6.8 America: 1500 to 1000 b.c.  (Page 2/4)

Like the Egyptians, the Olmecs (and later Mayas) wrote in hieroglyphs, developed a calendar and predicted the movements of planets. These Central Americans built flat-topped pyramids similar to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and decorated those with bas-reliefs showing priests with Semitic facies and long beards. There is even some botanical evidence of European contact in that the Olmec successors wore garments from a strain of cotton that seemed to be a cross between a local, wild type and the long-staple Egyptian cotton. The latter has thirteen large chromosomes and the native central and South American cotton, which was short stapled, had thirteen small chromosomes per cell, but the cotton used for cloth later in Central America was a hybrid of the two above and contained twenty-six chromosomes, thirteen small and thirteen large. One has to wonder if it is just coincidence that these Olmecs developed writing, calendar systems, pyramids etc. directly at the terminus of the strong Atlantic Canary Current, flowing from the bulge of Africa through the Canary Islands to the Gulf of Mexico at the base of the Yucatan peninsula. The swampy, unfavorable jungle coast in which this civilization developed would suggest that it must have arrived almost in full bloom, from the sea. The Egyptians and Phoenicians knew more about astronomy, the key to ocean navigation, than the later European contemporaries of Columbus and Pizarro, and it is definitely known that the Phoenicians had settlements all the way down the Atlantic coast of Morocco by 1,000 B.C. (Ref. 176 , 209 , 95 )

There is also the possibility of still other peoples being the source of early foreign diffusion to the New World. Heyerdahl (Ref. 95 ) lists fifty-two examples of common characteristics seen in the early civilizations of Asia Minor (Hittite), Cyprus and Crete and the early societies of Central America and Peru. These include priest-king dynasties in sun-worshipping administrations, brother-sister royal marriages, fully developed script writing