Homo erectus

Although Charles Darwin had speculated in his work The Descent of Man, published in 1871 (p.240), that "It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee ; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere." So, Darwin was the first to propose an Out of Africa origin for mankind.

But Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), a German scientist who quickly accepted and promoted Darwin' theory of Evolution through natural selection thought otherwisw.

Haeckel coined the term pithecanthropus (ape-men) and believed that humans had evolved from Catarhini, or Narrow-nosed Apes in South East Asia. Current woke feelings condemn his posture on eugenics, and racial inferiority of some human populations. His writings acceptable in his days would now be considered racist, and derogatory towards dark-skinned peoples, but he was a man of his time when such points of view were acceptable, so we can't apply our modern standards to judge him with hindsight.

Haeckel described a human phylogenetic tree, and addressed practical aspects of human evolution. Even before Darwin's "Descent of Man", he had conjectured about the birthplace of humanity. In 1868 he wrote (see p. 436 Vol. 2 in The History of Creation: "Man, we may feel certain, is descended from Catarhini, or narrow-nosed apes... Of the five now existing continents, neither Australia, nor America, nor Europe can have been this primaeval home, or the so-called "Paradise," the "cradle of the human race." Most circumstances indicate Southern Asia as the locality in question."

Homo erectus discovery

Heaeckel's work inspired a Dutch physician, Eugène Dubois, to explore that region in search of the "missing link" ancestor of the human species. He succeeded, and he discovered the first pithecanthropus, now known as Homo erectus in 1891, at Trinil, a site located on the banks of the Solo River, in Java, in what is now Indonesia. They were ancient, and validated Haeckel's hypothesis. Now we know they are ancient, between 700,000 and 1,500,000 years old.

1932 Newspaper article about Solo Man

The Trinil "Java Man" or "pithecantropus erectus" (upright ape man) was the oldest hominin discovered at that time, far older than the European Neanderthals. More erectus remains were discovered near Beijing, China, starting in 1921, at the Zhoukoudian site. These remains were named "Peking Man" (Sinanthropus pekinensis).

Further excavations were conducted at Trinil in the early 1900s but didn't yield any remains.

But, less than one hundred years ago, the situation changed. A member of that expedition, Willem Frederik Oppenoorth had persisted in his quest, and had become the head of the Java Mapping Progran in 1930. He also secured funding to conduct further archaeological research in the region, searching for erectus. Noting the Trinil site's location, Oppenoorth surveyed the Solo River east of it, and struck gold when one of his teams led by Ter Haar discovered some animal fossils on August 27, 1931 close to the village of Ngandong.

They dug at the spot, located 20 m (33 ft) above the level of Solo River and found that it was a rich deposit containing animal fossils entombed by a flood that laid volcanic ashes along a now abandoned river bed.

For those keen on more details, I suggest reading Huffman et al., 2010, who describe the site, its exploration, layout, and remains in great detail.

On September 15, 1931 the dig unearthed hominin remains, they had discovered what we now classify as Homo erectus. Oppenoorth published the findings in 1932 (Solo Man a new fossil skull. Scientific American Sept. 1932, 154–155). He soon realized that the "Solo Man" belonged to the same group as Java Man and Peking Man. Oppenoorth believed that the Indonesian Java Man was the ancestor of the less primitive, and more recent Solo Man, and that both were part of the branch of mankind that led to the Australian Aboriginal people. On the other branch was the Peking Man from northern China,who was the root of the tree that led to Neanderthals in Europe. Man had its roots in Asia. However, he also recognized that these Asian hominins were similar to the African Homo rhodesiensis.

Dubois, who had discovered the Java Man, classed them as human beings, naming them Homo sapiens soloensis (Source).

A few years later, in 1939, von Koenigswald and Weidenreich recognized that Java Man and Peking Man were "related to each other in the same way as two different races of present mankind. Now we know that they were erectus, and so was the Solo Man.

How old was the Solo Man?

At first these remains were believed to be very old, closer to the age of the Java Man, but over the years we learned that they are much more recent, and they may have even co-existed with Modern humans.

Specimens from the Solo River site ad Ngandong were studied by Yokoyama et al. (2008), who calculated an age of 40,000 to 70,000 years for them, which would place them close the the date of arrival of modern humans to the region. Did they overlap with Homo sapiens? Maybe not.

The latest dating of the Solo Man was preformed by Rizal et al., 2020. This study revealed that the terrace above the Solor River in Ngandong was formed between 92,000 and 140,000 years ago and they estimated "ages of 117 to 108 thousand years (kyr) for the H. erectus bone bed, which accumulated during flood conditions. These results negate the extreme ages that have been proposed for the site and solidify Ngandong as the last known occurrence of this long-lived species." This date is earlier than the currently accepted date for the second, and final, Out of Africa migration which is believed to have taken place ~60 kyr ago.

It is possible that modern humans left Afria earlier, or that the first Out of Africa around 120 kya advanced east much further than currently believed and reached Indonesia, instead of the Levant. In either case, Solo Man and Modern humans could have met.

Alternatively, these erectus could have survived and thrived in the region until the arrival of modern humans. We do know that Denisovans lived in this region before modern humans arrived. We ignore if erectus and Denisovans admixing here.

Currently, there is no direct genetic evidence of direct super-archaic admixture in the people who now live in this region (Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, or Australia), see Hudjashov et al., 2007. Perhaps further studies will clarify the matter. But, we recently learned that erectus and Denisovans admixed somewhere in East Asia, and that some of the erectus genes ended up in modern humans via Denisovan-Human interactions.

Some open questions remain: did Solo Man evolve from the original Java Man? or were they closely related "sister lineages" evolving in the same region, both being subspecies of H. erectus?

Interestingly H. erectus has been in Asia for over two million years, which is older than the oldest African erectus fossils. Furthermore, erectus remains were found in Africa far more recently than those discovered in Asia; starting in 1970 Richard Leaky discovered fossils in Koobi Fora, near Lake Turkana, in Kenya, which are 1.75 million years old. In 1984 the erectus Turkana Boy was found there too. It is possible that H. erectus evolved in Asia and then migrated to Africa.

As mentioned in my recent post, they lived in Siberia between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago, showing that they were equally well adapted to the tropical climate of Indonesia and the icy Siberian forests. These adaptable and intelligent hominins were capable of colonizing Africa from Asia, and also, moving on, and reaching America.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Celtic navigators and the New England stone chambers

A few days ago I wrote about the Minoans and the hypothesis that they visited America and traded native copper (pure metal) from Lake Superior in USA to the Mediterranean. I don't agree with that theory. Among the evidence put forward by those who do believe in it, was the existence of stone buildings in the northeastern states of the U.S.

There are stone structures found in different parts of New England and New York that have been attributed to European visitors. They are considered to sophisticated to have been built by the Native Americans who lived there, or by the later wave of settlers that came from Europe starting in the 1600s.

So, who built them? According to an article that has studied these structures (Lost Histories: The Story of New England’s Stone Chambers by Benjamin Lord, Northern Woodlands, Vol 20, No. 4 Winter 2013, p.24), some believe that they are the work of ancient European mariners, such as Celts.

The hypothesis is that thousands of years ago, Celts from Europe, crossed the North Atlantic and built these stone buildings in America.

Those who support this idea mention the stone structure at Mystery Hill, in Salem, New Hampshire, USA. or the Upton Chamber in Upton Massachusetts. They discard a colonial construction, or even a later origin (they may have been built as root cellars in the late 19th century) and consider that the natives couldn't have built them. So the explanation is that they are megalithic sites, similar to those erected by the Bronze Age Europeans 1,500 to 3,500 years ago.

Mystery Hill

This site is located at 105 Haverhill Rd, Salem, NH. It is a private site or park, known as "America's Stonehenge". It was acquired by William Goodwin, an archaeologist in 1936 and following his death in 1950, it was acquired in 1956 by an entrepreneur named Robert E. Stone, who charged an admission fee to see the massive stone structures. He also wrote some "papers" studying the site. The place is still operated by the Stone family. Below is a plan of the site (Source):

Goodwin believed that the site was built by Culdee Monks, who had crossed the Atlantic from Ireland (see my posts on Irish monks and America) around 1000 AD.

Stone, on the other hand promoted another origin, he asserted that the stones were aligned with astronomical points. Below I summarize on of his articles, published in 1971.

The site has many massive, stone structures and covers an area of 12 acres (6 ha). It has wells, stone walls, buildings, carvings, drains, and chambers. One stone slab was named with the eye-catching name of the "Sacrificial Table", located inside the site's largest structure. There are "monoliths" around the site that Stone argued were set with "astronomical alignments, similar to "Stonehenge" in England, are quite impressive. Thus far, the winter and summer Solstices for both rising and setting of the sun are very accurate, when viewed from the exact center of the site; the "Sacrificial Table", 500 feet away. Setting of the sun during'the Equinox also lines up on a dolmen-like structure built into the outer wall" Source.

Stone provides a historic timeline for the site: The Pattee family lived near it from 1823 to 1847, they built a house on it which burned down in 1855. The Pattees quarried the site, destroying up to 40% of it. Some slabs ended up as curb stones in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Following Stone's acquisition, the newly formed New England Antiquities Research Association (N EARA) in 1964, the site was excavated and radiocarbon dated.

Stone gave an age of 180 BC and 1045 BC and asserted that they "are indicative that a previously unrecorded megalithic culture was in existence in this hemisphere... This culture... not only included sites like Mystery Hill, but various other stone-constructions that we are documenting, such as dolmens, tunnels, strange non-Colonial walls, unusual wells and many other oddities."

Some views of the site, the "monolith" with the sign is one of those said to mark astronomical positions.

Views of Mystery Hill. Source

Barry Fell, in 1975 visited the site and coincidentially, Stone found a tablet inside one of the chambers at Mystery Hill with inscriptions that Fell immediately recognized as Ogam, an ancient Celtic sript. He also concluded that one of them was written in Libyan while the other was Phoenician or Iberian Punic script. According to Fell, one of the buildings had been dedicated to Baal by Canaanites who reached this spot.

Fell wrote a book about ancient European visitors to America (America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World) mentioning other similar sites and Celtic inscriptions in New England and further inland, like the Davenport tablets. Fell says that Celts from what is now Spain, reached America 3,000 years ago establishing their kingdom, Iargalon, there. Source

Mystery Hill has been radiocarbon dated to around 2,000 BC, but this age is compatible with Native American occupation. A calendar aligned with the position of the sun (Solstices and equinox) is unknown among the Algonquian tribes so it is probably a coincidence. But, they were capable of building large structures like the massive earth mounds (see my posts on mound-builders).

Mainstream archaologists consider that "America's Stonehenge" is the work of either American natives or later settlers, and was not built by Bronze Age Europeans. (Source)

Mystery Hill Tourist Attraction

The official website of the America's Stonehenge tourist attraction states that:

"Unfortunately, the original builders of America's Stonehenge remain unknown. While we do know that early construction happened here about 4,000 years ago, no diagnostic artifacts from that time have been discovered. The earliest diagnostic artifacts, attributed to the Pawtucket people, are dated to about 2,000 years ago. Similarities to megalithic structures in Europe, as well as the discovery of possible Old World inscriptions, has led some researchers to believe that there may be a connection between this site and ancient Western European or Mediterranean cultures. In the ongoing research of this site, we strive to keep an open mind. Before forming any conclusions about the origins of this site, it is important to follow where the evidence leads. Hopefully, with continued study, we can reveal who actually built these structures and what culture or cultures used the site over its thousands of years of history."

We must point out that diggings at the sie have discovered many Native American objects including a dugout canoe, a teepee, stone tools and ceramics, but no Celtic, Irish or Phoenician or Carthaginian artifacts, except for the "inscribed stone" the Baal Stone discovered in 1975 and deciphered by Fell. Pictured below:

Baal Stone. Source

It has what appears to be chiseled lines on it, in a random and disorganized way. Not a neat inscription or glyphs. Fell says it reads: "To Baal on behalf of the Canaanites this is dedicated." (Source).

This website has a list of the astronomical alignments mentioned for this site, and also includes pictures of the place.

Finally, there is a paper online that mentions a blue-light beams spotted at the American Stonehenge site common to all stonehenge-type buildings as well as pyramids. But they are not ghosts but "Manitou" that "can perhaps be categorized as signals generated by geophysical events... the equivalent modern descriptor would be that there are no “ghosts", or haunted houses, or TV's which tip over by their influence —there is only causative electromagnetic field!" (see Edward and Roger McLeod, 2001, America's Stonehenge, (A.S.), As a Prototype For Expected Phenomena At "The" Stonehenge, and Also For Psychophysical Events and Native American "Manitou."). The McLeods also mention this site regarding "Stellar Gravitational Neutrino Interactions (see their 2009 abstract online). The title may sound like real physics, but it seems to be nonsense. They report that neutrino flux from stars and quasars pass through the Earth (up to here it is true) and as they "cannot penetrate these graviton-like strings. They ... project... stick figures within instruments like the Watch House at America’s Stonehenge, and perhaps the chamber beneath the Great Pyramid..." I would have tended to agree with geophysical processes that form lights in the sky (see my posts about earthquake lights), but neutrinos somehow focused by quantum particles in certain ancient structures is beyond science.

Closing comments

I stand by the findings of a serious research article by Feathers et al, 2022 (Luminescence dating of Enigmatic rock structures in New England, USA, Quaternary Geochronology, Nov. 2022, 101402, Vol 73, doi 10.1016/j.quageo.2022.101402): "Enigmatic rock structures in the form of walls, chambers, tunnels, and cairns are common archaeological features in northeastern United States, but the age of their construction is mostly unknown. Debate persists as to whether they are colonial or pre-colonial in age. Luminescence dating ... place their construction in the late 16th century, just before sustained colonial settlement... The evidence suggests a pre-colonial construction, by ancestors of modern native Americans." Clear and simple, nobody came from Phoenicia, Carthage or Ireland, these structures were built by local Native Americans.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Neanderthals treated a tooth cavity 59,000 years ago

Although this post has nothing to do with the main theme of my blog, I decided to include it because it gives us a glimpse of the intelligence and humanity of Neanderthals. They were not lumbering semi-human brutes. They were human beings, just like us, with a brain and a mind similar to ours. In this post I will comment about a very recent publication about how a Neanderthal from the Chagyrskaya site in the Altai region of Siberia 59,000 years ago, perforated a molar to relieve the pain caused by a caries. The oldest example of dentistry on record.

The paper is the following: Zubova AV, Zotkina LV, Olsen JW, Kulkov AM, Moiseyev VG, Malyutina AA, et al. (2026) Earliest evidence for invasive mitigation of dental caries by Neanderthals. PLoS One 21(5): e0347662. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347662

Over the years, there have been studies (the links lead to the research that backs these statements) that suggest that the Neanderthal buried their dead, and took care of their elders and injured companions, disabled (Down syndrome) and, mended those that were sick. This implies some kind of elevated mental function, and compassion.

In this paper the authors analyzed a molar (one located on the lower left side of the mouth) which had a large man-made hole bored into it (see image) this hole was made while the individual was alive, and the person survived after it was done. It was perforated by using a stone "perforator" that drilled or rotated against the enamel of the tooth to reach the inner pulp and relieve the pain caused by the caries with "severe pulp exposure." This procedure was done without any type of anesthesia, and would have taken (based on the experiments conducted by the researchers) between 10 minutes and two and a half hours, but they point out that "the individual would have had little choice: remove the dentin or face potentially fatal consequences."

Fig 2. Chagyrskaya 64 molar tooth and its macro-features. 1 General view of the tooth in five projections; a–c. Macro-photographs of the crown’s occlusal surface features: a. superior view of the concavity; b. stepped groove on the concavity’s wall; .
From Zubova et al., 2026

The authors point out that the procedure required "... two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements, indicates that the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthals possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention. These patterns bring Neanderthal behavior closer to modern humans and differentiate that behavior from the instinctive actions of other primates."

Interestingly, the enamel thickness on Neanderthal teeth is thinner than in human teeth, meaning that it is easier to perforate it and reach the pulp than in modern humans. The edges and walls of the perforation are smooth and rounded suggesting that the individual was alive during the procedure and that lived after it, using the tooth. The authors wondered if the hole had been filled with wax, resin, bitumen, tree sap or antiseptic herbs to serve as painkillers but a Raman spectroscopical test did not reveal the presence of other materials.

Yes, it must have been a painful intervention, and the aftermath was also painful as it resulted in " complete pulp exposure. On the one hand, this could have caused pain for some time; on the other hand, pulp exposure would have accelerated nerve destruction, after which the pain should have disappeared." Was it done by chance? or did these people know how to treat a caries?

The paper concludes that this molar "offers new insights into Neanderthal self-regulation, revealing their capacity for deliberate, sustained actions that required enduring pain – a behavior not documented in other higher primates, which typically rely on instinctive responses. While genetic evidence confirms that Neanderthals exhibited heightened pain sensitivity compared to Homo sapiens, their ability to engage in goal-directed behaviors involving pain tolerance suggests advanced volitional control. It can be argued, therefore, that Neanderthals exhibited volitional strategic goal-setting behaviors that may have aligned more closely with those of Homo sapiens than with non-human primates... challenging traditional distinctions in cognitive archaeology between anatomically archaic and modern members of Homo sapiens and highlighting their shared legacy of biological and cultural adaptations."

Closing Comments

Neanderthal were smart, compassionate, and human. By the way, the earliest Homo sapiens dental intervention discovered to date was in an individual from 14,160 to 13,820 years ago, who lived in Ripari Villabruna in Italy. This person shows evidence of enamel scraping on a caries more of a toothpicking procedure rather than a drilling one.

One can hardly imagine the pain suffered by countless generations of human beings before the discovery of analgesics and anesthesia. We are fortunate to live in the present time! I recall the scene in the movie "Castaway" (2000) where Tom Hanks, stranded on a desert island, in terrible pain due to an untreated toothache that he had prior to his trip that led him to the island, does away with the tooth using a rock as a hammer and the blade of an ice skate as a chisel, passing out after the procedure.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

2011 Neanderthal sightings in Kemerovo Siberia

Iwas watching a program on History channel that offered different explanations for the Himalayan Yeti (abominable snowman) such as its a bear, its a relict Gigantopithecus ape, its the footprints of deformed human feet, its imagination (Brocken spectre, pareidolia, or a shadow person), and finally, it mentioned some sightings of extant Neanderthals reported in the Kemerovo region of Siberia around 2011-2012, and investigated by Russian scholars. Which is indeed a new alternative,in line with what I have written about on the ancient Patagonian myths of "wild men" (sightings of surviving ancestral hominins in America). For these reasons, I decided to post about it, and look into these sightings and the scientists and organizations that are studying them.

The Kemerovo Sightings

An article published online in 2011 mentions a spike in sightings of the abominable snowman in Siberia in the Kemerovo region noting that it is 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from Moscow, and neighboring Altai (a place where Denisovans and Neanderthals lived for several hundreds of thousands of years, and overlapped there, admixing).

The article mentions an "International Centre of Hominology in Tashtagol, and cites its head, Igor Burtsev (his name was also cited in the History Channel documentary). Burtsey stated that: "When Homo sapiens started populating the world, it viciously exterminated its closest relative in the hominid family, Homo neanderthalensis. Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes."

Kemerovo is indeed close to Altai (see Google map), roughly 580 km (360 mi) north of the famous Denisova Cave.

Another article describes the sightings: one took place near a village called Misky (see map), where a fisherman called Vitaly Vershinin, who was sailing up the river, saw what he believed to be two people with a bear-like appearance drinking by a river, but when they saw him, they stood up, and walked away, so did he. The man, took a TV crew to the spot, and added that ""they just rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making way through the bushes with two other limbs, straight up the hill, right there."

Some "yeti" hairs were found by an expedition in Kemerovo conducted by Burtsev the previous year (2011), who said that despite the violent interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals "Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes. No clothing on them, no tools in hands and no fire in the household. Only round-the-clock watchfulness for a Homo sapiens around." I disagree. Neanderthals were sophisticated people, they knew how to make specializeds stone tools, dominated the art of firemaking, and fashioned clothes to protect themselves from the harsh Ice Age climate during the period they thrived in Eurasia, for several hundreds of thousands of years.

I posted about these sightings in 2011 and was looking forward to the outcome of the DNA tests of the tufts of hair recovered in Kemerovo. But these were never disclosed.

The article continues, and also mentions that "Sightings of the creatures in the region have increased three-fold over the past 20 years, prompting scientists at Moscow's Darwin Museum to speculate that there may be a small population of these creatures." (Neanderthals).

Another sighting took place in January 2013 (Source) when a state inspector spotted a yeti in the Shorsky National Park in the Tashtagolski district (see map). A local official, Sergei Adlyakov, said that it didn't look like a bear and vanished in the forest snapping branches off the bushes as it fled.

The final report of an encounter with yetis took plaxe in Kuzbass, when men on a boat navigating the Mras-Su River (see map) spotted, on a rock above the river, "some tall animals looking like people. Our binoculars were broken and did not let us see them sharply. We waved at the animals but they did not respond, then quickly ran back into the forest, walking on two legs."

A 2014 post quotes Igor Burtsev as affirming that "there is an active population of about 30 of the creatures living in the Kemerovo (the region of Mount Shoria) in Siberia to this day"

The "Yeti Expert"

Who is Igor Burtsev? and what is the International Centre of Hominology?

Burtsev is co-author of a research paper about a wild woman that was captured in a forest in the Caucasus (Margaryan A, Sinding MS, Carø C, Yamshchikov V, Burtsev I, Gilbert MTP. The genomic origin of Zana of Abkhazia. Adv Genet (Hoboken). 2021 Jun 14;2(2):e10051. doi: 10.1002/ggn2.10051. PMID: 36618122; PMCID: PMC9744565), in the paper he is credited as affiliated to the " International Center of Hominology, State Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia." This museum is a serious institution (website).

The paper cites some refrences authored by Burtsev:

• Bourtsev I. A Skeleton Still Buried and a Skull Unearthed: the Story of Zana. In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, Crypto‐Logos Publishers 1996;46–52.
• Burtsev I. Relict Hominoid Research Seminar. 1987.
• Burtsev I. Moscow Naturalists' Society. 1987.

Burtsev has appeared in some episodes of documentaries about cryptozoology (Cascade Bigfoot Blood Mystery, 2022, and in The Proof is Out There, 2025: Bigfoot Car Chase, Airport UFO, and High School Football Ghost, S.5;Ep. 12 and Siberian Yeti, Amazonian Alien Researcher, and Japanese Wolves Resurrected, S.5; Ep. 14.

A Russian language article states that Burtsev holds a History pHD, but then quotes him as supporting the weird theory put forward by Dr. Melba Ketchum (see my 2012 post about this quack story), who analyzed the DNA of North American samples of Bigfoots. Burtsev says that " It's been absolutely certain that the creature wasn't related to Neanderthals or Denisovans... Besides, 15,000 years ago, representatives of these human species had already disappeared from the face of the Earth—they went extinct... I don't rule out a hypothesis that might seem completely fantastic. Aliens who visited Earth could have been involved in the hybridization. Very unusual DNA was found in the samples analyzed in the United States." When UFOs and aliens are combined in a story involving Bigfoot, it becomes pseudoscience, and therefore placed in the same category as astrology, flat earth, creation science, Bermuda Triangle and similar nonsense.

I found his bio on the ICH website (more on ICH further down):

"Igor Burtsev, born in 1940, candidate of historical sciences, publisher, president of the Cryptosphere Fund for furthering scientific searches and explorations, director of the International Center of Hominology. Engaged in this investigation since 1965, participant and leader of many searching expeditions – in the North Caucasus (Kabardino-Balkaria, 1965), Azerbajan (Talysh, 1970-75), Abkhazia (1971, 1975, 1978, 2004, 2008), Mongolia (1976), Pamiro-Alai (1979-82), the Murmansk Region (Lovozero Lake, 1990); participant of investigations near St. Petersburg (1989, 2009) and in the Kirov Region (2002-2007), in the Novgorod, Tver’, Tula, Krasnodar regions (2009), in the Mountaneus Shoria, Siberia (2009-10). Since 1971 devoted several years to the study of the Patterson film. Author and co-author of many publications in the popular scientific magazines and in newspapers. In the fall of 2004 spent five weeks in Tennessee, USA, investigating reports of bigfoots visiting the Carter Farm. In 2006 visited the New York University concerning the analysis of the skulls excavated in Abkhasia."

International Centre of Hominology or ICH

Burtsev in collaboration with Bayanov (more on him below) created the International Center of Hominology in Moscow in 2003 (Source). Both are pictured below.

The ICH is listed in the Union of International Associations (link here) as a civil entity.

The UIA gives a website address for the ICH: https://hominology.narod.ru/eng.htm which is offline, however, the website can be seen in archive.org (a great tool, it has captured and saved one trillion web pages!), below is a screenshot of ICH's website as it looked back in 2013, when it was active.

ICH website in 2013, archive.org, Internet Archive Wayback Machine

ICH has a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hominology which is currently active.

More on the Eurasian Hominoids

An interesting thesis exploring Soviet science and Darwinism touches the subject of hominoids and the Yeti. It mentions that these scholars believed that the Yeti was a missing link, a relict hominoid, but which one, was an open discussion. somt thought it was related to apes, like the gigantopithcus, while others like Boris Porshnev supported a hominin like the Homo erectus or a Neanderthal, and Petr Smolin thought it was an australopitecine. After deep studies of physical evidence, Porshnev "concluded that Yeti and Neanderthal shared too many traits to be incidental" yet the Yeti was an animal, it degenerated from the intelligent Neanderthal in a backward evolution. This seems to explain why Burtsev suggests that the Neanderthals in Siberia don't make stone tools, don't wear clothes or don't light fires, they are a reversion to an animal form, yet shaped like humans.

In my search about these Siberian sightings, I also came across the work of Dimitri Bayanov, who is the Science Director in the International Centre of Hominology. He is credited with coining the term "hominology" as the study of "hairy bipeds" like bigfoot, almasty, and yeti. For over 30 years he has headed the Smolin seminar focused on hominology at the Darwin Museum in Moscow.

In his essay, Bayanov Historical Evidence for the Existence of Relict Hominoids (The Relict Hominoid Inquiry 1:23-50, 2012) where he addresses the issue of which hominin has survived and embodies the current hominoids sighted in Eurasia:

"One final relevant question: How to correlate relict hominoids with the fossil record of paleoanthropology? According to Krantz (1980), Neanderthals had more traits in common with Homo erectus than with Homo sapiens, so that they “could all be classed with erectus.” He also wrote: “Homo erectus existed for over a million years with relatively little change – a kind of evolutionary plateau – and then was transformed rather quickly into Homo sapiens” (Krantz, 1980). Could it be that today’s wild bipedal homins are relicts of that evolutionary “standstill,” which lasted long enough for them to penetrate and settle the Old World before the advent of Homo sapiens? Adapting to local environments, these pre-sapiens must have more or less departed in their physique from the fossil erectus-grade forms presently known to science. I therefore propose that homins reported in central Eurasia are relicts of the Homo erectus-Neanderthal stage of evolution."

Closing Comments

The idea that surviving Neanderthals, Denisovans, or even Homo erectus have inspired the stories of wild men, or similar hominoids is exciting. It is extremely unlikely yet possible that in the vast wilderness of the Siberian hinterland there are a handful of our ancestors still living in the stone age. The same could apply to South America, or North America. But we need serious science to sift facts from pseudoscientific rubbish (like alien hybrids and similar nonsense).

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Newberry Tablet - Minoan script in the Great Lakes

In post on Jewell and Fell's theory about Minoan presence in America, engaging in copper trade between the Levant and the Great Lakes, I mentioned the Newberry Tablet as evidence put forward by them to back their theory. This post will look at the tablet with a critical eye.

Did it ever exist?

As you can verify by googling the phrase "Newberry Tablet", there are no formal, serious, scientific articles about this artifact. There are some newspaper articles, a few blog posts, and one "paper" (if we can call it that), discussing the characters. All of them reproduce the same image of the tablet, shown below, supposedly a picture taken by the Smithsonian Institution, or taken in Michigan and sent to the Smithsonian in 1896:

Photograph of the Newberry Tablet. Source

The tablet's fate is not quite clear, some sources say it crumbled into dust (it was a clay tablet) as it was not properly preserved or treated, another, posted by the museum in St. Ignace, Michigan, that houses it, shows a deteriorated piece of brown clay asserting that it is what remains of the tablet. See the image below:

Newberry Tablet nowadays. Source

The photograph and the the clay tablet look very different from each other. Are they the same object?

The story behind the Tablet

The museum's post adds that "The Newberry Tablet is shrouded in mystery. The tablet was discovered in the 1890s under a tree in a farmer’s field. Since its discovery, it has ignited imagination and debate about its origins and its meaning. Despite the long-held belief that the tablet is fake, new research is being conducted testing the theory that it was left by an ancient group of people called Minoans. So, is it an ancient relic left behind by Minoan explorers or a clever hoax? You decide."

A local newspaper published an article about it in 2015 which states that the tablet measured 19 by 26 inches (48 x 66 cm) and had a grid with 140 squares that contained symbols of some unknwon language.

It was discovered in 1896 when two loggers were felling trees on a plot of land close to the town of Newberry, Michigan, USA (See the spot in Google Maps). They discovered the tablet and two clay figures next to it (McGruer's Idols). They were tangled in the roots of an old tree (perhaps as some proof of their great antiquity). As nobody understood the symbols, they were photographed and the pictures were sent to scholars at the University of Michigan and the Smithsonian in Washington. The tablet was dismissed as a forgery, a hoax, quite common at that time when mound-diggers produced many inscribed objects to sell them at a profit.

They were kept in town until they were bought by Henry Vaughan Norton and moved 60 miles away to the town of St. Ignace, on the Straits of Mackinac and exhibited as an attraction at a tourist site owned by Norton, called Fort Algonquin. He opened it in 1926 (Source) and ran it until the mid 1950s. Its remains can still be seen (Google Maps), below is an old postcard.

Norton died in the 1980s, and according to the story, the tablet was acquired by Dr. Donald Benson (1924-2005). Benson, a local orthodontist founded the Fort de Buade Museum around that time (1980s) and housed it in a building he owned, which he had purchased for his AM radio station in the mid 1960s, and shut down in 1979. Benson stocked the museum with ihis personal collection of local historic artifacts. After Benson's death in 2005 the Michilimackinac Historical Society took it over. (see this source and this one).

The online posts (see this one as an example) embrace Jewell and Fell's theory and hint that the inscription is probably Minoan, but show some skepticism: "One theory is they have to be a hoax because if they are supposed to be hundreds or even thousands of years old, from the time of the Minoans, how did they survive for so long only to be eroded away in a short amount of time after they were discovered. Like I wrote at the beginning of the post, I am not sure it is real or a hoax, but it is an interesting story."

Another blog, Archaeological Fantasies (Occam's Trowel, Sifting archaeological fringe to get to archaeological fact), has an objective post that dismisses the tablet as a hoax, and summarizes the story, along the lines I gave further up, and concludes with a sober disqualification of the tablet:

"What we can say for sure is that the tablet is not Minoan, Hittite, or any of the other cultures it’s supposed to be written by. Since it’s not any of those cultures, there is no way it could be translated. So any claims that the Tablet proves contact with Pre-Columbian peoples is not valid.
It is my opinion that the Tablet in the Museum is not the same Tablet as the one in the pictures from 1898. I base this on the images as they have been provided. It’s not the best way to evaluate them, I admit that, which is why this is my opinion on the matter and not a fact of any kind. If evidence comes to light that can prove the Tablet’s existence and location over the 60+ year gap between photographing and being purchased by Dr. Donald Benson, then I would re-evaluate my position.
With all of that, I must declare this Tablet a hoax. Neither the facts about the Tablet, nor the speculation is convincing enough to say otherwise.".

Nevertheless, an article (Mormonism’s Encounter with the Michigan Relics by Mark Ashurst-McGee while accepting that another set of articles (the Scotford artifacts) are forgeries, and a hoax, has a different approach regarding the Newberry stone and accompanying figures: "The inscribed stone, discovered in 1896 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, does not fit within the spatio-temporal context of the Scotford scheme. Scotford worked in the state’s main land mass. Except for the first phase of the hoax, which was very localized, Scotford’s work took place after 1896. The Newberry tablet bears only a superficial resemblance to the Scotford-Soper artifacts. Figurines of the Newberry type are without parallel among Scotford’s known productions." Of course, it does not state whether the tablet and the figures are genuine or fakes.

Not the only Tablet

My research uncovered a new fact, there was another tablet discovered in the same region at roughly the same time! Such coincidences are so improbable, that they mean that the artifacts are hoaxes or, a naturally occuring phenomenon that were interpreted as a manmade objects. The latter may well be a good explanation for these tablets.

This is the story: The Newberry tablet was not the first one to be discovered in St. Ignace. Apparently in 1892 (one year before the Chicago World Fair, another tablet was unearthed while digging a ditch at the St. Ignace Court House, where the future office of A. J. Gennell, county clerk, would be later built (Source), the following article published in a local newspaper at that time, describes the event:

The facts tie in with this information: In 1883 Alfred J. Gennell owned a grocery and general store, he was born on Mackinack Island in 1844, and moved to St. Ignace in 1881, (Source), he later became a Public Notary, Real Estate Dealer and city clerk (1888 to 1906). He passed in 1935.

This second tablet existed, and was reported by the Smithsonian Institution on page 180 of its 1914 Report on the progress and condition of the United States National Museum for the year ending June 30, 1914 pictured, and titled "GENNELL, A. J., St. Ignace, Mich.: Fragment of limestone with natural markings resembling ornamental designs. (55998)" This is a list of "List of Acceessions to the Collection During the Fiscal Year 1913-1914." This means that a piece of the tablet was sent to the Smithsonian, accepted, and added to its collection. However, note that the description says "natural markings resembling ornamental designs." The piece of sandstone was not manmade, it had natural inscriptions that resembled symbols. The Smithsonian received the sample of the tablet in 1914, roughly twenty years after the stone was discovered.

McGruer's Idols

One of the versions about how the tablet was found says that it was unearthed on the McGruer farm, located close to Newberry, with the stone idols also known as McGruer'

I searched for John McGruer on ancestry.com, and came up with his bio: "John McGruer was born on February 12, 1858, in Canada. He married Catherine (Kate) McMillan in 1883. They had one child during their marriage. He died on May 20, 1917, in Newberry, Michigan, at the age of 59." He was a pioneer, and also operated timber business, the Tahquamenon Logging Museum preserved his homestead house, which can be seen on their website in a picture, it has a sign that reads "McGruer House" on it. The place is 2 km (1.3 mi) north of Newberry (Google map) on the south bank of the Tahquamenon River.

The figures are on exhibition in St. Ignace with the remains of the tablet. Pictured below in color, and a black and white picture supposedly from the Smithsonian. The images came from this source and this one.

In a book titled This Land: America 2,000 B. C. to 500 A. D., by May, W. N. (2012), you can read about the tablet and the figures, which are not made of clay, but of stone! It cites a local Newberry newspaper article as follows (my comments in brackets):

"Jacob Brown and George Rove, both residents of Newberry were looking for deer, and in the course of their hunting, startled a mink, which made for a swamp nearby and took refuge in a hollow stump. In digging under one side of the stump to get at the mink, they struck stone which bore evidences of the handwork of man. Becoming interested, they secured picks and spades, and unearthed the stones. As a result of their labors, thre stone images were uncovered, also a large stone tablet. All four objects were cut from brown sandstone, the rock probably coming from the northeastward where the pictured rocks, great cliffs of sandstone, worn by the wind and wave into fantastic forms frown for many miles upon the blue waters of the great lake [learn more about these cliffs]. Of the three images, the largest is that of a man in a sitting posture, nearly life size. This statue is on a pedestal formed from the same piece of stone. The second image, from point of size, is that of a woman, and is a trifle under three feet in height [90 cm], while the third is an image of a child, and like the man, is postured in a sitting attitude and is about two feet high [60 cm]. All three of the images were found placed with faces towards the east, which may have been accidental, but more probably intentional, and this points strongly to sun worship...
Near these figures was found a slab of brownstone averaging six inches [15 cm] in thickness and eighteen by twentyfive inches on each face.
One side was smoothed as carefully as the coarse structure of the rock had allowed, while upon the other face were engraved a series of inscriptions each set in a square of approximately one and a half inches, there being 140 of these."

The description of the tablet coincides with what I have mentioned further up, but this source states that the tablet was made of sandstone, not clay. Yet Betty J. Sodders (1928-2018) in the paper mentioned further down in the next section, after stating that together, the statues weighed almost 1,000 pounds (453 kg) and made from pinkish clay adding, that the initial reports said they were made of brownstone (Sodders, B, p. 24).

Very few "Serious" articles about the Tablet

Betty Sodders lived in St. Ignace, and was an amateur historian, she wrote about the tablet in her 1990 book Michigan Prehistory Mysteries, and according to online forums, she wrote to Mrs. Benson about sending the clay tablet to California to be radiocarbon dated, but the results were never published. She also wrote a paper: Betty Sodders, McGruer’s Gods and the Newberry Stone, The Ancient American 1 (March-April 1994): 24–26.

Another paper was written by Dr. Minas Tsikritsis in 2024, who is a school professor of informatics who is interested in Aegean scripts, based in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, his article is titled The Newberry Stone, ESOP, The Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers · Volume 30 p.220. (it can be read online). In his paper, Tsikritsis attempts to identify the script, concluding that it may not be a forgery:

"The Newberry Tablet is a unique artifact... Consequently, cannot be attempted a replacement of the symbols with possible phonetic values, which have been attributed in table 1, since only the 24 out of 39 symbols are similar to the cyprominoan script. Since the remaining 15 cannot be recognized, the subject of reading and interpreting the inscription still remains open. Nevertheless, the replacement of the symbols that have great resemblance to the symbols of the Cypriot-Minoan script, gives us words that are actually names of people who come from the region Kamiros ofRhodes and they are mentioned as ka-mi-ri-ta-wi.
Probably the inscription was written between the 12th and the 8th century BC and its symbols were influenced by the Cypriot-Minoan script. A percentage of 25% approx of its symbols has to be a local creation. The modification of a syllabic system in another region is a known phenomenon. A similar case was the case of Cypriot-Minoan script (1650-1050 BC) that was based on Linear A (1800-1530 BC). We should also note that the horizontal and vertical lines of the Newberry Stone is a characteristic not found in other script artifacts of the Cypriot-Minoan writing system. Regarding the authenticity of the tablet, we may argue that the Stone is probably not counterfeit, because it could not have so many Cypriot-Minoan symbols, since by the time that Newberry tablet was found —in 1896— the symbols of the Cypriot-Minoan script had not been found yet. The first symbols of Cypro-Minoan were found on two cylinder seals found in 1875 in Cyprus but did not receive publicity until 1957. These seals were bearing 5 and 4 symbols Cypriot-Minoan script respectively. Two of symbols found on the seals exist also in the Newberry stone tablet"

Closing Comments

Interesting story, very likely a hoax, well done, but a hoax or, people believing that a natural sandstone bears manmade inscriptions. The idols or gods seem to confirm the artifacts are fakes. I don't think that Minoans reached the Great Lakes and left some tablet and idols hidden in a lost river in the middle of nowhere.

Some blogs and other sources

There is a blog, Noahs age that deals with this artifact, and includes texts, translations, interpretations, and wild theories about comets!

Up North Michigan mentions the tablet.

Another blog, archaeological fantasies.

Charles Sprague Taylor, 1991, Tahquamenon Country: A Look at Its Past. page 113

C. Fred Rydholm, 2006, Michigan Copper, the Untold Story: A History of Discovery. page 123

Mertz, Henriette, 1964, The Wine Dark Sea: Homer's Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic. United States: Mertz. page 131.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall © 

Minoans in America

Not long ago, I wrote a post about the Native Americans from the Great Lakes region of U.S.A., who mined native copper and used it for practical and ornamental artifacts (axes, jewels, spear heads, etc). For over 5,000 years different tribes operated this mining, processing, and trading emporium across North America.

However, some authors have suggested that the copper was extracted by Mediterranean people (i.e. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, or Minoans). In today's post we will look into some of these wild theories.

Minoans and copper trade, Jewell's theory

In his book, published in 2000, "Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America", Roger L. Jewell gives his support to the Minoan discovery of America and their use of the native copper mines in Lake Superior. The name "Kitchi-Gummi" is the the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) name for Lake Superior

Mainstream scientists agree that the copper was not only used locally but also traded across North America. Some of the metal artifacts were buried in graves, other pieces were lost, and, following the discovery of America, most Native objects were taken (looted, stolen) and melted down for other uses. However, Jewell argues that the natives couldn't have dug 5,000 separate mines 4,500 years ago or consumed the 20 to 50 million pounds (9,000 MT to 22,000 MT) of pure copper that were extracted from these mines.

But, according to Wilband, 1978 the figure is even higer than the one given by Jewell: "500 million pounds to perhaps more than one billion pounds" citing: Drier, R. W., and Du Temple, 1961, Prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region. Published privately by the authors.

Though the figure may seem large, it adds up to 227,000 to 554,000 MT. To grasp it, its volume is roughly 25,000 to 50,000 cubic meters, or 883,000 to 1,766,000 cu. ft. Averaged over, say, 5,000 years of mining it isn't much: 5 m³ or 17.6 cu.ft. of pure copper per year. This was traded across the continent and widely dispersed.

As I haven't bought the book, I will simply summarize the arguments put forward by the author in his book's overview, and on its website, as well as information I came across on online forums. All of them agree, and sound quite serious, but, in fact they don't add up to support the Minoan connection with America.

Overview of the theory

The copper mines are located in the Isle Royal region of Lake Superior in Michigan, USA (Google maps). They were operated by Native Americans who were managed by European people on how to extract the copper. These Europeans then loaded their ships with the copper and sailing east, along the Great Lakes, and the -Saint Lawrence River, crossed the North Atlantic and took the copper to Spain where they smelted it. The copper ingots were then traded across the Mediterranean by Minoans from Crete or merchants based in Cyprus, who sold it to the Egyptians. All of this is said to have taken place around 4000 BC. (perhaps too early in my opinion, regarding the Minoan Culture on Crete.

Dolmens

As evidence, Jewell says these mines in Michingan have been dated to 4000 BC by radiocarbon methods. He adds that European culture can be seen in the region because there are dolmens on the shores of Lake Superior. Dolmens are megalithic (large-stone) structures common in bronze-age Europe 3,000 to 4,000 years BC. A dolmen generally consists of two or more upright slabs supporting a flat slab layed across them. They are table-like structures. Jewell adds that some of these dolmens are inscribed with the word "BAAL", the name of a Semitic god (from Phoenicia and Canaan) —which seems strange if the miners are Minoan or Cypriot! The script used to write the word is Ogham, another oddity because it is much more recent, from the Irish Middle Ages.

Below are some European Dolmens, they are structures that a person can enter, and stand inside. Their appearance is very different from the "dolmen" of Lake Superior pictured futher down, which is resting on some big boulders, not on tall slabs.

European dolmens.

The "dolmen" at Sawbill, Michigan:

Sawbill Dolmen stones near Lake Lujenida. Photo by Gary Meinz. Source

The supposed Dolmen is interesting, but I don't see the need to link it with Minoans. The picture above forms part of an article that states that dolmens "are commonly found in the Eastern United States. It is believed that this dolmen is the only one in Minnesota. The Dolmen measures approximately 4 feet high by 6 feet wide and seems to be oriented to the sunrise at the Summer Solstice. It has been speculated that this Dolmen may have been used to observe planetary/star movements, or as a worship area marking changes in the seasons".

Interesting speculatin, but notice the phrasing "it seems" so it isn't a fact that the boulder points towards the summer solstice. In my opinion is it not man-made, it is an erratic boulder (see this article, with a picture of a similar looking natural dolmen in Austwick, England). Erratic boulders are large stones hewn by glaciers and transported on the ice sheet for hundreds of miles and deposited when the ice melted.

Newberry tablet

Jewell adds further evidence in the shape of the Newberry Tablet (my next post will deal with it), a clay tablet inscribed with "proto-minoan script" and the clay figures knwon as McGruer's God's; all of which were discovered in 1896 along the Tahquamenon River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. They are said to be the work of Minoans who visited the region.

The Sutton Deed signatures

Jewell also noted that the first English settlers (in fact they lived in Sutton, Massachusetts, which by the way, is very far from Lake Superior) purchased their land from the Native American Algonquian-speakig tribes, who signed the deed in 1681/2 using Basque language symbols (Basques live in Spain, hence the connection Spain-Basques-Cree-Lake Superior). He also points out that a treaty signed in 1727 between English and Native Americans had 32 Cypriot symbols used by the native chiefs as their signatures. The blending of Basques, Cree alphabet, and Cypriot symbols seems complicated and confusing. Below is a summary on how these elements are supposed to support the Minoan-Great Lakes connection.

I found an interesting 46-year-old article (Sutton Historical Society, Sutton, Massachusetts, 1704... and Before That, Bulletin, Vol 6, No. 4, Dec. 1980) that tells this same story, as reported by Barry Fell, an epigraphist in his book published in the late 1970s (America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World).

According to Fell, who uses linguistics to support his wild claims, the Celts of Gaul and the British Isles who used Ogham script, reached New England and left inscriptions in rocks there. Carthaginians travelled with Celts (and also left inscriptions). Phoenicians and Egyptians joined in the trade with America and finally, Basque sailors came too. He left the Minoans out of his theory.

But, let's go back to Sutton, which is linked to Jewell and his copper trade theory. The native Nipmuck Indians, who were Algonquian, used Cree syllabic script, an original alphabet. It seems that in the early 1800s, missionaries learned about the existence of an ancient native "Cree" scripts, and used them to christianize the Indians. One of these missionaries, Rev. James Evans (1801-1846) even printed religious texts using it.

But, this nice story ignores the fact that the Cree didn't have a pre-Columbian writing system. Their symbols appeared after their contact with Europeans. There are two versions about who created the Cree script. One version is that, at first, Reverend Evans tried to use Latin characters to express the native language, but when that failed, he implemented a syllabic script inspired on the symbols used for the Cherokee language (devised by Sequoyah). Evans used special symbols that he designed for the Cree language. The other version differs, and states that the Cree invented the language themselves before the missionaries arrived.

Interestingly, Sequoyah was born in Tennessee, ca. 1770, the son af a white man, Nahtaniel Gist, and a Cherokee woman. His father abandoned them when Sequoyah was a child. He became a silversmith and blacksmith, and was a good artist. He also devised a written alphabet for the Cherokee language which he finished in 1821. He moved to Arkansas in 1818 and in 1828, he explored the lands in Oklahoma that the Federal government would give the Cherokee in exchange for their territories east of the Mississippi. He lived in what is now Sequoyah (a village on Route 66) in Oklahoma and died in in 1843 during an expedition. His is the first and only case of somebody who never learned to read or write and created on his own a new written language. (The image shows Sequoyah. It is a lithograph from the portrait painted by Charles Bird King in 1828. He is pointing at the script he invented).

Going back to the Cree script, the second version, the one involving a Cree myth, says that it was handed down by the spirits to a chief called Calling Badger, a man who returned from death, and wrote the symbols on a scroll of birch bark c.1830. These were then adopted by Evans. Neither story mentions a pre-Columbian origin, or Minoans.

Further reading: See this source for a serious explantion of the development of the Cree script.

Barry Fell, in his explanation of the Sutton deeds, jumps to Spain, and asserts that some inscriptions from Basque stone tablets in Spain, that predated Columbus, were sent to him for study, and he noticed they had lines of symbols identical to the Cree ones. Using the Cree "sounds" or phonemes (as a sillabic language, each Cree symbol is linked to a syllable) for these symbols, the language of the inscriptions turned out to be Basque. So ancient Basque inscriptions had been written in Cree-Algonquian script.

Fell added that the Sutton land deed was signed by natives using two types of alphabets, those native chiefs who had been educated in the New England schools used English (Latin) letters for their names while others used the Cree script (or mamalohikan) which Fell says uses ancient Cypriot alphabet letters, only deciphered in 1871, much later than the land deed.

This version contradicts the "Evans origin" of Cree symbols c.1840, and the Cree myth of Calling Badger inventing it in 1830. The Sutton deeds and the Basque inscriptions are theoretically much older and employed Cypriot characters!

Finally, Fell also noted the 1727 treaty signed at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Canada had 32 Cypriot symbols. The Cypriot alphabet died out in Europe around the third century BC, during the days of Alexander the Great meaning that it had to reach America before that date.

So, some Canadian Indians used a script invented in Cyprus over 2,300 years ago, while others used one used by Basques prior to 1492. Confusing indeed! Seems scientific, but it hogwash.

The image above, from the Cree Language Grammar book written by John Horden in 1881 clearly states that "The Indians possess no written characters of their own, and their only mode of communicating with each other, except verbally, before they received instruction from European Missionaries, was by means of rude hieroglyphic symbols. They are now In possession of a "syllabic system"." So you can choose, the pro-native version that does not accept that the script was created by the invading "white Europeans" and imposed on an inferior race of natives, or the more politically correct version that the Cree people invented it themselves shortly before the arrival of the missionaries, inspired by their ancestral spirits.

Jewell's arguments, a Summary

Jewell's website (see it on archive.org) provides snippets of the main arguments that according to his book, support the presence of Minoan-Phoenician-Carthaginian-Basque traders in the Great Lakes region:

• The copper mines are far too old. He argues that they dates are "much older than would be expected" ranging from 2470 BC to 1050 BC. Stating that at that time there were "No developed cultures were here to use the copper." These people were hunter-gatherers. I can't imagine why he supposes that the Native Americans were not capable of mining and using native copper, which is almost pure. They used it to make tools, ornaments and traded it with other native groups. No Minoans needed for this.
• Where did all the Copper go? Arguing that it was shipped to Europe and Egypt because "the copper is missing" and can't be found in America. This overlooks the fact that it was traded all the way to Mexico, a lot of it was interred, placed in tombs and graves, and lost. Since corrosion affects copper, some of the artifacts must have disintegrated. Plenty of copper was looted and smelted by European settlers after their arrival in the mid 1500s.
• Scripts and Texts. There is evidence of other scripts like the Newuberry Tablet which is said to be written in "an ancient script known as a Cypriot Minoan Syllabary", and brought to America by "Minoan traders".
• Dolmens and the Stone Chambers. There is a "Stone Chamber" discovered in Putnam County, New York, oriented according to the Winter solstice and another facing the Equinox. Then there is the Sawbill Dolmen in the Superior National Forest supposedly marking the water divide between the Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence River basins. I have already dealt with the "dolmens" further up. Regarding the Stone Chambers, they deserve a post for themselves: see it here.
• The mtDNA X haplogroup. I have posted about this in the past and discussed it in depth. Jewell says that the Algonquian people carry it because they were in contact with eastern Mediterranean, Spanish, and West European people "thousands of years ago." These people brought the X mtDNA haplogroup to America by sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.

Closing Comments

None of these arguments, support the Minoan trade network assumed by Jewell. One that spanned the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and also required navigating 1,170 km (730 mi) up the St. Lawrence River skirting rapids, and then continuing 1,750 km (1,100 miles) inland, bypassing Niagara falls, and crossing the Great Lakes and the St. Mary's rapids to reach the copper mines they didn't even know existed when they set out from Europe. Furthermore, for those who'd believe that the natives could have guided the Mionan expeditionaries from the Atlantic seabord to the the Isle Royale mines, I must point out that the French missionaries and explorers who reached the shores of Canada c.1600s saw copper objects but couldn't get the natives to explain or identify their exact source (see Ancient Mining on the Shores of Lake Superior, by Charles Whittlesey, 1862.

The Cree-Basque-Cypriot script link is tenuous at least, and a fantasy if we look at it objectively. The stones inscribed with the word "Baal" sound like nineteenth century forgeries, and I have not (yet) been able to find any formal research papers mentioning them.

In my opinion, if the Minoans visited America, it was a chance event driven by a storm or strong winds, an accidental voyage, and not a systematic and consistent trade route driving copper from America to the Levant. For those interested in the subject, I have mentioned Minoans in some previous posts.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Submerged Continental Shelves: the corridors of Hominin migrations

When we look back at the first humans as they spread across the globe, we are usually constrained by the coastal areas marked on maps. But people didn't only move through the heart of continents, they also trekked along their margins, by the coast, using the resources provided by the sea.

During the Ice Ages, vast quantities of water was trapped in the thick ice shields that covered the polar parts of the world, from 1.5 to 3 km (1-2 mi.) thick, the ice held so much water that the sea levels dropped, exposing areas now submerged along the continental shelves around the globe.

These areas were dry land for thousands of years. The exposed seabed thrived with plants and animal life. Trees, grasslands, rivers that flowed across them offered an environment suitable for our ancestors to live.

Some of the best known exposed continental shelves are: Beringia (spanning Bering's Strait between northeastern Siberia and alaska), Sahul (encompassing Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, Sundaland which included insular South East Asia: Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Flores, Bali, and the Malay Peninsula), and Doggerland (now submerged by the North Sea between Britain, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands).

But there were many more spots that were used by humans, and also by our ancestors, the Denisovans and Neanderthals, to migrate, hunt, and live.

The forgotten Submerged World of our Ancestors

During the peak of each Ice Age, sea levels dropped up to 120 meters (400 ft.) and this exposed up to "15–20 million km² of land" (5.8 to 7.7 million square miles) this is equivalent to 50-66% of the surface of Africa, two to three times the surface of Australia, or two to three times the area of the lower 48 states of the U.S. (21 to 28 times the area of Texas).

Ice age sea levels. Source.

The map above shows a large area along the north coast of Siberia, Europe and Canda, but this was under the ice sheets, and the map with its Mercator projection tends to inflate the size of polar areas and diminsh those of mid and equatiorial latitudes. As you can see, Australia, Sunda, Japan-Taiwan-Korea, Southern South America, the mouth of the Amazon River, the persian Gulf, the Aegean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Seabord of USA have the largest emerged areas.

The area of the continents is around 148 million km², so the ice ages exposed an additional 10 to 13.5% of dry land, now submerged beneath the waves. A territory that is unexplored.

Archaeology under the sea is almost non-existent, and except for the rare artifact brought up by chance during fishing (like the Denisovan jawbone Penghu-1 from Taiwan) or the Homo erectus bones dredged by Berghuis, 2025 in Java) we know little of what exists on the continental shelves.

A paper by Norman et al., 2024 described the now submerged shelf along the northwestern coast of Australia, modelling its environment and population. The authors mention the importance of subaquatic archaeology, and also noted that the flooding after the end of the last ice age was very fast, sea levels grew by 1 meter (3 ft. 4 in.) per century and accelerated to 4-5 m (13-16 ft) per hundred years for over 400 years around 14.1 kya. This was followed by a second flood, that lasted 3000 years, beginning 12 kya, which was also fast. The flooding pushed the people living on the sea shores into the interior of the continent, a period of stress and adaptation to new enviornments and resources which is reflected in the rock art styles that changed and seem to depict "conflict/battle scenes."

Americas

The submerged coastal areas of North America along the shores of Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California surely contain sites with artifacts and campgrounds of the first people to reach America. Although narrow, this shelf holds evidence about the earliest humans in America. On the Atlantic coast, the continental shelf is far wider. In a recent post I mentioned the 22,000-year-old Cinmar site off the coast of Virginia, in the Atlantic Ocean, 47 mi (75 km) from Chesapeake Bay.

The Pacific coastline, is steeper in Central and South America, as the Andes run very close to it, and the seabed plunges into the ocean depths fairly quickly. But on the Atlantic coastline of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, there was a vast flat area that stretched for hundreds of kilometers eastwards from the current sea shore. Below is a map that depicts the current, and the now submerged terrain of South America (the white dots are sites where pollen was collected for an analysis of the plant coverage).

South America during the LGM. Source

The paper in which the map shown above, was published, by Díaz Pinaya et al., 2024, describes the "Southern Atlantic Continental Shelf Connectivity (SACS)" had trees of many species, like "Araucaria and Drimys, forming plant assemblages with Arecaceae, Ericaceae, Ilex, Myrsine, Myrtaceae, Podocarpus, Symplocos and Weinmannia. It includes Atlantic Rainforest sites extending from the Mantiqueira Mountains, the modern cerrado region of Minas Gerais into the Serra do Mar highlands along the coast of southeastern and southern Brazil. Considering the LGM landscape, this floristic connectivity extended from the Central South American Connection (CSAM) onto the then-exposed Atlantic Shelf spanning from 23 to 56°S in latitude. We hypothesize that this large exposed area was vegetated by cold and humid successional forests as a consequence of the downward migration of montane taxa into the coastal lowlands, a scenario supported by pollen records." During this period, the araucaria of the Paraná region (not the Patagonian variety of monkey-puzzle) is believed to have expanded "into Uruguay and northern Argentina, especially onto the exposed continental shelf. Drimys, on the other hand, appears to display high niche suitability centered in southern/southeastern Brazil, on the Argentinian shelf and in a large area between 36 and 48°S on the Pacific coast of Chile. Drimys winteri... an Andean endemic, could have populated the latter two regions"

This paper estimates the emerged continental shelf along the coasts of South America at 1.94 million km², which is "equivalent in size to the combined areas of France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom and that in southeastern/southern Brazil/Uruguay and Argentina the past coastline was 200–250 km and 500 km distant from its present location, respectively."

The Araucaria and Drimys (in the Patagonian forests, the latter survives as the Winter Bark, or Canelo, Drimy winteri) would have expanded along the southern part of the shelf, colder and wetter. In the other parts, further north it would have been similar to the present day Atlantic Rainforest with different levels of trees, possibly five tree layers with different tree-heights, from 50 meters (150 ft) to tree ferns and shrubs at the lowest level. The authors point out that "the South American Continental Shelf, which could have created an important migration corridor for different southern Andean plant species to migrate northwards and colonize areas of the Brazilian Atlantic coast. Our data suggests that this vast coastal corridor was possibly covered by temperate-like forest with prevalent Andean floristic affinities in the south and a more Atlantic floristic composition in the north."

This scenario of forests and jungles is very different from the grasslands and prairies of Uruguay, and the Pampas region of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the arid steppes of Patagonia. The people living in South America during this period (if we accept them having reached the region 25-30 kya) would have enjoyed a rich environment that is now totally submerged. I

The difficulties and limitations of underwater archaeology

Unfortunately, most of this submerged area is part of Argentina's continental shelf. Research funds are limited and scarce in Argentina, so very few underwater sites have been studied (see Ciarlo, 2009). Most of the underwater sites involve post-European-Discovery sites like ships or inland places in lakes. In Uruguay, where the situation is similar, there have been "increasing discoveries of archaeological material from submerged sites redeposited on beaches by storm events" (see López Mazz, 2004) these findings include fossils of megafaunal animals from the former deltaic area of the River Plate, now submerged by the sea.

Underwater archaeology is complex, expensive, and requires scuba diving gear and special equipment such as pumps, support shipes, etc. Easton, Moore, and Mason, 2020 (free access) describe the experience along the coastal area of British Columbia in Canada, showing that although it is feasible, it will not become mainstream in the forseeable future.

Underwater sites often lack stratigraphic context, and objects dredged up from the seabed are isolated from their original emplacement making it hard to reach useful conclusions about them. For instance the "Chinese anchors" dredged off the ocean floor close to Catalina Island, California in November 1973 have been controversial. Brought up from the bottom by a United States Geological Survey expedition from the Patton Escarpment, the donught-shaped stone was believed to be part of Chinese Junk dated to 3,000 years old. It was followed by the discovery of stones shaped like Chinese anchors at Palos Verdes Peninsula, close to Los Angeles by Baldwiyn and Meistrell in 1975 (see these two references: Mc Ginty, 1983 p. 54, and University of San Diego, 1980 p. 4). However, Frank Frost, 1982, suggested they were recent, not more than 100-years-old.

Comments

With the main migration corridors, and sites linked to the shores of lower sea levels, now submerged and out of reach, how can be so sure about the dates for the movement of people around the world?

It is reasonable to assume that the first migrants exploited the coastal environments before spreading inland into the continents, yet we can only access sites located on dry land, which are certainly younger than those under the sea.

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