They Hid This African Discovery In Brazil For Centuries

[00:00:01]Brazil, 1974.

[00:00:04]>> [music] >> A cave called Lapa Vermelha.

[00:00:08]A French archaeologist named Annette Laming-Emperaire is digging through 40 feet of compacted earth and mineral deposits.

[00:00:16]She's [music] been working this site for months, and then she finds a skull.

[00:00:20]An 11,500-year-old skull. The oldest human remains ever discovered in the Americas.

[00:00:28]She names her find Luzia in honor of Lucy, the famous 3.2 [music] million-year-old fossil found in Ethiopia.

[00:00:38]And when forensic experts examine this skull, when British anatomist Richard Neave reconstructs the face, >> [music] >> what looks back at them is not what anyone expected. Not East [music] Asian, not [ __ ] not the ancestor of the people we call Native Americans today.

[00:00:56]The [music] face is unmistakably African. This is what that reconstruction looks like.

[00:01:02]>> Lock the doors because what I'm about to say is going to upset some people right next here. Um Okay. [music] Christopher Columbus did not discover America.

[00:01:14]>> [music] >> So anyway, there were there were actually many other mariners before Columbus that discovered America as well. Decades earlier, even eons earlier, [music] uh there were so many people that were coming across uh these islands and this continent. But it's only been in the last century that evidence has surfaced and continually grown to indicate that many of these pre-Columbian explorers might have come >> That face changes the question. Not whether Africans were enslaved in America. We know that.

[00:01:49]But whether Africans were in America before anyone else. Before Columbus, before the Vikings, before the Bering Strait crossing that every school textbook still teaches as the only story.

[00:02:02]In this video, we're going to follow the evidence. The genetic evidence, >> [music] >> the archaeological evidence, the evidence that Columbus himself recorded in his own journal.

[00:02:13]We're going to tell you what it says.

[00:02:15]We're going to tell you what it doesn't say.

[00:02:18]And we're going to let let you decide what it means.

[00:02:22]Let's start with what we actually know about who was first. [music] The standard story goes like this.

[00:02:28]Around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, people crossed from Siberia into North America through a land bridge where the Bering Strait is today. [music] They spread south. They became the ancestors of every Native American people.

[00:02:43]And that was the first chapter of human life in the Americas. [music] Full stop.

[00:02:48]For decades, that story felt settled.

[00:02:51]Then Luzia [music] arrived.

[00:02:53]Luzia's skull, 11,500 years old found in Brazil, did not look like the descendants of Siberian migrants.

[00:03:01]Her features, [music] a narrow oval cranium, projecting face, pronounced chin.

[00:03:07]Walter Neves, an [music] anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, who studied her for years, was clear about [music] what he saw. He said her morphology most strongly resembled Australian Aboriginal peoples, African peoples, Melanesians, not [music] Siberians.

[00:03:23]This matter because Luzia was not alone.

[00:03:27]Neves and his colleagues examined multiple ancient Brazilian skulls. All of them, every one of the oldest, showed [music] the same pattern. African and Australasian features, not East Asian, not [ __ ] And [music] then, separately, thousands of kilometers north in Mexico, someone in 1862 was digging through soil in Veracruz and hit something hard. Something enormous.

[00:03:54]He kept digging. What he uncovered weighed 8 tons.

[00:03:57]>> [music] >> It was a stone head, taller than a man, and the face carved into that stone, [music] the broad flat nose, the full lips, the particular set of the jaw and cheekbones looked nothing like the faces in the history books of Mesoamerica.

[00:04:13]It looked African.

[00:04:16]By 1938, archaeologists had found more of them.

[00:04:20]By today, 17 confirmed examples are known.

[00:04:23]17 colossal stone heads carved by the Olmec civilization [music] of ancient Mexico beginning around 1200 BCE.

[00:04:33]Each one [music] unique. Each one a portrait of a specific person. Each one with those same features. This is what [music] they look like up close.

[00:04:41]>> I I mentioned I mentioned them briefly.

[00:04:43]Uh I explored the Olmec mystery in considerable depth.

[00:04:48]>> Could you explain that to people that maybe >> in the fingerprints of the gods. Yes.

[00:04:51][music] So, it's considered to be the earliest high culture of Central America.

[00:04:56]Everybody's heard about the Aztecs.

[00:04:58]Everybody's heard about the Maya.

[00:05:02]>> 3,000 years of silence.

[00:05:04]>> [music] >> Then a stone face emerged from the earth and broke history in two. The Olmec built the first civilization in the Americas. No [music] wheels, no metal tools, no draft animals. Yet, they carved 17 colossal heads, some weighing 50 tons, and moved them 60 miles [music] through jungle and swamp. But, the faces on those heads, scientists, archaeologists, and governments spent 160 years fighting over what they actually show. In 2006, a forensic team ran the most advanced analysis ever attempted on ancient Mesoamerican remains.

[00:05:36]Genetics, isotope mapping, facial reconstruction. The results didn't just answer the question. They erased the wrong one entirely. Stay with us. The truth rewrites everything you thought you knew. The stones that should not exist, it starts with [music] a farmer.

[00:05:51]In 1862, a man clearing land near Tres Zapotes in what is now southern Mexico hit something hard beneath the soil.

[00:05:58]>> [music] >> He dug, and what he found looking back at him from the earth was a human face carved from a single block of volcanic stone, partially buried, eyes closed, mouth slightly open.

[00:06:09]>> The debate about those faces has been running since 1862.

[00:06:13]In 1976, a Guyanese-born [music] scholar named Ivan Van Sertima published a book called They Came Before Columbus.

[00:06:22]Van Sertima argued that African explorers, specifically from Nubian Egypt, [music] had crossed the Atlantic and reached Mesoamerica.

[00:06:30]That the Olmec heads were portraits of those visitors. [music] That the Olmec civilization itself was shaped by African contact.

[00:06:39]The book became one of the most read works of black history in the 20th [music] century.

[00:06:44]It was also rejected by mainstream archaeology.

[00:06:47]The rejection was pointed. [music] Academics in 1997 published a systematic rebuttal in [music] the journal Current Anthropology.

[00:06:56]They said no genuine African artifact [music] had ever been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the Americas.

[00:07:04]That skull shape is not a reliable indicator [music] of ancestry.

[00:07:08]That the Olmec heads show features still common today [music] among the people of Tabasco and Veracruz.

[00:07:15]Van Sertima pushed back.

[00:07:17]He said they were reading [music] history through a bias. That the evidence had been dismissed rather than examined.

[00:07:24]Both things can be [music] true.

[00:07:26]But here's the part of this debate that nobody, not Van Sertima, not his [music] critics, was paying attention to.

[00:07:33]Because in 2015, a completely separate question was being asked by a completely different team of scientists >> [music] >> using tools that Van a team and never had.

[00:07:43]Harvard Medical School 2015 geneticist David Reich and researcher Pontus Skoglund [music] published a paper in the journal Nature.

[00:07:53]They were not looking for Africans in the Americas. They were not looking for [music] anything controversial. They were doing routine genome-wide analysis of Native American populations and they found something that stopped them cold.

[00:08:06]Three groups in the Brazilian Amazon >> [music] >> the Surui, the Karitiana, the Xavante carried a distinct genetic signal.

[00:08:16]A signal that did not match Siberian migrants. Did not match any known Native American population.

[00:08:23]Did not match European or African post-Columbian admixture. [music] It matched Australasians.

[00:08:29]Indigenous Australians, New Guineans, Andaman Islanders.

[00:08:35]People whose deep ancestry [music] traces directly back to the earliest out-of-Africa migration.

[00:08:41]People [music] who left Africa before the populations that became East Asians and Europeans. The researchers named the signal population Y from the Tupi word Ypykuéra meaning [music] ancestor.

[00:08:55]Some Amazonian Native Americans carry DNA that connects them to a founding [music] population more closely related to people of African and Australasian origin than to any other group on Earth.

[00:09:07]Reich [music] said "We have done a lot of sampling in East Asia.

[00:09:12]Nobody looks like this.

[00:09:14]It [music] is an unknown group that no longer exists, but it existed.

[00:09:19]And it got to the Amazon somehow before Columbus, before the Bering [music] Strait crossings that conventional history accounts for.

[00:09:28]The question of how is still open.

[00:09:31]>> [music] >> One place to look, the researchers said, might be in the skeletons of early Native Americans [music] whose skulls some researchers say have Australasian or African features.

[00:09:43]>> [music] >> Most of those skeletons were found in Brazil where Luzia was found.

[00:09:49]Now, I need to say something clearly because this channel deals in truth, not in the comfortable version, the actual version.

[00:09:58]In 2018, a landmark study was published in the journal Cell. 72 scientists from eight countries, including Harvard, University [music] of São Paulo, and the Max Planck Institute, sequenced ancient DNA from 49 individuals across the Americas, [music] including samples from the same Lagoa Santa region in Brazil where Luzia was found.

[00:10:24]Their conclusion, all of these ancient individuals, including those with the striking African-looking skull morphology, descended from a single ancestral group that crossed from Siberia.

[00:10:37]Not from Africa directly, >> [music] >> not from a separate African migration.

[00:10:42]The DNA of Luzia's population, [music] the study said, traced to the same source as every other Native American group.

[00:10:49]So, what do we do with that?

[00:10:51]Here's what the honest answer looks like.

[00:10:54]>> [music] >> Skull morphology is not the same as ancestry.

[00:10:58]Richard Neave's facial reconstruction of Luzia, the African-looking face, [music] was built from bone shape. And bone shape, as geneticist Andre Strauss explained [music] after the 2018 study, is not a reliable marker of ancestry or geographic origin. Genetics is, [music] and the genetics say single migration from Siberia.

[00:11:21]>> [music] >> But genetics also say population Y exists. It is real.

[00:11:27]>> [music] >> It is in living Amazonian people today, and it connects them to a population that looks more like Australasians, >> [music] >> people whose deep roots are African than like anything else.

[00:11:39]These are not the same question.

[00:11:41]The Siberian migration happened.

[00:11:44]But [music] who was already in the Americas when it arrived? Who came before it?

[00:11:48]That question is still open. [music] Let's talk for a moment about what we are building at Black Culture Unlocked.

[00:11:54]A space where black history is told without filters, without apology, and with the evidence to back it up.

[00:12:01]If this channel matters to you, subscribe and hit the notification bell.

[00:12:05]Every subscriber keeps this work alive.

[00:12:08]>> [music] >> Let's continue.

[00:12:11]Now, Christopher Columbus, 1492, second voyage, Haiti.

[00:12:18]Columbus writes in his journal, in his own hand, that Native Americans came to him and told him something.

[00:12:24]That black-skinned people had come from the south and southeast, trading in gold-tipped metal spears.

[00:12:30]>> [music] >> This is not an Afrocentric interpretation. This is not a theory.

[00:12:35]This is Columbus's journal.

[00:12:37]Van Sertima, when he sat down with Our Time Press in 1997, said it plainly. Columbus was a chief witness.

[00:12:46]In 1952, a man named Alain Bombard sailed a life raft from Casablanca in North Africa to Barbados without adequate food or water, [music] but with a cloth net and two spears. He made it.

[00:13:00]If one man on a life raft in 1952 can cross the Atlantic from Africa [music] to the Caribbean, then what could Mandinka sailors, operating ocean-going vessels, do in the 1300s?

[00:13:11]This is the question Van Sertima was really asking.

[00:13:15]Not whether Africans built the Olmec civilization, >> [music] >> but whether African contact happened.

[00:13:21]Whether knowledge, objects, people moved across that ocean before Europeans [music] said it was possible.

[00:13:28]The Columbus journal entry is evidence of something.

[00:13:32]What that something is, >> [music] >> that is the argument.

[00:13:36]Here's what the genetic picture looks like right now.

[00:13:39]The 2021 PNAS study extended the population [music] wide research. It found the Australasian genetic signal not just in the Amazon, >> [music] >> but in groups along the Pacific coast of South America, including descendants of Peru's Mochica civilization. A civilization that built pyramids, >> [music] >> that had a complex writing system, that developed advanced agriculture independently.

[00:14:04]The people who built Mochica carried DNA that connects them to a founding population related to Australasians.

[00:14:11]People who walked out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, who moved through South Asia, through Australasia, >> [music] >> who eventually, somehow, reached South America.

[00:14:24]The debate about how is legitimate.

[00:14:26]The genetic evidence that they did is published, peer reviewed, reproducible.

[00:14:32]This is not fringe theory.

[00:14:34]This is in Nature, in PNAS, in Cell.

[00:14:39]What it means is this, the story of who first reached the Americas is not settled. The Siberian migration is real, but [music] it is not the only story.

[00:14:49]And the people who predated, whoever they were, carried [music] ancestry whose deepest roots trace back to the continent everyone came from, >> [music] >> Africa.

[00:15:00]Now, this is what the Olmec heads look like when [music] you take away the debate and just look. 17 heads, carved from basalt boulders [music] weighing up to 40 tons. Each one moved across 60 miles of jungle, river, and volcanic [music] terrain.

[00:15:15]Each one a portrait of a specific living ruler.

[00:15:18]The mainstream answer [music] is the features belong to the indigenous people of Tabasco and Veracruz. That may be true. It is probably true.

[00:15:28]But it raises [music] its own question.

[00:15:30]Where did the indigenous people of Tabasco and Veracruz get those features?

[00:15:34]The Olmec lived in that region from at least 1200 BCE.

[00:15:39]Their civilization is considered the mother culture of all later Mesoamerican societies, the Maya, [music] the Aztec, the Zapotec, all downstream from the Olmec.

[00:15:52]What was the Olmec connected to?

[00:15:55]Here's a reminder to like and share this video and subscribe to Black Culture Unlocked for more videos on black culture, history, civilization, and identity.

[00:16:03]>> [music] >> Let's continue. We need to ask the honest question.

[00:16:07]And the honest question is this.

[00:16:09]>> [music] >> The genetic evidence for specific specifically African pre-Columbian migration to the Americas is not established.

[00:16:17]The 2018 DNA study is clear. The ancient skulls that looked African descended from Siberian migrants. But that is not the same thing as saying Africa played no role. Africa's where the deepest human roots are. Population Y, the signal in living Amazonian people today connects them to a founding population that is genetically closer to Africans and Australasians than to anyone else on Earth.

[00:16:44]>> [music] >> That is not because Africans sailed to Brazil in 1300 CE.

[00:16:49]It may be maybe because the earliest humans to reach the Americas came before the Siberian migration.

[00:16:55]Before East Asian populations diverge.

[00:16:57][music] When African and Australasian ancestry were not yet separate things, the deepest roots of the Americas may be African. Not because of a voyage, but because of where all of humanity begins.

[00:17:11]That is a different argument from Van [music] Sertima's. But it is one the genetic data actually supports.

[00:17:18]And here is what matters for black people looking at this history.

[00:17:22]Africa is not only where [music] black people were enslaved.

[00:17:25]Africa is where all human life began.

[00:17:28]>> [music] >> Every person in the Americas, Native American, European, Asian, carries ancestry that traces back to Africa.

[00:17:37]The Olmec heads, whatever their specific origin, depict people with features [music] that still exist in Africa and in the Amazon today.

[00:17:46]The oldest bones found in Brazil look African before genetic tools existed to complicate the picture.

[00:17:52]>> [music] >> And living Amazonian people carry genetic ancestry that connects [music] them to the deepest human migrations, migrations that began in Africa.

[00:18:02]The story is complicated, but [music] Africa is always in it. Let me tell you what comes next in this research.

[00:18:09]Scientists know that population Y existed.

[00:18:12]>> [music] >> They know it contributed to the founding of at least some Amazonian populations.

[00:18:17]They do not yet have ancient DNA from a population Y individual. When [music] they do, when they sequence a skeleton from the right place and the right time, the picture may change completely. It has changed before. In [music] 2015, population Y did not exist in the scientific record. Then it did.

[00:18:37]In 2018, Luzia's African-looking face was redrawn. Then it was. History is not a fixed point. It is a moving one. And the people with the tools to move it have only recently begun to look at the Americas through an African lens. That is worth paying attention to.

[00:18:56]The colossal stone heads of the Olmec have been sitting in the ground and on museum floors [music] for 3,000 years.

[00:19:04]Nobody asked who they were for most of that time. Now people are asking.

[00:19:08]The DNA researchers are asking. The facial reconstruction teams are asking.

[00:19:14]The people [music] of the Brazilian Amazon are asking because the answer is in their own blood. Here's what the Olmec heads look like when you stand next to one.

[00:19:22]>> Now, we should all know Columbus did not discover America, right?

[00:19:26]The Americas were already discovered and populated for thousands of years before Columbus sailed there and landed in the Caribbean's by mistake. But, did you know there's some evidence showing that Africans came to the Americas before Columbus did?

[00:19:41]>> 8 tons, 3,000 years old, staring back at you with a face you have seen before.

[00:19:47]We do not know exactly who these people were. [music] We do not know exactly how population Y got to the Amazon. We do not know exactly what Columbus's gold-tipped spear traders were.

[00:19:58]But, we know they existed. [music] The bones say so. The DNA says so.

[00:20:03]>> [music] >> The stone says so.

[00:20:06]And the most honest thing we can say right now is this.

[00:20:10]The Americas were not empty before Columbus arrived.

[00:20:13]>> [music] >> They were not empty before the Siberian crossings, either. And whoever was there first, wherever their deepest roots lie, those roots go back to the same place everything goes back to, Africa. Let us know in the comments what you think.

[00:20:29]Does the genetic evidence [music] for population Y change how you think about the African presence in the Americas?

[00:20:37]Do you think mainstream archaeology is asking the right questions about the Olmec heads? And what do you think Columbus meant when he wrote about black traders with gold-tipped spears arriving from the south? Subscribe to Black Culture Unlocked [music] and press the bell icon.

[00:20:53]We bring videos on the history and culture that nobody else is talking about. Thanks for watching. Until the next one, stay with the truth.