Page 139 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

thirty centuries as an object of awe and splendour for future generations
to gawp at and revere? Or, in such a great expanse of time, was it
possible that circumstances might change so much that it would once
again be buried and concealed?
Perhaps neither would happen. I remembered the ancient calendrical
system of Central America, which the Olmecs had initiated. According to
them, and to their more famous successors the Mayas, there just weren’t
any great expanses of time left, let alone three millennia. The Fifth Sun
was all used up and a tremendous earthquake was building to destroy
humanity two days before Christmas in AD 2012.
I turned my attention back to the stele. Two things seemed to be clear:
the encounter scene it portrayed must, for some reason, have been of
immense importance to the Olmecs, hence the grandeur of the stele
itself, and the construction of the remarkable stockade of columns built
to contain it. And, as was the case with the negro heads, it was obvious
that the face of the bearded Caucasian man could only have been
sculpted from a human model. The racial verisimilitude was too good for
an artist to have invented it.
The same went for two other Caucasian figures I was able to identify
among the surviving monuments from La Venta. One was carved in low
relief on a heavy and roughly circular slab of stone about three feet in
diameter. Dressed in what looked like tight-fitting leggings, his features
were those of an Anglo-Saxon. He had a full pointed beard and wore a
curious floppy cap on his head. In his left hand he extended a flag, or
perhaps a weapon of some kind. His right hand, which he held across the
middle of his chest, appeared to be empty. Around his slim waist was tied
a flamboyant sash. The other Caucasian figure, this time carved on the
side of a narrow pillar, was similarly bearded and attired.
Who were these conspicuous strangers? What were they doing in
Central America? When did they come? And what relationship did they
have with those other strangers who had settled in this steamy rubber
jungle—the ones who had provided the models for the great negro
heads?
Some radical researchers, who rejected the dogma concerning the
isolation of the New World prior to 1492, had proposed what looked like
a viable solution to the problem: the bearded, thin-featured individuals
could have been Phoenicians from the Mediterranean who had sailed
through the Pillars of Hercules and across the Atlantic Ocean as early as
the second millennium BC. Advocates of this theory went on to suggest
that the negroes shown at the same sites were the ‘slaves’ of the
Phoenicians, picked up on the coast of West Africa prior to the trans-
Atlantic run.
2
The more consideration I gave to the strange character of the La Venta
sculptures, the more dissatisfied I became with these ideas. Probably the

2 Ibid., p. 141-42.

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