Finding the Black Olmec

by Brian Dunning
October 22, 2024

If you know anything at all about the Olmec culture — one of the earliest known Mesoamerican cultures, from what's now the southern part of Mexico — it's probably the gigantic stone heads they carved. If you saw a picture of one, you'd recognize it in an instant. Seventeen of them are known, from 1.5 to 3.5 meters high, weighing from six to fifty tons, and dating from probably 1500 to 900 BCE — we don't know exactly when. They're called the colossal heads, and they bear a certain characteristic that some have interpreted in such a way that upends virtually all of what we know of Mesoamerican history. That is that most of them depict broad noses and large lips, traits that some have used to infer that the Olmecs were Black Africans. Today we're going to give this alternative conjecture its fair shake, contrast it to the standard model of Mesoamerican ancestry, and see exactly how we know what we know.

The Olmecs were an underappreciated civilization, possibly because they're not nearly as well known as the later Aztecs, Maya, and Incas who were conquered by the Spanish and thus popularly introduced to the European world. Although the Olmec were not the first people to settle the Americas, they were the first to build a true civilization with permanent city-temple complexes including such famous sites as San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan in Veracruz, Mexico. They had hieroglyphs but it's not clear whether it constituted actual proto-writing, and has not been conclusively translated. The Olmec civilization predated the later, more famous ones by so much that we don't even know what their own name for themselves was; it was the Aztecs who named them the Olmeca, meaning "people from the rubber place."

The timeline of the peopling of the Americas is known from multiple lines of evidence, not only archaeological, but also genetic. Some 14,000 years ago, ancestors of all Native Americans made the trek from North America all the way down through South America. We've dated ruins all along that route to confirm that, and geneticists can use mitochondrial, autosomal, and other types of DNA analysis to prove the common ancestry. Ancient DNA from gravesites allows us to connect today's populations to the first peoples. Comparative genomics is a discipline by which we can look at modern populations all the way from Siberia down to the tip of South America and identify shared genetic variants among them, and even infer historical connections and migration routes. In short, from every science we're able to apply to this question, we get the same answer: that all the first people of the Americas share ancestry that came over from Siberia beginning some 16,500 years ago. There are no substantive gaps in this, and there is a total lack of the genetic evidence that must exist if there had been an early population that came from some other continent.

But the science of genetics did not yet exist back in 1862, when anthropologist José María Melgar y Serrano made the first known discovery of one of the colossal heads by a modern scientist. Going solely by the facial features in the carving, Melgar determined that it represented an "Africoid" person. In 1887, Alfredo Chavero concurred with the Africoid identification — but also went further and interpreted what appeared to be motifs on the headband of the carving as possibly Chinese. That the Olmecs had a Chinese origin is a conjecture that some continue to make today, speculating they descended from refugees from the Shang Dynasty around 1200 BCE — an idea that enjoys essentially zero academic support and cannot be shoehorned to fit any existing evidence.

But the alternate theories even go on from there. Norwegian adventurer and alternative historian Thor Heyerdahl built a papyrus raft in 1970 called the Ra II and sailed it from Morocco to Barbados in an effort to prove ancient direct contact between Egyptians and the Americas, another idea that has no academic support. When Heyerdahl saw one particular Olmec carving, he interpreted it as depicting an individual with a beard and a beaklike nose. He claimed the Olmecs must have had Nordic ancestry, and cited his own voyage in the Ra II as proof that it was possible. But it is the Black African conjecture that enjoys the most popular support — though no academic support — today.

Well, let me be not quite so fast. The idea has no support among relevant experts, but it has proven to be impressively insidious in its spread through other disciplines and its seepage into pop culture. Having been intrigued by the 19th century Mexican researchers' interpretation of the "Africoid" colossal heads, the Polish-American linguist Leo Wiener — who was a prolific author — wrote the three-volume book Africa and the Discovery of America. In it, he pointed to what he claimed were numerous similarities between Native Americans and West Africans, similarities in language, agriculture, art, and technology. However, the book was horrible, and received immense criticism from almost every academic discipline he strayed into. One example is that he claimed the word cotton is the same in both Native American and West African languages, as was the crop itself, therefore it must have spread from Africa to America through early contact. In fact there's no evidence the word existed in either culture. The book survived, but was thoroughly ignored by scholars for being so bad.

It was more than 50 years before another researcher picked up the baton, and this time, unfortunately, it was much more influential. In 1976, a graduate student in African Studies at Rutgers University wrote and published the book They Came Before Columbus. The student's name was Ivan Van Sertima, and his book struck at just the right time in cultural history. Chariots of the Gods and its many sequels and copycat books were burning up the cash registers at bookstores. It was the height of the New Age movement in which alternative belief systems of every description were all the rage, including astrology, spiritualism, ancient astronaut theories, and alternative archaeology. Van Sertima's main focus was the Olmecs and the colossal heads, but also claimed many other types of Olmec art that he believed represented Black Africans. He talked about archaeological finds, oral histories, linguistic analyses, and historical records. And, since it was the New Age period, Van Sertima also talked about pyramid power and its use on both continents, as well as religious symbolism. Although the book was written way back in 1976, it's still a top seller on Amazon today, with more than 4000 ratings and an average review of 4.8 stars. And here's the scary part: Amazon's AI-generated summary of all the reviews is the following:

Customers find the book filled with information they were never taught in school. They describe it as a comprehensive study of how African people traveled to and from Europe. Readers also say the book is well-written and interesting.

Odd that it says Europe instead of the Americas, but still. "Information they were never taught in school." Even 50 years after its publication, conspiracy-hungry readers are still enthralled by the promise of forbidden knowledge, and eating it up.

But there are also efforts to take the Black Olmec myth mainstream. In 2020, four authors — all either educators or professors in African American studies — published a paper in The Urban Review titled "Early Pioneers of the Americas: The Role of the Olmecs in Urban Education and Social Studies Curriculum". The paper makes an extended argument for altering public school social studies curricula to include the contribution of the Olmecs to American history and culture — Black Olmecs. The authors cited Van Sertima extensively as well as other pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory writers. Omitting instruction about the Black Olmecs, they argued, was racist. And, granted it probably would be — if it were true. It's not.

Shortly after this article's publication, archaeologist Kurly Tlapoyawa and historian Ruben Arellano Tlakatekatl, co-hosts of the Tales From Aztlantis podcast, published an open letter to The Urban Review:

Teaching the baseless and erroneous claim that the Olmec were black Africans is just as colonialist as the Eurocentric model that Afrocentrists rail against. Such claims regarding the Olmec are the result of outdated racial worldviews held by early European writers, many of whom never set foot in the Americas, combined with the Afrocentric ramblings of pseudoscholars such as Ivan Van Sertima and Clyde Winters, none of whom are Mesoamerican specialists. The idea of "Black Olmecs" is rooted in pseudohistorical revisionism and is not accepted by legitimate Mesoamerican scholars. It should be made clear that no archaeological, faunal, floral, genetic, or historical evidence exists to support the myth of "Black Olmecs." In fact, scholars such as Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Warren Barbour, and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano have published extensive research refuting Van Sertima and the myth of "Black Olmecs."

Throughout any discussion of this subject — and even in the Amazon reviews for the Van Sertima book — are accusations of racism and colonialism. There's no doubt someone will accuse me of racism for doing this episode. "If you don't believe my version of history, you're racist." It's really unfortunate, because it takes what should be a sober and educational archaeological and historical subject and infects it with emotion and ideology — again taking attention off of where it belongs and turning the whole thing into a culture war that nobody wins.

A few weeks after the open letter was posted, The Urban Review retracted the paper with the following comment:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article (Wiggan et al 2020) following concerns raised by readers. After post-publication peer-review, it was found that the theory that Olmecs were Black Africans on which the lesson plan is based is not substantiated according to current Mesoamerican archaeology and genetic evidence. The authors have been offered to submit a revised manuscript updated with information based on current knowledge for further peer review.

Author Greg Wiggan stated on behalf of all co-authors that they do not agree to this retraction.

Relying on "post-publication peer-review" is not the way a refereed journal is supposed to do things. Peer review for publication happens before publication, which is its entire purpose. The paper was based entirely on a false premise, one so false that anyone can learn the facts with 5 minutes on Google. That these authors could not bother to research this topic about which they are so passionate beyond reading a few discredited mass market books from the same shelf as Chariots of the Gods is just as bad as The Urban Review editors publishing it without peer review.

There is really one big lesson to learn from the myth of the Black Olmec. Well, two lessons, the first being that art is often stylized. Picasso's paintings are not evidence that people used to walk around with one eye sticking off the side of their head, and the Olmecs' colossal heads are not evidence that Africans founded the core of the Mesoamerican population. The bigger lesson is no matter how fragile is the root of a false claim, no matter how easy it may be to disprove, it can still gain a powerful foothold in culture. Bad ideas have to be fought, or they will only keep growing. Editors need to stay vigilant. Teachers need to stay vigilant. You, as a person in the world, need to stay vigilant. And we should all remember to always be skeptical.

Thanks to Kurly Tlapoyawa for ethnographic assistance with this episode.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning