Thorowgood rejected the claims of a Brazilian colonist that the Apostles had preached the Gospel in America before 150 CE. Instead, he felt that the Native Americans had never heard the Good News and therefore were doomed to suffer and die because, as was the common belief of that era, Jews had killed Christ and were living under the punishment of God.

“And now if all these parallels will not amount to a probability, one thing more shall be added, which is the dispersion of the Jewes.” Since Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and the Jews were scattered to the winds, it stood to reason that if none of the Lost Tribes could be found in Europe, Africa, or Asia, they must have walked to America. It also stood to reason that since Natives today are degenerate Jews that they must have been greater and more civilized in the (Jewish) past—an idea that fed into the mound builder myth.

Obviously, not everyone agreed. Indeed, this view was a decided minority down to the American Revolution, even more so after the failure of the Millennium to arise in 1655 or 1666 as predicted. That the Native Americans were their own people and responsible for the villages, mounds, and other works found in their lands was so self-evident that it required no discussion or explanation in the travel narratives produced down to about 1775. The mounds in particular were simply “Indian” works. But after the Revolutionary War something changed. The United States needed a new past not tied to Britain’s, and suddenly the old claims about non-native builders of the mounds seemed like a great place to look for new ancestors, effectively taking English propaganda and turning it on its head to provide succor for American claims to greatness.

There were active claims for many other origins—Noah Webster, interestingly enough, argued that Bronze Age Scots had built the larges to the mounds of the United States based on their similarity to Scottish tumuli—shades of Scott Wolter! “But as all primitiv (sic) inhabitants of the west of Europe were evidently of the same stock, it is natural to suppose they might pass from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Greenland, and from thence to Labrador; and thus the North American savages may claim a common origin with the primitiv Britons and Celts.” He further believed the Ohio earthworks were the result of Carthaginians, Vandals, Goths, and Tartars fortifying themselves against reciprocal attacks.

If there was one thing everyone in the late 1700s and early 1800s agreed on, however, it was that Native Americans were too stupid, lazy, poor, and inferior to make big piles of dirt. (The Comte de Buffon famously declared Native Americans not only weak and stupid but possessed of abnormally small penises—he thought the entire Western Hemisphere was a degenerate shadow of the Old World.) Only Europeans were capable of such amazing feats as building mounds. Well, almost everyone agreed: Thomas Jefferson recognized these claims for the Eurocentric fantasies they were and tried to squelch them by excavating a mound near Monticello in the 1780s to demonstrate that it was a Native construction. His work, while praised, was nevertheless ignored in favor of more fanciful and politically useful theories. Gen. George Rogers Clark, too, was so incensed at the stupidity of such claims that in 1788 he went out to ask Native Americans what they knew about the mounds of the West. “They say they were the works of their forefathers; that they were as numerous as the trees in the wood; that they affronted the Great Spirit, and he made them kill one another,” he reported. “This is their tradition, and I see no good reason why it should not be received as good history—at least as good as a great part of ours.”

It wouldn’t be received that way because there were too many other forces at work, enough to require a full book—which I am actually in the process of writing right now (I’m about 2/3 of the way through)—to explain. Instead, let’s focus on Lost Tribes, widely popular as an explanation for the Indians thanks to James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775), though Samuel Farmer Jarvis cautioned that the obvious Judaism of the Natives is probably only due to their shared decent from Noah.

Despite a plethora of reports like Clark’s, far too many asserted, as George Imlay (an advocate for westward expansion into Native territory) and Jonathan Heart did in the 1790s, that Native people had no knowledge of the mounds, no tradition of their use, and no clue how they were made. Heart felt that just as the mammoth had gone extinct and left nothing behind but a few bones recently uncovered, so too might a lost white race have vanished behind the tide of Native savagery. This left an opening for Lost Tribes.

The story breaks down at this point into dozens of competing versions of the Lost Tribes theory whose differences are too manifold to go into here. The thrust of it was this: If America were to be taken serious on the world stage, it had to have a prehistory to rival Europe’s, and it could not be seen as a degenerate land of small penises as Europeans envisioned it. Suddenly, America’s mounds sprouted an amazing history. Now they were the works of the Jews, the Chosen People of God, and therefore America itself was touched by the hand of the divine.

Representative of this trend was the Rev. Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews (1823, rev. ed. 1825) which recapitulated much of what was already the popular understanding of American history in service of a pernicious argument: When Jerusalem fell and the Jews scattered, prophecy declared that the Lost Tribes must be an outcast people, forgotten to modern man and ignorant of themselves (Jeremiah 3:6-25) and who had walked for a year and a half north and east from Babylon (2 Esdras 13:44-45). Only America would fit the bill, and no other humans save the Native Americans so perfectly matched the expectations for a lost race of degenerate Jews.
Israel brought into this new continent a considerable degree of civilization; and the better part of them long laboured to maintain it. But others fell into the hunting and consequently savage state; whose barbarous hordes invaded their more civilized brethren, and eventually annihilated most of them, and all in these northern regions!

Up until this point, however, no pre-Exile Judaic artifacts had been dug out of the mounds, despite nearly fifty years of looting. No one had really expected to find them prior to the 1770s, and so they were not found.

Now, however, there was an incentive to seek God’s special providence and blessing for the new land, to show it had independent connection to the Divine. In View of the Hebrews Smith reported that an employee of Joseph Merrick had found a document later known as the Pittsfield Parchment just below the surface of the Merrick farm in Massachusetts in what he suspected but never checked to see was an “Indian grave.” This parchment was old and stained and written in Hebrew letters—obviously the work of the Lost Tribes for people not yet aware that Paleo-Hebrew, not Modern Hebrew, was the alphabet in use at the time the Lost Tribes allegedly vanished. This became conflated with a supposedly genuine Native tradition that there had once been an unreadable book buried with a long-dead chief. The object was probably a colonial era artifact left behind by a Hessian soldier in the Revolution or a German prisoner during the War of 1812. The artifact, whatever it was, disappeared after being sent to the American Antiquarian Society and garnering the non-interest of scholars. But the precedent had been set: Indian burials contained the artifacts of the Lost Tribes.

The very same year that Ethan Smith published his book, Joseph Smith (no relation) invented Mormonism, and many believe he took this incident as his model, for he too claimed to have found a book written in a lost language (“Reformed Egyptian”) and dug out of Hill Cumorah, a glacial formation in upstate New York that Smith and the locals wrong believed was a Native American burial mound. We need not go into the whole history of Mormonism, but the conclusions Smith drew in the Book of Mormon and related texts were unmistakable: Just as Ethan Smith had claimed, here too Lost Tribes of Israel were the first inhabitants of the Americas and the mounds were the funeral pyres of their noble dead, killed by the Native Americans, fallen Jews cursed by God with dark skin for lapsing from monotheism (Alma 3:6-7; 4 Nephi 1:10; 2 Nephi 5, etc.).

Both Smiths also shared other commonalities: Ethan thought Quetzalcoatl had been modeled on stories of Jesus; Joseph decided he was Jesus. Ethan claimed a copper breastplate with two jewels exactly like Urim and Thummim came out of an American mound, while Joseph claimed to have found the true Urim and Thummim with a gold breastplate at Hill Cumorah. Either way: Jews!

From this point, suddenly Jewish artifacts started to bubble up out of the ground all over America, most quite obviously manufactured by those seeking to support Mormon beliefs or to justify seizure of Native lands by reassigning them to an older, non-Native source. We have already seen Scott Wolter discuss the Newark Decalogue Stone found in Ohio, which all but fringe historians recognize as an anachronistic fake. It was hardly the only artifact manufactured at the time; the Michigan Relic are perhaps the most famous for their sheer number and the audacity of the fraud, but other examples include the Grave Creek Stone, the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone, and of course the Tucson Lead Crosses. The last case is the most interesting because Scott Wolter examined those hoax crosses, declared them genuine and promptly ignored the Latin and Hebrew text detailing in plain, if ungrammatical, language their origin with Jews who fled Rome in favor of reassigning them to imaginary “proto-Templars.”

Today the most popular of these hoaxes is the Bat Creek Stone, which was found in 1889, allegedly in a Native mound, but wasn’t recognized as “Hebrew” for decades. Cyrus Thomas published its picture upside down in the 1890s and thought it Cherokee writing. Only in 1960 did Brandeis professor Cyrus H. Gordon declare the inscription Paleo-Hebrew. Gordon was an interesting figure; he believed that the Greeks and the Hebrews descended from a common culture and that the Jews regularly voyaged to America in Antiquity. He also “authenticated” the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone, which as I mentioned, is almost certainly a recent hoax.

Radiocarbon work on other artifacts dug from the same mound at the same time gave dates in the early centuries CE. This was problematic because it’s far too late to have been contemporary with the Lost Tribes (though in theory an artifact could be buried any time after its creation), and the Hebrew alphabet in use in those years was the modern one.

Careful work done in 1993 demonstrated conclusively that the stone was a fraud, and in 2004 the discovery of a Masonic Paleo-Hebrew illustration from 1870 that conforms to the Bat Creek inscription in too many details to be coincidental sealed the book on the stone as far as academia was concerned. The governing conclusion today is that John W. Emmert, a Smithsonian agent who conducted the 1889 excavation, forged the stone by disguising Paleo-Hebrew text copied from the 1870 Masonic text in order to create “Cherokee” writing so he could impress his boss, Cyrus Thomas, by discovering pre-Columbian Native writing.

Nevertheless, both J. Huston McCulloch and Scott Wolter dissent from these conclusions. McCulloch, who as criticized my previous analyses of the stone, asserts that the inscription contains Paleo-Hebrew features not seen in the 1870 illustration (though such features appear in other texts published at the time and Emmert was trying to make Cherokee not Hebrew writing). And Wolter … well, he has his own ideas. In 2010 he examined the stone under a microscope and reported the results in Ancient American, the fringe history magazine. I evaluated his claims back in 2012:
Wolter looked at the stone under a microscope in 2010 and concluded that because the edges of the carved letters were rounded and did not contain any quartz silt, they were therefore weathered and “had to have been made prior to the excavation of the mound by John Emmert.” I’m not sure I follow why it is that the utter lack of orange-colored silt in the carved characters is proof that the stone had been buried in a red clay mound for hundreds of years. The argument seems to be that a fresh carving would have broken into the stone’s orange silt interior and left debris, but that greatly underestimates the ability of a hoaxer to do such simple things as carve carefully and wash and polish the stone prior to burying it.

Wolter contradicts his own assessment by asserting that the stone had been polished prior to being deposited in the mound. The more parsimonious explanation is that the man who faked the stone gave it a good polish to make it look old prior to depositing it. This is partially confirmed by Wolter’s own analysis that only the side with the inscription is polished.

And remember: I wrote that in 2012, before I had ever seen America Unearthed and when I knew nothing of Scott Wolter. His analysis was predicated on the assumption that “academics” and “skeptics” had been suppressing the truth. As such he seemed willfully blind to the idea that the artifact could have been intentionally forged, and he did not factor this into his analysis.

Thanks in large measure to the fringe history explosion of the 1960s-1980s, new candidates for pre-Columbian Jewish sites sprang up. Barry Fell had the unfortunately habit of finding Old World languages, including Hebrew, in any random scratch marks. In 1988, a man in Ohio looked at some old charts of a now-vanished earthwork near Milford and saw nine parallel mounds connected at one end. He thought they looked like a Hanukkah menorah and thus was born a modern myth when the irrepressible J. Huston McCulloch picked up the claim and discussed it in Ancient American magazine in 1996. (See a pattern?) I’m sure it’s entirely coincidental that Ancient American magazine is owned by Wayne May, a Mormon hyper-diffusionist who works to prove the literal truth of Joseph Smith’s vision of prehistory.

The idea of a menorah mound in Ohio had never occurred to earlier researchers—even Lost Tribes theorists—because they had known that the Jewish Temple menorah had seven branches, not nine. The nine-branch menorah was for Hanukkah, used only after 165 BCE, and then only for a very minor holiday of little traditional importance until Americans turned it into a rival to Christmas in the twentieth century. For Jews to sail across the ocean to make a monument to Hanukkah in the early centuries CE would be like Americans going to the moon to build a monument to Labor Day. I’ve discussed this earthwork in much greater detail here.

The Episode

We open with shots of Jerusalem’s Old City and on-screen text discussing the disappearance of the Lost Tribes in 722 BCE, who the show says could have traveled to America. Then the opening credits roll without so much as perfunctory reenactment of Jews heaping dirt into a giant hill. Scott Wolter is seen looking at various material from past episodes as he recounts his geological credentials to remind viewers why we should trust him with rocks. He discusses the Bat Creek Stone as one of his prior successes, which he examined (poorly, as discussed above), and which he plans to revisit for this episode. Wolter asserts that the Bat Creek Stone contains Hebrew writing, and he asserts it is—of course!—a “land claim.” The man is nothing if not consistent. He finds land claims everywhere, and one of his leitmotifs is the desire to determine which European or Mediterranean group is the oldest legal claimant to America. It is a strangely legalistic framework for investigating history.

Wolter meets with a friend named Leslie Kalen to discuss the Bat Creek Stone and Hebrews in America. Kalen describes herself as a Cherokee, and she claims that some Cherokee feel they are Jews, but this isn’t a pre-Contact belief but rather one that emerged as a result of European Lost Tribes claims.

Wolter discusses Cyrus Thomas’s early work looking into the origins of Americas mounds, and he dutifully discusses the claim that Emmert planted the Bat Creek Stone to appeal to Thomas’s one-time belief that the mounds were Cherokee. They predate the Cherokee, as Thomas discovered, but Wolter declines to share the fact that Thomas’s 1894 report on the American mounds delivered the most devastating blow to the lost race theory ever written, as well as correctly identified the mounds as the work of pre-Contact Native groups. Wolter delivers one of his patented rants to the museum official, Tim Baumann, who tried to explain this history to him, and we go to commercial with Wolter asserting that “bad science” is hiding the truth about the real history of the mounds—that they are Jewish.

After the break we get on-screen recapping followed by oral recapping—at ridiculous length this time, easily three times the required length—from the McClung Museum in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the Bat Creek Stone is housed.

Wolter refuses to believe the stone is a hoax. He asks Baumann about scratches that were added to the stone sometime after 1894, and, as in 2010, he plans to use these to compare to the older carvings using 3D microscopy. According to Wolter, this is the first time he is using a 3D microscope to examine the stone. He sees debris in the scratch, indicating it has not been polished and is, obviously, recent. The carved letters lack deposits, and Wolter concludes this means it is old. However, he is leaving out the idea the stone was intentionally polished by the hoaxer, removing any debris. Wolter concedes to Baumann that the inscription could have been faked but declines to explain why that wouldn’t apply here. I’m not letting him off that easy since Wolter concedes to Baumann that he can’t provide an absolute date for the stone. The more he talks, the more obvious it becomes that he is describing his feelings, not science.

He asserts that a double-cross symbol on the stone, which he calls the Cross of Lorraine, represents the Crucifixion. So the stone is from Jews for Jesus?

Without explaining anything, Wolter instead reasserts that the Newark Decalogue Stone is real, and he also claims that the Los Lunas Decalogue (discussed above) is real. He then asserts that the Tucson Lead Artifacts are authentic (his word) and placed on a trail of the Hebrews in America—but get this: He now acknowledges the Hebrew on the artifacts and calls them Jewish. In the episode he did on those lead artifacts (S01E10 “The Desert Cross”) he purposely ignored the Latin and Hebrew texts and called the artifacts “Proto-Templar”! He can’t even keep his own fake history straight! Why doesn’t he mention the Ark of the Covenant he spent the season premiere looking for? Is it because he doesn’t think the Jews brought it here but rather the Templars? If so, that episode was a waste of time, too. The contradictions and inconsistencies mount.

We go to another commercial with Wolter asking Baumann his opinion on the authenticity of the Bat Creek Stone.

When we return, we have another on-screen recap and then Wolter’s question to Baumann again. No oral recap this time! Baumann tells Wolter that he will not endorse the stone but remains open to Wolter’s analysis. Wolter tells Baumann he has convinced himself, and he’s going to go look for more Lost Tribes and wandering Jews.

He drives to Ohio to meet J. Huston McCulloch, whom Wolter identifies as an expert historian, though he is actually an economist and diffusionist. They meet at some Hopewell mounds in Ohio, which gives me the uneasy feeling that the men are trying to imply that the mounds are associated with Jews rather than Native Americans. The two decide that the Jews who made the Bat Creek Stone were not the Lost Tribes, for the mound in which it was found was too recent. Instead, they might have been Jews who fled the Roman destruction of the Second Temple. At this point, Wolter’s analysis of Bat Creek has gone from a tentative relative date to an impossibility of a hoax—something he just finished admitting the evidence did not support.

McCulloch shows Wolter the earthworks near Milford that contain nine parallel mounds, and both men assert that the earthwork is a Jewish Hanukkah menorah and an oil lamp. “What else could it be?” the two men said together. As I pointed out above, this is as close to a ridiculous claim since other mounds were built in parallel, and the Hanukkah menorah was utterly insignificant in that time.

Wolter lies about Jefferson’s interest in the mounds in 1803, after they were first surveyed. He found them interesting as Native constructions, not Lost Tribes. He never asked Lewis and Clark to look for them, and Wolter is wrong to claim Jefferson tried to prove a pre-Spanish culture in Louisiana, especially since Ohio was part of the Northwest Territory, not the Louisiana Territory and has nothing to do with purchasing Louisiana—not from Spain, as Wolter asserts, but from France. As I wrote back in January in examining McCulloch’s claims for the menorah mounds, also called the Little Miami River earthworks (and many other names):
Thomas Jefferson received the 1803 survey maps by William Lytle (produced, almost certainly, for the Northwest Territorial Survey) and was intrigued by Little Miami River earthworks. He requested more information about “those works of Antiquity,” but Anthony F. C. Wallace, writing in Jefferson and the Indians (1999), dutifully forestalls America Unearthed’s speculation by emphasizing that Jefferson’s correspondence makes plain that he considered the earthworks to be the work of Native Americans—not Aztecs or Vikings or Jews—and that this view did not change after he read [Hugh] Williamson’s [1811] book [discussing these mounds]. Although Jefferson would confess to being shocked late in life to learn that the mounds of the Midwest were “so numerous,” he never wavered from his view, born of his own firsthand excavation of a burial mound near Monticello and reported in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the mounds were the work of Native Americans.

In short, both McCulloch and Wolter are intentionally distorting Jefferson’s priorities, interests, and views in service of a conspiracy. For the book on Jefferson and the mound builder myth I’m writing, I’ve read Jefferson’s correspondence, his letters to Congress on the issue, and his private papers, and there isn’t anything in them that would support Wolter’s view. It’s a straight-up untruth.

After the next break, Wolter reviews what he had discussed so far. He thinks that the descendants of the Lost Tribes may have been responsible for the menorah-shaped mounds. This would be a neat trick since the Lost Tribes were more than 500 years vanished when the Hanukkah menorah was invented. Who was feeding them information? Why did the Jews back in the Old World not record such contact?

At his lab in Minnesota, Wolter interviews a rabbi named Michael Adam Latz, who discusses Columbus bringing Jews with him on his voyage on the chance he might run into some Lost Tribes. Some irrelevant material about European persecution of Jews in the 1490s is introduced, but this is at least 1300 years after the period of interest, so I’m not sure what the purpose of this discussion is. Latz discusses the conversos, or crypto-Jews, who converted outwardly to escape persecution, many of whom took up residence in New Mexico in the 1500s to escape scrutiny at home, and then I realize what this is: It’s the story I suggested America Unearthed cover last year. Hey! I got one, except that no one on this show bothered to actually go find any conversos descendants (who, yes, still exist and practice Jewish rites), and in what one could reasonably read as a rebuff to me, Wolter dismisses this entire fascinating story of cultural survival in the wilds of America in favor of pressing the rabbi for more Lost Tribes claims. Latz dutifully pretends to provide photographs on his tablet computer of rock art in New Mexico.

So Wolter travels to New Mexico after again asserting without evidence that the Los Lunas Decalogue is real and not, as is likely, a college prank, and he plans to look at some rock carvings that may or may not be evidence of Jews. We then go to commercial.

After the final break, we get another recap of the entire hour, before we return to Conchas Lake, New Mexico and the petroglyphs that aren’t even Hebrew, just symbolic. The area is known for Formative Period Native American rock art, but this explanation doesn’t satisfy Wolter. He again, oddly, asserts that the Tucson Artifacts are Jewish and not, as he claimed last year, proto-Templar. The rock art he sees is absolutely typical of Formative Period (and later) rock art, including the archetypical pecking technique for making the art. Wolter claims that his own ignorance of Native American rock art styles is evidence that the art is not Native American in what has to be the single dumbest conclusion he has drawn in this hour. Just because Wolter does not know what the rock art of early tribes from the region looks like does not exempt it from being Native American. Wolter claims that the rock art is much older than modern graffiti, to which: no shit! The Formative Period stretches back to 200 CE.

Wolter hears from his informants that the rock art is Old Negev, a script allegedly used by the Jewish laborers before the time of Abraham, a reference that bothers me. I’m disturbed by the assertions thrown about, not only because not even a hint of evidence is shown that the geometric and natural designs were actually alphabetic but also because Wolter wonders whether the tribe of Judah, the ancestors of Jesus, were responsible. He cautions that just as Catholics use Latin for the mass (which they haven’t done since the 1960s outside Rome, but hey!) later Jews could have used this script. What disturbs me is that “Old Negev” doesn’t show up in standard sources. It’s most fully documented in Mormon literature, and I can only find references to it in conjunction with Brigham Young University archaeologist James Harris, who claimed to have found the script in Israel in 1994 and then others claimed it existed on all six continents as part of a global, ancient Jewish world culture.

I don’t know enough about this, but the fact that I can’t find any non-Mormon or non-fringe material on Old Negev suggests to me that all is not right with this claim, especially since recent standard works on the development of Hebrew make no mention of it—and no linguist would use the mythical figure of Abraham as a reference point.

At any rate, Wolter discounts the Lost Tribes as early Americans because they are too old to fit his evidence, so he instead concludes that the Jews came in the early centuries CE based on an array of hoaxes and misunderstandings shown in this hour.

Next time: We conclude Wolter’s three-part search for the oldest white Americans with the hunt for Solutreans in America!

153 Comments
J.A.D
2/1/2014 02:37:40 pm

whew... Jason! Home run!
The alternative history ideas
vector off towards distraction
as Plato is further ignored. If
they had stuck to the classics,
less damage is done. Correct
on T. Jefferson! He asked L + C
to be 100% observant & document
well. He did not tell them the very
results to be handed in before they
went!!! Old Earth Creationists often
do not drop zeros from a B.C date.
Young Earth Creationists do...

Reply
J.A.D
2/1/2014 02:45:34 pm

If Joseph tells the Pharaoh about the seven good years
that will be followed by seven bad years, and says to store
grain, a Hebrew script contemporary to Abraham is also
assumed contemporary to at least one of the pyramids or
even Stonehenge. SW i see is in rarefied form, having now
tracked down a script hid away by the Freemasons, that they
got from the Templar Knights, who in turn after the fall of the
Roman Empire must have stumbled on an ancient library
CLEOPATRA VII hid in the sands of Egypt on getting word
that Octavian was very AUGUSTUS at Actium, and soon to
arrive. Notice how quickly we bring up Alexander Helios?

Reply
J.A.D
2/1/2014 02:55:18 pm

Humour me in a droll British manner...
Wiki has Stonehenge arriving between 3000 B.C to 2000 B.C
Wiki has Abraham loosely at about 2000 B.C

so...

If the Freemasons had a badly copied Architectural manuel
that covered most of the fogotten arts that Cheops's courtiers
knew, in Cleopatra's tyme we assume her courtiers could
read books done in the auld manner, and she liked to read
books in a Greek translation. SW is in rareified form. This is
how PYRAMID lore has something to do with Stonehenge
and the way FDR modified the city plans George Washington
gave his JOHN HANCOCK to. Is SW about to verge on his
bold new GRAND THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE! I feel French!

J.A.D
2/1/2014 03:36:00 pm

Scott Wolter has a pattern.
His magnus opus is about
to arrive. Moses is possibly
contemporary to Akenaton,
Tut, Seti or Ramses 1 or 2.
There could have been a
Hebrew Alphabet that does
predate the Phonesian one,
so perhaps SW is on much
more solid ground, academically.
He lost me when he humiliated
Plato. He just pulled a Young
Earth Creationist number, i see!
You are correct Jason, your feud
with SW in the History Dep't is on
an equal academic level to the older
and glorious one in the Math Dep't...
namely the Newton/Leibniz Calculus
feud of the late 1600s. Even taking
Newton's Biblical timelines as if the
Divine Writ of God, and humouring all
begats in a Bishop Ussher manner, my
French side is about to quote Voltaire
as i try not to pee me bloomers. It does
help that earlier tonite i looked at the film
COCKNEYS Vrs ZOMBIES on Netflix and
began to root for the leads. Saw a grand
royal seal on an old 1666 tomb for plague
victims shattered as a construction team i did.
Then the film gets fun! all sorts of rats... anyway.
1666 is a Charles II date. The 1655 date if
arrived at by Cromwell's copious almost as
to be Neanderthal in volume cranium in the
1630s or 1640s explains why CHARLES 1st
is beheaded in the seven year AntiChrist zone.
How nice of the Puritans to preclude his being
one of the tinhorn puppet kings of the global tyrant.
They thought him weak, so they did him a favor,,,
SW is about to show his millenialism in short order!

J.A.D
2/1/2014 03:41:46 pm

i feel S.W is a Young Earth Creationist...
Gunn is correct, with the ### he lucked in.

TYPO
as a construction team = BY a construction team

J.A.D
2/2/2014 11:38:28 am

"Obviously, not everyone agreed. Indeed, this view was a decided minority down to the American Revolution, even more so after the failure of the Millennium to arise in 1655 or 1666 as predicted. That the Native Americans were their own people and responsible for the villages, mounds, and other works found in their lands was so self-evident that it required no discussion or explanation in the travel narratives produced down to about 1775. The mounds in particular were simply “Indian” works. But after the Revolutionary War something changed..."

Jason's assessment of the Classical School vs. the Biblical
School has me thinking that by 1775 the Enlightenment was
about to give way to Lord Byron and the Romantic Era. If I am
correct and Charles I was beheaded when England was in
the throes of a Millennium Cult, and the members of the cult
expected Jesus to return in 1655 or 1666, he is not simply the
Absolutist Tyrant all feared. His hesitant character & bombastic
rhetoric doomed him. He dies inside a medieval passion play.
Did Cromwell's failure at providing a powerful heir in tandem
with the emotional letdown upon the realization that the Second
Coming was not imminent then build on the accomplishments
of the sciences so as to create a secular space where Royal
Society members could be hypothetical & speculative? Is the
reign of Charles II totally Post-Millennial in that the religious
fervor is seen for what it is, even if Oliver Cromwell himself
was not adverse to Science proper, only mayhap weak kings?
We have quiet echoes of our modern era, case in point, the
television ministry of Jack Van Impe and what he said in 1999
verses the realization today that Jesus has yet to arrive and is
not already here. A stern restricting of secular space in public
dialogues hints at waves of religious fervor. To be fair, Milton
helped to bring about some of our freedom of speech & the
press ideas, but all Puritans around and under Cromwell
acted like a cult group. We are not a theocracy... but the short
Republic of Oliver Cromwell almost became a very long term
theocracy. John Locke helped to create a secular intellectual
space. Natural Philosophy became Science proper. Admittedly
AULD ROWLEY was not a Civil Libertarian, and like his father,
but was a more astute politician. Hence this paradox, the very
discriminatory practices in tandem with the new freedoms that
John Locke's Glorious Revolution engendered, that do arrive.
Jason, as he writes his book, has to take into account the many
religious crusades for good or ill and the letdowns in their wake.
For our Democracy to survive, we presume that there shall be
this secular space in common. The Classical model is less lethal. It also is more sane if it be in tandem with the scientific
method. This is why Jefferson is not a total idiot, even if he is
a slave-master and not questioning the Tidewater social set.

"The Portuguese Jew Antonio de Montezinos claimed in 1644 to have met Lost Tribes of Jews living among the Inca in part of Peru near Quito (now Ecuador), and the news spread fast when a rabbi in Amsterdam published the claim a book called The Hope of Israel in 1649 after having spoken to Montezinos and become convinced that the Messiah would soon return now that the Lost Tribes had been found. The author, Menassah ben Israel (who had been born a Portuguese Marano Christian during the Inquisition), petitioned Oliver Cromwell to let the Jews back into England in anticipation of the end of the world, which he and Cromwell apparently had penciled in for 1666. Menassah laid down the foundation of everything that would follow with the claim that America was originally peopled from the Mediterranean and that the current Native Americans all but exterminated the pure Old World race, who were left but few in number..."



KIF
2/1/2014 09:01:14 pm

Get a grip on folks, the Bible itself is fiction and therefore cannot be used as a primary historical source for anything - except of course as a primary source of the mythological beliefs of the Jewish people. Yep, I've heard about the Christian-Jewish Tradition being credited with the source of Western Civilization, but laws for the past few centuries have originated from Governments and not from spurious priesthoods.

Reply
Gary
2/2/2014 03:18:57 am

Kif, you are overstating it to say that it is all fiction. Later movements of peoples and the existence of individuals are supported by evidence. Look up the Cyrus Cylinder story. It gives an interesting insight into the message from Cyrus that is in the Bible. It shows that he sent such messages to many peoples, crediting their own gods for his success.

KIF
2/2/2014 03:45:19 am

Historical accounts within the Bible are embellished by fiction and it is impossible to determine what is fact and what is fiction. But the priests made sure fact was subordinate to the fiction.

Gary
2/2/2014 04:08:59 am

I see you've changed your opinion from "fiction" to "embellished by fiction". But it is not impossible to determine fact from fiction. Evidence from the ground does that.
Yes, it's obvious that it was written by priests for their own benefit.

KIF
2/2/2014 07:52:59 am

There is no "evidence" from the ground. References to peoples and places do not validate obvious mythological events. The salient element in Biblical material is the supernatural intercession of "God". Anything that happens "historically" is deemed to be part of "God's plan", and anything that did not happen was made up. The Bible cannot be trusted any more than any other ancient mythological narrative.

Gary
2/2/2014 08:23:31 am

Kif, there is more to it than divine interventions. There are people and wars and movements of peoples. Some have been verified to have existed. Others are more and more unlikely to have existed as we get a clearer picture of the histories of that region. Cyrus was not fictional.

J.A.D
2/2/2014 10:12:18 am

Nor was Josephus even though his work was heavily
censored after his time by Imperator Trajan's scribes.

Benny
2/1/2014 03:24:42 pm

Really enjoyed this blog post, and I'm still going through things trying to draw my own conclusions on tonight episode. I have two articles that talk about DNA testing on the Cherokee pointing to a North-African or Middle-eastern origin.

http://dnaconsultants.com/_blog/DNA_Consultants_Blog/post/Anomalous_Mitochondrial_DNA_Lineages_in_the_Cherokee/

http://www.examiner.com/article/dna-scientists-claim-that-cherokees-are-from-the-middle-east

Not trying to stir the pot, as I said before I am still trying to draw my own conclusions. I was just wondering about your thoughts on this.

Reply
Gary
2/2/2014 02:31:27 am

I would not take either of these sources seriously. These DNA services have been criticized as giving people misleading information about their own DNA and the Examiner article is only referencing the same tests and is by Richard Thornton. Search this site for information about him.

Reply
Just Sayin'
2/1/2014 03:52:58 pm

I’ve found more “Crosses of Lorraine” on a single take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant than have been found in all of the Americas excluding, of course, all the Exxon gas station signs across the continents, and the hundreds of thousands of telephone poles scattered throughout North and South America, which look suspiciously like “Crosses of Lorraine” to me. So, obviously, filling up with Exxon gas on my way to pick up my Chinese take-out food after using the telephone to place my order proves a Knights of Templar/Free-Mason presence in America, prior to the introduction of the gasoline engine, the telephone, and even the Chinese. Just sayin’………..

Reply
Prone
2/2/2014 07:06:59 am

But what about the Oreos???

Reply
Gary
2/2/2014 07:29:30 am

Oreos have a built in Eurocentric bias against the lactose intolerant because they are so good with milk!

The Other J.
2/2/2014 09:33:12 am

You can also find the Cross of Lorraine in fortune cookies on the flip-side of the fortune, where you too can "Learn to Speak Chinese!" At least the fortune cookies at the place up the street have that. So of course, Templars in San Francisco.

I've also gotten a fortune from one of their cookies that said:

Love is the law,
love under will.

So the Templars are also behind Aleister Crowley and Thelema -- someone alert Scott Wolter!

Reply
Harry
2/1/2014 03:57:32 pm

Since I am Jewish and have some knowledge of Jewish, I watched about half an hour, before I grew wary of his malarkey. I completely agree with Jason that a hoaxer was quite capable of polishing the Bat Creek Stone. However, Wolter also mentioned that the so-called Paleo-Hebrew inscription was more weathered than the more recent marks to which he compared it. Of course, if the inscription was carved in 1889 and the marks were made within the last few decades, it would not be the least surprising that the former is more weathered. In short, his analysis was meaningless.

One other error I noticed as soon as I heard it was Wolter calling Judah one of the "lost tribes of Israel." It was never lost -- which is why my religion is still called "Judaism."

Reply
Harry
2/1/2014 03:59:30 pm

In the first sentence of my post above, I meant to say that I have some knowledge of Jewish history.

Reply
J.A.D
2/1/2014 04:03:38 pm

Harry... it was a minor typo! You redeemed thyself
with a neat ending to thy short posting, indeed!!!!!

"One other error I noticed as soon as I heard it was Wolter calling Judah one of the "lost tribes of Israel." It was never lost -- which is why my religion is still called "Judaism." "

J.A.D
2/1/2014 03:59:59 pm

game, set & match point

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Seeker
2/1/2014 06:41:32 pm

Jason, thanks much for providing the information in your blog one would expect to find on the History Channel. What a hot mess this AU episode was. And it yielded some memorable SW quotes:

“As a scientist, I focus on facts but in this case I can’t ignore the oral tradition.” This comment was made in reference to the Central Cherokee tribe who claim Jewish roots. Did SW not watch the recently re-aired 2010 History channel show he participated in—"Who Really Discovered America?" DNA testing definitely proved during that show the Central Band of Cherokees don't have Jewish ancestry, so he must know this.

Before a commercial break SW states: “We go back to the science. I let the rocks talk.” After the break, before SW even examines the Bat Creek Stone, he says he doesn't believe it’s a fake. The rock hadn't even "talked" yet, so how is his approach scientific?

To Harry's point about the meaningless analysis, amen. If I'm understanding SW's explanation of relative dating, he has no clue when the initial inscription was made—he only determined: 1) the initial scratches were made earlier than the two modern scratches and 2) the stone was polished after the initial scratches were made--whenever the heck that happened.

Emmert's BCS hoax would have happened in 1880’s—and then he could have polished the stone before he tossed it into the mound, so surely any deposits or residue would be gone by 2014.

After sharing this weak evidence, SW proclaims the BCS is "the genuine article" and the whole investigation of it boiled down to another great quote: “the inscription looks really old.”

This kind of weak scientific work is exactly what drove me to this blog. The BCS investigation on AU was so ridiculous, a middle school science class would not be convinced by the evidence presented, much less Bauman—whose facial expressions were priceless, by the way.

Sorry this is so long, but I have to mention a final thing which blew me away and I wonder if anyone else caught this. When Bauman directly asked SW about the BCS' authenticity, SW tried to turn it around and practically asked Bauman to prove it's a fake i.e. “you can make a charge that somebody did something anytime you want but making it stick is the key thing." Huh? So SW evaded the question and then changed the subject by talking about the meaning of the inscription instead--which didn't fit the time frame of the Lost Tribes. Classic.

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The Other J.
2/2/2014 09:48:36 am

Kinda makes you want to see the shots of Bauman that ended up on the cutting room floor.

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Seeker
2/2/2014 03:13:14 pm

Nice! That would be worth the price of cable, alone.

Watcher
2/2/2014 10:25:15 am

I agree, this week had the best assemblage of SW quotes to date. The best one had to be "scientist" and "facts". This was probably never truer for him than when he appeared in 2010's "Who Really Discovered Amerca?" and tested the alleged Chinese anchors recovered off the Californian coast, declaring them to have no signs of being manmade before doing his signature flip-flop (just like in this episode) and comes to the conclusion, based on hearsay about the unrecoverable site, that it must be manmade and the burden of proof is on someone claiming they aren't...which 10 seconds ago was him. I assume he viewed the show in its entirety since he participated in the KRS discussion as well as testing the New Mexico decalogue.

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CFC
2/2/2014 11:03:52 am

Committee Films produced "Who Really Discovered America" so of course, Wolter played a role in it.

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Watcher
2/2/2014 11:28:32 am

...following "The Holy Grail in America" from the following year...the project and partnership leading to AU...for better or worse...

Watcher
2/2/2014 11:29:55 am

....sorry, I meant previous year...

Wacher
2/2/2014 11:30:38 am

...and also I just meant worse...

Gunn
2/1/2014 07:25:09 pm

From Blog Heading: Gen. George Rogers Clark, too, was so incensed at the stupidity of such claims that in 1788 he went out to ask Native Americans what they knew about the mounds of the West. “They say they were the works of their forefathers; that they were as numerous as the trees in the wood; that they affronted the Great Spirit, and he made them kill one another,” he reported. “This is their tradition, and I see no good reason why it should not be received as good history—at least as good as a great part of ours.”

Makes one wonder what the Mound Builders did to affront the Great Spirit. I find this particularly interesting because a Native American from way far back is telling his peoples' viewpoint on what happened to the Mound Builders. Historians want to know where they came from (if they did) and what happened to them. Their beginning and ending is fuzzy, but this Native American said they killed one another off. I wonder if he said this out of accurate, passed-down knowledge, or out of community speculation about the mounds? It is one hypothesis I've never heard before...and from someone possibly in the know.

J.A.D., I have no idea what "Gunn is correct, with the ### he lucked in," means, and I hesitate to ask. You kind of made the beginning of this comment section not that appealing. I hope it doesn't distract folks away from wanting to post.

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Only Me
2/1/2014 08:41:10 pm

Gunn, I found a possible answer to your question that seems to verify the story given to Gen. Clark.

According to nativeamericanencyclopedia.com:

"The Late Mississippian period, usually considered from c. 1400 to European contact, is characterized by increasing warfare, political turmoil, and population movement. The population of Cahokia dispersed early in this period (1350–1400), perhaps migrating to other rising political centers. More defensive structures are often seen at sites, and sometimes a decline in mound-building and ceremonialism. Although some areas continued an essentially Middle Mississippian culture until the first significant contact with Europeans, the population of most areas had dispersed or were experiencing severe social stress by 1500. Along with the contemporary Anasazi, these cultural collapses coincide with the global climate change of the Little Ice Age. Scholars have theorized that drought and the collapse of maize agriculture, together with possible deforestation and overhunting by the concentrated populations, forced them to move away from major sites."

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Gunn link
2/2/2014 03:34:42 am

Interesting take, Only Me. I'll have to check out that website, which I wasn't aware of. Thanks.

I guess hunger makes for cranky neighbors. The above scenario you revealed makes pretty good sense. The bottom line is that territories were constantly shifting and re-shifting, which caused a failure of communities.

I'm beginning to focus in on the interaction between the Scandinavians I perceive to have been here in MN and SD during this very time period, and the Natives they encountered. I had earlier assumed that Eastern Sioux had interacted with these medieval lads, and not Chippewa for instance, because they didn't arrive until around 1500. Who did the Old Trouble Maker's carvers collide with?

Now I'm realizing that during the 1300's, this European and Native American clash may very well have been between Mound Builders, most likely Mississippians...and if the evidences in SD goes back slightly earlier, say to the very end of the Viking Age (1100), it is possible that early Scandinavians clashed with either Sioux-related tribes, or Mississippians.

I don't know how far north and especially west the earthwork mounds extend to, but it's easy to see that this area must have been a shifting fringe territory of sorts...which could account for the huge early 1300's massacre (nearly 400 Natives) in nearby SD, most having scalp marks on their skulls. (This represents a city that was overrun during construction of a weak spot in their defenses.)

Using logic, I must guess that the Scandinavians who marked up the entire Whetstone River, SD, area with stoneholes and several related petroglyphs, were allowed in the area for a while, based on these evidences being spread over an area perhaps 20 miles or so in length, and half this distance in width. Assuming they were on foot at this point, the river being too diminished to travel by boat all the way, this was a vast area to try to take up land. This reveals that either a small number of lads were in the area for a long time, or a large number of lads (perhaps soldiers) were in the area for a shorter period of time, but most likely allowed to stay for a while.

Maybe an early treaty was made, or this portion of land was bought, bartered for. At any rate, the people who left the evidences at this unique merging spot of the two or three oceanic waterways far inland were comfortable enough to stay for a while. It's anybody's guess what happened.

Farther east, in the mid-1300's, Scandinavians left the Old Trouble Maker as a memorial to half of their inland party, who in my view were probably scalped and mutilated, which was the regional tradition at the time. Redrum, indeed. AVM! Who killed these intrepid travelers? Sioux or Mississippians?

As a side-note, I think it may be possible that disease may have played a part in Native loss of life earlier than the experts believe, if in fact Europeans were in the upper Great Lakes area much earlier than current close-mindedness would allow for. In other words, is it possible that the Native populations were impacted by this proposed earlier arrival of diseased Europeans?

I'm not proposing disease as a possibility for the 10 dead men, due to the totality of circumstances, but I am wondering if these early Scandinavian explorations and attempts at land up-taking may have contributed to the decline of the Mississippian culture, at least in this MN area. I think it more likely that disease may have played a role than climate change, for instance, in their disappearance. Disease can travel fast.

Perhaps the initial decline was indeed brought on by over-population and hunger, which caused the initial mass movements away from depleted population centers.

Only Me
2/2/2014 09:15:28 am

"In other words, is it possible that the Native populations were impacted by this proposed earlier arrival of diseased Europeans?"

One way to determine this, is to see if the arrival of the Vikings in Newfoundland led to a decline in the Inuit population due to disease, as opposed to conflict over limited resources. The Dorsett are gone, so we can't really ask them.

Coridan
2/2/2014 03:26:35 pm

It is possible the vikings brought over disease, but less likely. Virii do not thrive well in greenlandic weather, also it is probable that nstive cultures in the area were spread much thinner and less likely to foster disease.

When you hear the high count numbers of precontact Amerindians, it is easy to believe that a strong virus in a virgin population would have been able to account for the massive depopulation.

Gunn link
2/3/2014 05:39:03 am

Only Me and Coridan: Your comments both make good sense. But, as pointed out by Coridan, the impact would be dependent on fairly close contact--generally speaking.

Maybe disease was one of the reasons for the Mississippians to have spread out, after seeing the effects in particular areas. A lot of speculation here.

Side-note: If one were to believe in the non-provenance accumulation of Scandinavian, medieval "appearing" evidence up here, he or she would realize that most likely SEVERAL or more expeditions for various reasons were made far into the interior of the current US. So, there were SEVERAL opportunities for disease-spreading. (In this scene, I'm not referring singularly to the 1347 European outbreak of the plague.)

John Marks
10/24/2016 01:32:48 pm

OnlyMe, you stated

"In other words, is it possible that the Native populations were impacted by this proposed earlier arrival of diseased Europeans?"

One way to determine this, is to see if the arrival of the Vikings in Newfoundland led to a decline in the Inuit population due to disease, as opposed to conflict over limited resources. The Dorsett are gone, so we can't really ask them."

The Vikings likely would not have encountered the Inuit. One, I am not sure L'anse aux Meadows is North enough for Inuit. Also at that time the Inuit had not migrated that far East.

Interestingly, and perhaps unrelated there is a potential Viking trading post located at Tanfield Valley, Baffin Island in the high Canadian Arctic. They have found bog iron, wool skeins, a whale bone sod axe, whetstones bearing traces of copper alloys such as bronze and old-world rat pelts. There are no known corollaries for these artifacts with the local or near native peoples. At the same site they discovered artifacts belonging to the Dorset people. The Dorset people mysteriously died out leaving very little trace and DNA test show few biological links. Inuit legend tells of clashes with the Dorset people, whom they displaced as they migrated out of the Alaska area. This is pure speculation but it is possible contact with Vikings introduced disease which eventually eliminated the Dorset.

Dan
2/1/2014 07:48:25 pm

I turned this episode off right after he ran through a laundry list of known hoax stones and declared them all "authentic". There's only so much horseshit one mind can process at once.

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Tara Jordan link
2/1/2014 08:19:31 pm

Scott Wolter is impermeable to ridicule.

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Only Me
2/1/2014 08:44:01 pm

Or facts, or the scientific method, or peer review, or differing opinion...

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Tara Jordan link
2/1/2014 09:12:13 pm

This is what amazes me.I wonder how Wolter made it so far as a "certified geologist".He frequently makes howling errors of the type that would make a 6th grade science student cringe.

Tom
2/1/2014 09:20:13 pm

Hush.... I CAN .... feel the rev coming to moderate and defend the fair maiden's honour. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyhMYVU31ng substitute bishop for rev.

j.a.d
2/1/2014 09:41:56 pm

https://www.facebook.com/AreYouSmarterThanAFifthGrader

j.a.d
2/1/2014 09:24:13 pm

###=krs

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Gunn link
2/2/2014 04:39:53 am

Oh, I see. I think you can call it the Old Trouble Maker and get away with it. I take it you believe Wolter lucked out with getting to examine an authentic relic at the beginning of his "career." Now I understand what you were saying in code, and yes, I agree. It's my own opinion that he should re-circle that stone.

How about this: Duluth. End of westward sailing. Non-subliminal Bulldozer stuff. Wolter's show begins with the Copper Harbor petroglyph of the medieval Norse sailing boat. Simply awesome! Click on the green Gunn to see.

From Duluth, Wolter is suddenly whisking westward in a helicopter, following a straight line across MN to the Whetstone River area in far SE South Dakota. Along the way, they drop down to Old Trouble Maker Hill and insert a multiplicity of useful information about why they were able to drop down exactly on the straight line to the Whetstone River area, without having to divert. They expertly explain that this knoll happens to be on the straight compass line to where they are going in SD. Does this make sense?

Yes, they swoop back up into the sky and continue on generally westward, until they drop down to cow pasture land, where the experts look deeply into an obviously very aged carving of a medieval drinking horn--appearing somewhat like a colonial era powder horn. But this is no powder horn, as can be evidenced by like relics in Sweden, in museums, showing a medieval provenance.

This carving will be easy for Wolter to showcase, because it is so very deeply carved, and also because it is so obviously aged--without question. This brightly illuminated and enlarged image alone will flabbergast the audience, and they will begin to see the significance of the stoneholes found in the vicinity--the same kind of stoneholes found encircling that Old Trouble Maker when it was found.

The helicopter will hop all around the area, following the river, showing dozens upon dozens of stonehole locations, and then, finally, the copter lands and Wolter is able to get his hands dirty. The equipment comes out of the backpack, and the rocks take over, speaking to us in common sense language. Corroboration is at hand. It all makes better sense now.

j.a.d., my guess is that Wolter will receive his salvation (speaking non-spiritually) by going back to his lucky first find, and taking it from there. The story doesn't stop at Old Trouble Maker Hill, or with the Old Trouble Maker. That's where the story only began, for those who have eyes to see....

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M. Wilson
2/3/2014 06:13:58 am

The obvious "magic" in semi-straight lines in SW's (and other "scientists") minds continues to escape me.

Tara Jordan link
2/1/2014 10:15:24 pm

At this point I feel like Scott Wolter should get Bishop Seán Manchester on his program,& engage in a "forensic investigation" on the Highgate Vampire.

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Michael
2/1/2014 11:15:41 pm

Bat-Creek craazy

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J.A.D
2/1/2014 11:53:32 pm

is Old Negev at all like Proto-Sinaitic?

http://www.ancientscripts.com/protosinaitic.html

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 12:27:18 am

As I understand it, the Mormon archaeologist D. James Harris proposed Old Negev as a descendant of Proto-Sinaitic used only by one group of Canaanites who worshiped Yahweh. So far as I know, no mainstream linguists have agreed with this and instead classified the writing as a pre-Arabic script, not its own alphabet--at least that's what Harris himself says. At any rate, the symbols Wolter looked at bear only a coincidental resemblance to Proto-Sinaitic and its offshoots, due to the fact that Proto-Sinaitic used geometrical figures and shapes from nature, just like most early art.

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J.A.D
2/2/2014 10:08:24 am

If prior to the end of the last ice age, social bands were
hunter/gatherer and anything like a modern city was on
a now sunken coastline near a major river or harbor, if
a shamanistic religious practice in each local area drew
on ancestor worship, if art existed and was familiar with
geometric shapes, the opportunity exists globally for all
cultures to invent pictographs verging on hieroglyphs
from the basic shapes that are each groups petroglyphs.
Lets assume there is no ongoing cultural diffusion but
there is an ancient source and slow, gradual change.
As with China, Art overlaps crude designs, but complexity
in designs can create hieroglyphs over time. Egypt has a
hieratic scribe's short hand script in tandem with formal
hieroglyphs. The Sahara has pictograms and petroglyphs
that date from when the climate was kinder. What if the
rock art is almost a formal alphabet and the iconic meaning
is lost to us? I agree Old Negev is a leap of faith. I think that
something as formal as the Mayan script or something as
flexible as Incan Knot string records that could tally with both
numbers and letters begs a question as to alternatives to
something like a Phoenician alphabet. The artwork could
also be a billboard, as is the intent of the rock art of Australia.

Byron DeLear
2/2/2014 01:35:08 am

“They say they were the works of their forefathers; that they were as numerous as the trees in the wood; that they affronted the Great Spirit, and he made them kill one another" --- Jason, this is very intriguing --- is there any further development of this anecdote? It's as if the more regimental and organized Cahokia became over the centuries, the weight of the complex (Mississippian culture in general) toppled the whole enterprise. This story about the fall of the Mississippians suggests that the survivors' take away was to shrink back for higher orders of urban development due to rampant internecine warfare, possibly instigated by resource deprivation.

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 01:39:37 am

Some suggest that it is a genuine memory of the Mississippian collapse, and others think it was a post-hoc rationalization of why the mounds existed and were abandoned. There was a lot of disruption, movement of peoples, population collapse, etc. after the Contact period, so I would probably favor the second hypothesis unless you could show cultural continuity in a given location.

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 01:40:47 am

Oh, and I should have added that you can click the link near the quote to see the full passage. The rest of the oral story is much less historically accurate.

Pacal
2/2/2014 05:08:24 am

Although the site of Cahokia seems to have ben abandoned and yes "collapsed"; it does not appear that Mississippian culture collapsed in general before the Europeans came. We have accounts of de Soto's exploration, attempted conquest of the American South East during the second quarter of the 16th century and it appears that Mississippian societies ere flourishing. It is very likely that the chaos of de Soto's invasion combined with diseases brought by the Spanish produced the end of Mississippian culture with a few survivals. We have later Spanish accounts of the American south east later in the 16th century and they describe a devastated region. Native societies remerged but they seemed to have been quite different from the Mississippian societies with some exceptions.

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Gunn
2/2/2014 08:09:00 am

Just guessing here, of course, but since this scene is plausible, if it can later be proven that Scandinavians were far inland a few hundred years earlier than the Spaniards to the south, this same disease-collapsing hypothesis might be applied...just to say that perhaps disease was a reason for the Mississippian collapse, from both north and south, stretching over a few hundred years--including well before the Spanish came. Of course, I realize this depends on finding legitimacy of earlier European far inland exploration, and etc.

M Wilson
2/3/2014 06:35:44 am

Thanks for this. There really isn't much mystery in this - only if we want it to be. Oh, unless we find that they were wiped out by the dreaded Swedish Small Pox!

Colin Hunt
2/2/2014 02:15:57 am

Jason,

Old Negev Script. Check out http://net.lib.byu.edu/imaging/negev/

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Colin Hunt
2/2/2014 02:37:51 am

Jason,

The above site reference I supplied for Old Negev primarily quotes Brigham Young associated sources, as you quote in your background material, but the following WikiBooks site gives more info from other sources, and the suggested renaming of "old Negev" to "First Tongue" by which there may be other references. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Vuara/Ancient_alphabet

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CFC
2/2/2014 03:02:09 am

Some interesting additional resources. Thanks Colin.

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Fr. Bill Bosh
2/2/2014 02:57:12 am

All this... RELENTLESS... focus on the PROVABLE and the TRUTH distracts from... the SIGNIFICANT QUESTION of the show, which is WHY Jason always cries "racist..." it's just a TV show... relax, enjoy SW driving an SUV. I saw him play hockey, I promise he's a man... lol... Just relax. It's not NOVA or "Frontline."

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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/2/2014 02:58:37 am

Sorry, couldn't resist.

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Gary
2/2/2014 03:24:14 am

You nailed the style, with the caps and ellipses.

The Other J.
2/2/2014 10:21:31 am

^_^

*thumbs up*

Rev. Phil Gotsch
2/2/2014 04:34:49 am

Fr. Bill --

Are you trying make a point … or are you just goofing around … ???

But, I agree …
The RELENTLESS invocation of a racial-ist" boogeymen is flat out … silly ...

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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/2/2014 05:20:28 am

I feel like Jonathan Swift, if he had just received a letter from an Irishman offering his baby up for this new meat-processing business.

tom
2/2/2014 07:07:14 am

XD! I m eagerly awaiting the next episode of America unhinged. Stick it to those academics jason! - facts can lie, but tv never does.

Steve McQueen
2/2/2014 05:01:39 am

Rreeeealy?

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Gunn
2/2/2014 05:06:55 am

I confess...and yes, Mr. McQueen, I agree. We must question Jason's capacity for audacity when it comes to charges of racial discrimination in many, if not all aspects of historical inquiry.

Gary
2/2/2014 05:57:05 am

Gunn, I have not seen Jason charge anyone with racial discrimination. You owe him an apology, at least, for your accusation and for breaking the new rules that you so heartily endorsed.

Mentioning that people are using ideas proposed by racists or have racist overtones, however, is a perfectly reasonable comment.

Gunn
2/2/2014 08:30:50 am

Gary, forget about it. You misinterpreted my humor, which had everything to do with real charges of racial discrimination. I believe you may be confusing racism with discrimination, which can be either one or two separate charges. I think Jason may admit to charging a few of the worst on his list with racial discrimination...but even then, one would have to get into the issue of intent...again...and whether the discrimination was actually purposeful or not.

So then, there is no overt accusation here, only a recognizing of what a part of Jason's self-described job is. He has rightfully pointed out racial discrimination here, over and over and over again. Who's side are you on, anyway? Just kidding, but I think your analysis is off because you smoothly switched from initial charges of discrimination to racism.

So then, to sum this up, yes, Jason has charged some folks with discrimination, and that's a part of his regular gig here.

I only wish you had added a bit more. Yes, I heartily endorse Jason's new rules, which have helped to keep people from becoming "mean and nasty," in the words of Ted Turner to Lou Dobbs a few years ago, speaking of Dobbs' unrelenting verbal attacks against our neighbors to the south. (Maybe that's why he left CNN.)

Gary
2/2/2014 09:01:39 am

No, Gunn, it's you who are confused. Give one example of Jason accusing anyone of racial discrimination.

There was nothing "smooth" about my mention of racism. Several people have accused Jason of inappropriate inclusion of the subject of racism, then you brought up "discrimination". I was steering back to the real debate.

J.A. Dickey
2/2/2014 09:50:16 am

Power elites can be racist and often have discriminatory
practices or worse things done. The two things can go
hand in hand or overlap. Not all bigots are powerful, also
to create a totally fair social order is difficult. One needs
I.Kant's catigoricall imperative, John Rawl's sense of justice
and a framework for a participatory democracy like J. Locke's.

Jeanne
2/2/2014 03:36:24 am

For 42 years I taught French, Spanish and Latin. Above my board I kep a big sign, " Scientia Potentia Est"...knowledge is power. And every opportunity that came up we would discuss the importance of basic knowledge in the face of BS. The kids would say, " I saw..."...and mostly I could give the facts. Around the 2012 Maya crap a bunch of them were really afraid.

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Jeanne
2/2/2014 03:40:39 am

Opps...now that I am retired kids still keep in touch ...more than once with the intro phrase " Magistra, Scientia potentia est...I saw...and thought of our class" ...it is so important to help kids (and adults) noT fall for this kind of stuff, to think critically. Shows like AU and AA make that job more difficult.

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CFC
2/2/2014 06:14:46 am

I agree Jeanne.
The History Channel is undermining the hard work of educators by sponsoring programs like America Unearthed and AA. Unscientific claims are being thrust upon school children, college students and the public by those who exploit and misinform for commercial gain. The only way to counter it is to encourage proper research and make the public aware of the inaccuracy of the claims made in these programs. Jason does a great job of that!

Tara Jordan link
2/2/2014 06:48:56 am

Jeanne.
Vous avez toute ma sympathie.Teaching is such a stressful job & usually people dont show much appreciation.
Ingratitude....

Titus pullo
2/2/2014 04:20:41 am

The lack of any logical hypothesis made this episode beyond watchable even for comic relief. Jews were native Americans, Jews were exterminated by native Americans, Jews came over 5000 years ago, no errr in the 1300 century...was there even a train of thought that had some continuity?

Jason,

Your intro for this one was exceptional. I do wonder when the first theories that native Americans were from northeast Asia? Assume by the 1700 century with the exploration going on, someone must have noticed the similarities between Asians and Americans. Thomas Jefferson continues to amaze me, his rational thinking on Indian mounds is just another reason to remember how special thus guy was. Perhaps we should have followed his views on money and banking....spoken from someone of the austrian school...ha ha

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 04:37:23 am

The idea that they walked from Asia was well established before 1700, actually. Even the Lost Tribes theorists believed that the Jews had walked across from Asia. In the 1700s Jefferson and his correspondents had worked out almost all the details of the Bering Sea crossing and had connected Native Americans to northeast Asia.

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CFC
2/2/2014 07:00:09 am

I agree with Titus that the background information is very well done and the part of your episode review where you set the record straight about Thomas Jefferson is highly commendable.

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j.a.d
2/2/2014 09:22:27 am

most heartily agreed to indeed!

Pacal
2/2/2014 04:59:13 am

Well we have a pretty good idea of where the so-called ten lost tribes ended up. The answer is provided by The Second Book of Kings in the Bible:

"In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes." (ch. 17, v. 6)

So the ten lost tribes were never lost to begin with.

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Gary
2/2/2014 06:14:15 am

It shows that so many people who say that they believe IN the Bible are really believing things ABOUT the Bible.

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Gunn
2/2/2014 08:44:21 am

Well, Gary, Christians believe the Bible is the Word, and the Word is God. I, personally, believe IN God and in His Word, the Bible, although I also believe things ABOUT the Bible. Why confuse or divide the two unnecessarily.

For instance, Christians believe IN the Holy Spirit, but they also learn ABOUT the Holy Spirit. One example is perhaps more personal than the other, which is the difference, especially when one considers that the Holy Spirit dwells in human flesh when invited in, as a part of the salvation process.

I'm sorry, but what was your point?

Gary
2/2/2014 09:12:09 am

The point, Gunn is just what you said. You believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and you include everything that is included in the canon, yet the Bible makes no such claim about itself. People believe in the "lost" tribes, but the Bible doesn't say they were lost, except in the sense that they no longer existed as tribes. People think that Moses wrote the 5 books, but there is no scriptural support for that and in fact, it contradicts it, unless you think that Moses wrote that he, himself was the most humble man who ever lived. If you believe In it I would think that you would believe what it actually says, rather than add stories to it.

Gunn
2/3/2014 06:45:18 am

Gary, there is plenty of room for interpretation within Christianity. This is kind of like history...we seek greater truth within already established truth. Christianity isn't a pigeon-hole, it's a dove being set free...peace.

Wayward Jew
2/2/2014 09:13:16 am

Exactly. This episode overwhelmly proves Wolter’s own statement of never having read the Bible to be true (and possibly those credited show writers as well, even though nothing is scripted). Anyone who has knows tribes were never lost, certainly not 10, and especially not the one Wolter singled out. If we had “lost” (air quotes intended) tribes then Anna would not have known she was of the tribe of Asher (Luke 2:36), Joseph would not have known he was of the tribe of Levi (Acts 4:36), nor Saul known he was of the tribe of Benjamin (Romans 11:1). The kicker, as Harry noted above, is that Wolter states that the tribe of Judah was lost, but we know it surely wasn’t because the founder of his sacred holy bloodline was of the tribe of Judah through both his father (Matthew 1) and mother (Luke 3).

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 09:18:54 am

I was just going to mention Asher and the other tribes in the New Testament! The "Lost Tribes" myth developed piecemeal during Late Antiquity and the medieval period.

Walter White
2/2/2014 05:01:04 am

Before finding this blog, what was really getting to me was that as the episodes approach their final minutes you realize that the thousand questions and inconsistencies one has are not going to be answered by Wolter, as he speeds it up to his conclusion.
Inasmuch as I love reading these posts, I cannot bring myself to go through another hour of that imbecile. I feel fooled by H2. You're a brave man Jason for suffering through this series for our benefit!

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Gunn
2/2/2014 05:15:41 am

Imbecile, or imbecilic show? We prefer better manners here now-a-days.

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Walter White
2/2/2014 06:06:38 am

Imbecile. The truth sometimes hurts.

Gunn
2/2/2014 08:50:01 am

Okay, but I hope you realize that yours is an open attack on the person, not the show. Tsk. Tsk. Is it comment removal time, or perhaps merely a warning time?

j.a.d
2/2/2014 09:37:25 am

Gunn... even in this recent episode, the Auld Troblemaker,
the tablet like thingie i refered to as the ### which also is
like a grave marker or the near perfect copy of an even more
ancient grave marker is invoked like a talisman or a resume.
Yes... I agree, the host can be quite clever but the show has
its imbicilic moments, which I am sore tempted to blame on
the HISTORY Channel's management and marketing people.
SW is in a position that if it gets any worse, he could walk out.
He lets these lapses of scholarship happen and it is sinking
his cherished fringe idea claims. My quip about what the bad
and lousy MERMAN & MERMAID Animal Planet documentary
on how absurd the Aquatic Ape Theorists looked in short order!
Gunn, you are correct. He has to draw into his core being to live.
He has to fight all Figi Mermaid marketing impulses from H2!!!!

Gunn
2/3/2014 06:54:51 am

"Gunn, you are correct. He has to draw into his core being to live."

Huh? He doesn't have to do anything...related to TV show hosting. He's capable of making a living outside TV, I mean to say...though some of us are getting pretty old! Maybe you meant to continue "living" on TV? (In which case, I'm still not sure what you meant, exactly.)

M Wilson
2/3/2014 06:55:08 am

Well if not imbecile - is charlatan bad manners? H2 and/or SW obviously take us for imbeciles and I think that goes way beyond bad manners.

Gunn
2/3/2014 07:09:23 am

Charlatan smacks of a personal attack, too, because it presupposes intent...which is a judgment of character. Charlatan is still name-calling, which can be avoided. By trying just a bit harder, someone can leave the same impression of something without needing to get "mean and nasty." The secret of being able to do this is to address the show, not the TV host himself.

Walt
2/2/2014 07:07:45 am

"...as the episodes approach their final minutes you realize that the thousand questions and inconsistencies one has are not going to be answered.."

This show is very much like watching Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Lucy always pulls the football away by the end of the episode.

He always states bravely in the first 10 minutes something big he plans to accomplish, then proceeds to not. Last week's episode, I laughed out loud when near the beginning of the show he proclaimed, "If there's a link between the Serpent Mounds in Ohio and Scotland, I'll find it!". Sure enough, he didn't find one. Lucy pulled away the football again.

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The Other J.
2/2/2014 10:36:53 am

You may be giving AU too much credit -- at least Peanuts is rooted in some verifiable reality. For instance, my white and black beagle dances every time he gets supper. And given the way he soars off the couch, I suspect he suspects he may have been a WWI flying ace.

Walt
2/2/2014 10:47:17 am

"You may be giving AU too much credit..."

Lol, in that case I apologize for breaking Jason's rules. In comparing SW to Charlie Brown, I didn't intend that to be a personal attack against Charlie Brown.

RLewis
2/2/2014 08:06:58 am

Mr. Heisenberg, you might try what several others do (and as I do for Ancient Aliens) - don't watch the shows, just read Jason's reviews each week. Not only are they as entertaining, they have the additional advantage of being accurate and informative,
BTW - Sorry how things ended for you, but you were a bad man.

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Walter White
2/4/2014 11:55:11 am

Yes, Walt & RLewis. I stopped watching, couldn't bear it!

Oh, and I had it coming. Sorry to disappoint with the ending.

Mark E.
2/2/2014 05:53:14 am

I could't help but wonder what the conversation would have been like when the Jews ran into the descendants of Alexander Helios.

Did they sit down together and have a monolithic pint of corn beer (everyone forgot to bring wheat and barley with them so they had to make do) and discuss how the Romans ruined their lives?

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Tim
2/2/2014 06:36:37 am

Being Native American, this show is getting more and more offensive every episode. Apparently we were too stupid to build mounds, to pay respect to our dead, or even make rock carvings. What Scott Wolters should realize is that everything we learned in school is just a history of the United States of America (or as they usually call it American History). They do leave out the history of all the (Native) nations that did exist on this continent before Columbus. Maybe he should get an education on the people that did/do live here before he says what were capable of and what we weren't.

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Tara Jordan link
2/2/2014 06:58:47 am

Tim.
Scott Wolter is just a clown with a cable program.As a Native American,you have an heritage of traditions,culture & history,No one can take that away from you.

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Rev. Phil Gotsch
2/2/2014 09:25:46 am

And SOMETIMES a "clown" has a 'blog" … "Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," eh … ???

Only Me
2/2/2014 10:25:58 am

"NO MORE toleration of off-topic personal insult slinging sounds like a good move ..."

Remember, Phil, two wrongs don't make a right.

The Other J.
2/2/2014 10:41:43 am

But clowns get paid to entertain, and between Scott Wolter and Jason, that only counts for one of them with regard to this material.

RELAX... I'll leave it to you to figure out which one is entertainment.

An Over-Educated Grunt
2/2/2014 01:33:45 pm

I agree. Sometimes a clown does have a blog. Scott Wolter has one, coincidentally.

Gunn
2/3/2014 07:03:35 am

Tara, I think calling someone a "clown" was a mistake. You could have mentioned the program as a circus, for instance, but why pick on a clown? Or, you could have said the show was clown-like. Nevertheless, the gravy did apparently flow over two perceived clowns, just to fair, right? (Key word: perceived.)

Tim
2/2/2014 07:15:39 am

Yeah I know Tara, just hard to watch this show. I don't really understand what he is trying to prove. If he is trying to say that the first people in an area can claim it as their own, then this continent would be full of many nations of Native peoples. I am glad to be an American as well as Native. He keeps asking why weren't taught this in school, well I learned in elementary school that Vikings did cross the Atlantic. And if any of these cross Atlantic travels did happen, the reason we don't learn about it because there is not enough proof yet for this and more importantly it left no lasting mark on what is now America (if they did make it here they were unable to sustain a lasting colony).

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Harry
2/2/2014 02:00:07 pm

Tim,

I can empathize with you. I could only take about half an hour of this episode, and I am both white and Jewish. I love history far more than I enjoy foolish that tries to stroke my ethnic pride at the price of another's whose people, in this particular context, deserve more credit.

I think that what he is trying to prove is that he knows something that the archaeological community does not, and he probably does not mean to insult native Americans, but just can't help himself.

If I am right about his self-appointed mission, I think he is failing miserably. I will not repeat what I said above about Wolter's analysis of the Bat Creek Stone (look for my comments dated 2/1/14 at 11:56 p.m.). Suffice it to say that it was joke!

Seeker
2/2/2014 03:24:00 pm

Well said, Tim.

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John Marks
10/24/2016 01:47:34 pm

I am with you Tim. If we side with everything AU has published in the show, North America was settled by Minoans, Scots, Danes (or some other Norse group), Irish, a European mix via the Templars/Freemasons and now Israelites. None of these have left any lasting population or DNA traces. At least the Norse have some claim to a settlement. I am not sure how much room is left for Native Americans (sarcasm implied).

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RLewis
2/2/2014 07:53:58 am

Well, at least SW seemed excited to get back to his "Crown Jewels".

A couple of my favorite statements: "Columbus brought Jews on his voyage so he could communicate with the natives in the New World". Um, New World? The history I was taught (which I understand is wrong) said Columbus was expecting to find Asia.

"This site is remote. No one would come way out here to create a hoax and write graffiti. To prove it, let me show you some graffiti on the other side of the rock".

Also, the earthworks shown only look (something) like a menorah when held in that orientation. If held "sideways" in my mind it could be the fins of a fish or wings of a bird. This assumes that many of the other features have eroded away (or were plowed under) - but that's easier to assume than lost Jews.

BTW - To be fair I don't think SW said the Louisiana Purchase was bought from Spain. He said it was bought from France who took it from Spain. Presumably, the US was concerned Spain would cry foul and claim they still owned the land. Whatever.

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Only Me
2/2/2014 09:10:02 am

Given Jefferson's scientific interests, I wonder if having Lewis and Clark explore the newly acquired land, under the pretense of preventing Spain or another nation from claiming previous ownership, wasn't just a politically convenient cover to indulge his own curiosity. I think the long rivalry between England, France and Spain would have led to the English and French joining with America to oppose the Spanish just on principle.

As to his "crown jewels", I'd say almost all of them have proven to be as valuable as a wooden nickel.

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 09:26:45 am

I'd caution us to remember than in 1803, Spain was officially an ally of both Britain and France (since 1796). Napoleon returned Louisiana to French control in 1800, having ruled it from 1699 to 1762 and forced to cede it to Spain in the Seven Years' War. Although Spain had a claim to the land back in the 1600s, it had long since recognized French sovereignty by right of conquest since it had been colonized by French settlers and explorers. It simply wasn't Spain's to claim.

Besides, Spain cooperated with Jefferson in the exploration of Louisiana during the transition to American rule--hardly a conspiracy! Spain, in case you care, was the occupying power at the time because the Spanish government was too slow and lazy to actually turn the place over to the titular owner France between 1800 and the completion of the purchase by America in 1803.

Only Me
2/2/2014 10:15:37 am

I wasn't aware of that! Thanks for the clarification. This puts into perspective the claims put forth by Wolter that there was a conspiracy involving Jefferson to discover Welsh Indians, to protect American sovereignty.

Paul N. link
2/6/2014 02:01:03 pm

Actually, the Louisiana Territory belonged to France. They ceded it to Spain at the end of the French and Indian War to keep it out British hands. They had already surrendered their Canadian provinces to Great Britain in order to regain their Carribean holdings that had been taken by the Royal Navy. Rather then lose Louisiana to their enemies, they gave it to their Spanish allies.

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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/2/2014 09:17:24 am

It's amazing just how misleading this episode was. Having spent half the season chasing "Lost Relics of the Bible" already, he spends this episode, explicitly titled after said relics, chasing after rumors of the Lost Tribes of Israel instead. The "relics" he puts forward are decidedly un-Biblical at best, and outright forgeries at worst, long-ago detected and debunked. Jason, you're probably more likely to remember the story than I, but the Tucson lead artifacts were debunked as long ago as the '20s; they appear in one of Lovecraft's collaborative stories, the same one we learn about the long-lost civilization of K'nyan... which should sound familiar, given Wolter & Co.'s recent ventures to the Grand Canyon. Surprised that Harry Hubbard didn't try to link the uraeus serpent to American cults of Yig-worshippers, come to think of it...

Anyway, it's gone from being interesting to frustrating to just a massive waste of time. Walt's comment about Lucy and the football nailed it down pretty well for me.

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Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 09:38:17 am

Marc A. Beherec argued in Lovecraft Annual no. 2 (2004) that Lovecraft referred to the artifacts in "The Mound," written with Zealia Bishop, but I can't find any mention of it there. As I understand it, Beherec argues that the news of the Tucson Artifacts influenced Lovecraft when he read about them in the NY Times while living in NYC.

Apparently the argument goes that the Caucasian skeletons found in a stone circle in the Dunwich Horror were based on Calalus: "Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian."

I don't personally see why Calalus should be needed since Lovecraft doesn't make this a Roman site, and he had many other models for lost races of white architects to choose from.

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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/2/2014 12:26:41 pm

Chapter VII of "The Mound." Thanks for figuring out which story it was. I only had it in E-book form on my phone. Not the best for searching.

The relevant lines:

"Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic—something like the leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe."

Jason Colavito link
2/2/2014 12:34:06 pm

That explains why I couldn't find it. I was looking for Arizona and Lovecraft had it in New Mexico by mistake! Thanks!

Walt
2/2/2014 10:00:01 am

I'm actually looking forward to the next episode, based on Jason's note about it covering the origin of the Clovis. I've enjoyed AU only because I've never heard of any of the sites or theories he's covered. Finally, the next episode is about something I'm more familiar with. I've just recently seen a show discussing it, and that show presented current thinking, the problems and inconsistencies with it, their theory of east coast Europeans merging with west coast Asians, and then the problems and inconsistencies with that theory. What are the odds AU does the same?

It'll be interesting to see the AU take on the matter. I have a hunch for the first time, I'll be able to see the same ineptness others see, rather than looking past the host and his story at the sites he's covering.

This may be the first AU episode to not contain any accepted hoaxes, and present a theory that at least some respected scholars are still considering. But I suspect they'll present it in a way that even those scholars wouldn't agree with.

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Martin R
2/2/2014 01:04:54 pm

Myself, I can't wait for the episode about the Lincoln assassination. Alan Butler should make an appearance. The possibilities are endless.

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Jonathan link
2/2/2014 03:51:02 pm

I've studied the rock art in the southwest extensively for the entirety of my life. I can guarantee you that none of them are "scripts". They don't have the form or organization of a written language. Further, elements are often isolated.
The claim is so ridiculous that I'm not even going to negotiate it.

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Michael Cohen
6/15/2014 02:04:42 am

Who was paying you to spent all your time studying rock art? Which university and what grant do you receive?
Did you produce any scientific papers on the subject?

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Tara Jordan link
2/2/2014 06:56:27 pm

Scott WolterFebruary 1, 2014 at 5:30 AM
"You apparently haven't figured out it's the scholar's miss use of proper scientific method that got us into this mess in the first place?."

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Andy
2/3/2014 02:18:56 pm

It's "Tim Baumann" with a double "n." I know him. I thought he did a great job with this BS show. It is part of his job as a curator to make collections available for study, but I'm pretty sure appearing on America Unearthed and being engaged in idiotic conversation with Scott Wolter is not part of his job description. He handled it very well.

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Jason Colavito link
2/4/2014 12:42:02 am

Thank you for the correction. I've fixed the spelling of Mr. Baumann's name. I apologize for the error; I am terrible at spelling.

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StoneUnturned
2/3/2014 09:47:05 pm

Now taking reservations...or at least the stones from them:
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-918594

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Gunn link
2/4/2014 03:05:13 am

Thanks, StoneUnturned. I went to the link and found something (in my mind) even possibly more important than the Bat Creek Stone, since the BCS has just a nodule of skepticism attached to it...like it could have been created and planted. There is possibly a shady past connected with it, so that it isn't 100% "pure" in eyes of all professional archaeologists.

On the other hand, look at this apparently rather unknown "runic inscription," found in a TN cave just several years ago, linked to the link you provided. The first thing I'm going to do is check out these "runes" for possible initial authenticity. If these could represent actual medieval runes, I think someone like Wolter should check them out, to attempt to determine age, although in a cave that would seem very difficult.

An expert in runes would possibly be of greater help. Maybe someone from Civil War days (Scandinavian) carved the runes. Another explanation could be medieval. It will be interesting to find out whether these runes give a message, and what it might be. I plan to make Richard Neilsen, the premier rune expert, aware of this image for his possible interpretation, in case he hasn't seen it yet.

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Gunn
2/4/2014 03:06:08 am

Whoops...here:

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-58289

Gunn
2/4/2014 03:26:41 am

They appear to be genuine runes: Ansuz, Othala, Tiewas, Isa, Algiz, etc., with some bottom dots on either side of some characters. If anybody has immediate knowledge about the possible meaning of this inscription, please let me know. In the meanwhile, I'll try to make Neilsen aware of it, for a possible explanation.

Matt Mc
2/6/2014 11:31:11 pm

Wolter is ranting over at his blog about the Smithsonian and other things because they announced that the Bat Creek Stone is a forgery. He sees some great conspiracy and thinks the timing to his episode about it is interesting.

He got all up in arms when he was asked to submit his stuff for a peer review.

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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/7/2014 12:56:10 am

And more worrisome Google-fu for H2...

When I search for "Scott Wolter" on Google, his blog isn't even one of the offered-up suggestions. #3 is "Scott Wolter fake," not "America Unearthed fake." The top link offered for "Scott Wolter" is the blog post here about his degree. You don't actually get anything that belongs to Wolter himself unless you specifically search for it or dig way down the search listing.

But the blog post itself is hugely entertaining reading. I'm really curious as to which American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) standards apply to dating a stone to being 1500 years old. I admit that it's possible there's an AASHTO standard for rock dating, but I sincerely doubt it, since AASHTO is more concerned with the engineering properties of geomaterials than the archaeologic properties.

I love his fallback on the "licensed professional" line. One of the things they teach you very early in the licensing process is not to speak authoritatively outside of your areas of expertise. Claiming to be an expert on forensic testing of concrete, which I have no doubt he does well, has absolutely nothing to do with the dating of materials. In the case of forensic geology, the only time that you would be involved with testing aging and weathering is when the material found in situ does not match what the drawings say... unless Wolter is saying he does a lot of testing on roads that predate maps of North America. This one really, really bugs me, because I know exactly what the process for establishing the age of a pavement or structure is, since it's part of my daily grind.

Saying "how dare you want me to show my work!" by itself is deeply, deeply unscientific, and shows that however he's been working for 30 years, he's failed to understand the scientific method.

All right, I'm done. If I continue, I'm just going to turn into another tailchaser, I've said it all before in other places.

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Tom
2/7/2014 02:18:03 am

"Dr. Smith then responded making sure to list all his credentials while trying to belittle my own qualifications"

Bit of jealously there about his own qualifications or lack thereof. Seems like quite a common theme amongst fringe authors.

An Over-Educated Grunt
2/7/2014 02:23:39 am

Plus it's not unheard of for the relevant people to put ridiculously long qualification lists in their normal E-mail signature blocks. My advisor's ran about as long as Smith's, though for parts of it, they were President, rather than Past President.

Robert K.M.
2/8/2014 02:15:28 pm

This is nothing more than a Scott Wolter bashing site anymore with posts by the same names over and over again. Get a life people! Better yet, go out and actually do some work yourself instead of sitting behind your computers and calling research and acting like your smart.

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Brian
2/8/2014 02:26:38 pm

I love Scott Wolter and America Unearthed. I like some of the ideas he puts forth and some of the possibilities he presents. It's my opinion and I am entitled to it just as everyone else is to theirs. I don't feel I should be insulted, attacked and bashes for it and everything I think or say be put under a microscope just to be cannon fodder for somebody else. It's a shame that people feel the need to do things like that to anyone.

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Rev. Phil Gotsch
2/9/2014 04:44:34 am

"De-bunking" seems to require and/or cultivate a certain mind-set which turns out to be rather arrogant and mean-spirited toward *the*other* ...

David
2/13/2014 03:45:51 pm

Jason,

I'm assuming you are not a member of the Church Of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints and only have a very superficial understanding of it's history and doctrine. So, it's very understandable for you to make serious mistakes when representing either its history or doctrine. In that it doesn't impact your point one way or another, I'll bring brief.

First, at no time did Joseph Smith ever teach, or claim, that he was Jesus Christ. His testimony was that at the age of 14 while pleading with God to tell him which of all the churches of his day was His true church, God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to him. Joseph testified that over a period of many years he was she received revelations and knowledge from angels sent to teach him. That iss how he came to translate the Book Of Mormon, which begins with the story of Lehi and his family, as told by his son Nephi, and how Lehi was commanded by The Lord to leave Jerusalem before being destroyed by the Babylonians. It was never taught, or claimed, that Lehi, or those that fled with him, were part of the lost ten tribes. However, Lehi was a Jew whose story of how he and his family were led over the ocean to the Americas is told in the Book of Mormon.

I'm only pointing out a couple of error's in your representation of LDS church doctrine. I'm pretty sure it doesn't impact your predisposition towards a unbelief in a God. It certainly doesn't change the premise of your article on the lost ten tribes. I just wanted to set the record straight on those two specific comments you made about Joseph Smith and the belief the LDS church teaches Lehi was part of the lost ten tribes.

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David
2/13/2014 03:58:29 pm

I went back and reread your comment and I think I miss-read what you said. I think you actually said that Joseph Smith believed Quetzalcoatl was Jesus Christ. If that's what you meant then I took a lot of time to refute something you never said. If so, sorry. Doh.

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PhD student
4/5/2014 12:21:24 pm

Interestingly, while reading Scott Wolter's blog about this this particular episode, the KRS was brought to attention. Scott claimed that he had numerous peer-reviewed articles published. When asked numerous times by forum contributors to present links to these articles he simply danced around the issue. He then acts like we are haters for not believing him. Truly it would be easier for him to just present these articles. I have a strange feeling that they don't exist. Strange indeed.

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PhD student
4/5/2014 12:24:21 pm

Sorry for some poor punctuation. It was a pain to write my comment with my phone.

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Michael Cohen
6/15/2014 02:11:35 am

Why does the academic establishment have this obsession that Columbus discovered America and any evidence showing others were here are lies and hoaxes? Why has the establishment spend fifty years trying to prove that the Vineland Map of 1453 a fraud? If it is not a fraud then Columbus is a fraud and all the books praising him should be moved to the section of the libraries which contain fiction.

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Michael Cohen
6/15/2014 03:32:15 am

Jason: I would like to know who is paying you to spend so many hours attacking America Unearthed?

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Jason Colavito link
6/15/2014 05:03:27 am

No one pays me a dime. I am not paid, nor do I receive remuneration from any company, organization, or entity for any of the work appearing on this blog. I don't even take advertising.

This season I wrote the background sections of the reviews an hour before the show and the review itself in real time, so it was only 2 hours a week, hardly a major time investment.

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Gary
6/15/2014 06:32:28 am

We know that Scott Wolter is paid handsomely for broadcasting misinformation.

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Dn link
11/30/2014 11:37:19 am

Jason, this is an incredibly difficult mystery to get to the bottom of, to find the true answers about the 10 tribes, you have to remove the agenda from all sides. remove revisionist history as far back as Mormonism, Gnosticism, Frankest, Ashkenazi, Communists, and progressives. All of these groups do a fine job of covering up the 10 tribes. Why bother doing this if they never existed? Good luck.

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Blckamerica
9/10/2015 03:43:29 am

I'm am shocked to see not one of you intellectuals thought of black Americans as being part of the "lost tribes"... we were put into slavery and taught to forget languages and traditions of our people and our tribes and no one dares speak on that...where did we come from or what tribes where we descended from maybe those artifacts found were from our race.. African Americans... is that too much for your intellect to ponder.... I truly find it ironically funny that no ones chooses to research African Americans and our part in Ancient History..."Truly lost Tribe"

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M K
1/31/2017 12:12:24 am

Just stumbled upon your site. Excellent work, by the way.
As an Orthodox Jew, I feel the need to correct you on some things, namely Abraham's exsistance. We only hear of him in the Bible, but there is no evidence to prove he did not live, therefore makiny him, not a mythical character, but a person who lived who we know nothing about.
They have found in Israel ruins from his time, and they have found things they belong to him.
Also, like you correctly noted (would have been better to see if the first time you mentioned the menorah) the story of Chanukah took place many years after the exile of the ten tribes.
On that point, it is not a myth that all Jews are descended from the 12 tribes, as studies have shown a better genetic connection amongst Jews of different countries than of the peoples amongst whom they lived.

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Mary T.
1/27/2018 12:33:41 am

I have an internet acquaintance who shared a newspaper article about his discovery of an authenticated, ancient stone statue of a Welsh man, which he had found in the wilds of Kentucky. It seems to support what I read about early explorers / settlers accounts of blue-eyed, Welsh-speaking Native Americans with light-colored hair.

As for the Los Lunas Decalogue, you suggested it was inscribed by college pranksters. When I traveled through New Mexico in the 1980's, it seemed sparsely populated, at least what I saw of it.We drove through miles and miles of dessert highway before coming to only an isolated port-a-potty in disgustingly unuseable condition. Because I read that the Los Lunas Decalogue was first discovered in the 1800s, I wonder whether there would have been any college nearby to it? Also, whether college students of the 1800s, in New Mexico, would have been taught how to write an extinct Hebrew language? More, it seems like it would have been quite an undertaking merely for a prank. The dessert heat in daytime, and cold after sundown.

As for the Bat Creek Stone, I read that it was found with brass armbands?

What do you make of the Red Bird Boulder on display in Manchester, Kentucky? So I read, it fell from a Cliffside along the Red Bird River. I further read that, a cave atop of that Cliffside also contained the same types of extinct Hebrew, Phoenician, ect., writing. It seems that scaling a Cliffside to perpetrate a hoax would be dangerous and foolish. Yet I have read that the Cherokee were cave dwellers, in part, for protection.

More recently, I have seen Youtube videos claiming that a team of archeologists/ anthropologist have discovered the Ark of the Covenant, in the tomb of "Mulek", in the Chiriqui Mountains of Panama. I have doubts, and this would be all the more lengthy to go into specifics, but I do wonder about a couple of artifacts shown on a 2012 video.

One was a stone statue of one man carrying another man on his shoulders. The narrator identified the artifact as a Phoenician man carrying a man of Hebrew royalty.

The other artifact was a stone with ancient carvings, so said the narrators. One carving was identified as a Jewish Menorah. Both artifacts were said to date back to around the time of the destruction of Solomon's Temple, supposedly, according to ancient scrolls discovered in the tomb.

On the northeastern tip of Kentucky are ancient "silver" mines. I have seen photos of them on the internet, and know somone who has been to them. One mine is booby-trapped, as the Spanish reportedly did. Others at the same site are not, but are probably no less dangerous due to age.

What stands out as odd to me, is hearing about an ancient artifact that I can best describe as probably looking something like a giant bird bath, based on description. I gather that it was in the general, wilderness vicinity of ancient mines. As suggested to me, I wonder if it could have been an alter for sacrificial rituals.

It is not my purpose to argue religion or evolution, and certainly not on behalf of any religion, such as Mormon beliefs. I have questions, not answers, and cannot arbitrarily conclude anything. But because Cherokee is part of my heritage, I do wonder if Chiriqui and Cherokee could be two spelling / speech variations of the same people.

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