Out of Africa Much Earlier Than Later Seafaring

I have been corresponding with Harry Bourne, author of:

Phoenicians in West Africa at Phoenicia.org at http://phoenicia.org/phoewestafrica.html (covering The Periplus of Necho, The Periplus of Hanno, Carthage & Chami).

From the Red to the Med, The Phoenicians in East Africa at Phoenicia.org at http://phoenicia.org/phoeEastAfrica.html

Ancient India, West Africa & the Sea at Migration Diffusion at http://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2011&id=245

East Africa & the Sea in Antiquity at Stewartsynopsis.com at http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/east_africa.htm

West Africa & the Sea in Antiquity at Stewartsynopsis.com at http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/west_africa.htm

I am in accord with the "out of Africa" hypothesis for initial human migration to other parts of the world -- see my posting at http://humanmigrations.blogspot.com/2009/03/human-migrations-and-principles-of.html but that was much earlier than seafaring or the megaliths, as the initial human migration "out of Africa" appears to have started ca. 60000 BC or so, if I understand DNA studies correctly.

However, I am not in accord with attempts to link the much later origins of seafaring or megaliths (as opposed to traveling by dugout canoes) to Africans, because I think that is simply not supported by the evidence.

Nevertheless, it is well worth reading Harry Bourne's writings, because he has collected a lot of material about ancient seafarers that is of value to analysis of ancient seafaring and the spread of the megaliths.

Thinking "out of the box", it occurred to me in reading about the Periplus of Necho viz. the Periplus of Hanno that something is seriously wrong in terms of chronology because the travels are dated otherwise by extreme volcanic activity witnessed by the seafarers. More forthcoming in the next posting.

African Megaliths and Ancient Seafaring

Catherine Acholonu informed me about a canoe excavated in Nigeria dated to ca. 7700 years ago. See Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Cultural Sensitization and Exhibition on the 8000 Years Old Dufuna Canoe, at http://www.nigerianmuseums.org/dufuna.htm .

Nigeria is of course rightly proud of this archaeological discovery, showing a high level of culture in the Neolithic era.

However, I remain extremely skeptical about "seafaring" Africans (outside of Pharaonic Egyptian culture) in the megalithic era ca. 3000 BC.

Yes, dugout canoes of tree logs are surely an ancient basic water travel technology found throughout the world -- also in Nigeria, but dugouts are still quite an extended technological distance from the kind of boats found at Abydos in Egypt.

I have nothing personal against dugouts. Estonia was the last European country to continue to build them, and some of my ancestors come from the border region of Estonia and Latvia.

However, the Baltic peoples -- as opposed to the Scandinavians -- never seem to have gotten much beyond that stage, I think because it was not necessary for them economically. The only ancient peoples in the Baltic who continued to build primitive boats clear into the modern era were the Livs viz. Livonians (relatives of the Finns) and they used them for fishing. Some Baltic DNA appears to be Varangian, so maybe there is an ancient seafaring connection.

Continued Scandinavian seafaring development has culminated in the world's largest ferries traveling e.g. between Kiel, Germany and Oslo, Norway:

"Color Line's Kiel-Oslo ships (and the world's largest ferries) COLOR FANTASY and COLOR MAGIC...."
http://maritimematters.com/2011/06/poesia-of-the-north-atlantic-part-one/.

In Africa, the megaliths in Senegambia, Nigeria and even Bouar to some degree are near a major river by which the subsequent megalithic area was accessed by the megalith makers, so my argument.

In Senegal and Gambia, this was the Gambia River.

In Nigeria it was the Cross River.

For the Central African Republic it was the Sanaga River, the next large river south of the Cross River.

"The Sanaga River is a river of South Province, Cameroon, Centre Province, Cameroon, and West Province, Cameroon.... The Sanaga River forms a boundary between two tropical moist forest ecoregions. The Cross-Sanaga-Bioko coastal forests lie to the north between the Sanaga River and the Cross River of Nigeria, and the Atlantic Equatorial coastal forests extend south of the river through southwestern Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Cabinda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo."

Jaap van der Waarde, Integrated River Basin Management of the Sanaga River, Cameroon writes at http://www.internationalrivers.org/files/IRBM Sanaga.pdf:

"The Sanaga River is the largest river in Cameroon.... It flows for 918 km from its source on the Adamawa Plateau.... The main tributaries in Adamawa are the Lom to the South and the Djerem to the North."

The Electricity Development Corporation, Republic of Cameroon, in Lom Pangar Hydroelectric Project: Environmental and social assessment (ESA), Executive summary, March 2011 writes:

"Lom originates at the foot of Ngaou Ndal [Ngaou "mountain" and Ndal "throne", Mont Ngaoui in Google - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Ngaoui] in the Central African Republic at the south-eastern boundary of the Adamaoua, around elevation 1,200 m, 70 km east of Meiganga...."

Mont Ngaoui is only ca. 100 km (60 miles) as the crow flies from Bouar, Central African Republic, where we find the megaliths marking the center of Africa in the ancient land survey system.

I do not know to what degree such rivers were anciently navigable by flat boats like those found at Abydos, Egypt (as was the case for the more modern ancient Vikings, such boats were surely pulled along the shore in areas where not navigable).

It remains speculation that the ancient megalith makers navigated these rivers to get close to locations which they required for their land survey. 

However, it seems significant to me, as in the above quotation from the Wikipedia, that the Sanaga River and Cross River are the major dividing rivers for these two tropical African ecoregions, and it is near these rivers that we find the Nigerian and Central African megaliths.

In any event, we are not going to resolve the issue of origins now, and surely much more research will be required until some element of certainty surfaces as to who the arguably seafaring originators of megalithic culture actually were.

If things were certain, there would be no need of discussion.

Kilmartin Scotland Monuments Are a Sky Map of the Heavens at least 4500 Years Old: This Decipherment Should Put Archaeoastronomy and Megalithic Research on a New and Improved Footing

Monuments of Kilmartin, Scotland Are a Sky Map of the Heavens

This posting announces my decipherment of the Kilmartin, Scotland monuments showing them to be a sky map of the heavens (at least 4500 years old). That decipherment was completed today, October 15, 2012, completing work initially begun in the year 2000.

Substantial progress was made in 2008 when friends invited my significant other and myself to spend some time at their home in western Scotland.

The monuments of Kilmartin cover a 6-mile radius of terrain and employ the hermetic principle, "as above, so below" in creating a mirror-image of the stars on the surface of the Earth. Kilmartin was a mammoth ancient "star" project.

As written at the home page of the Kilmartin House Museum:

"There are more than 800 ancient monuments within a six-mile radius of the village of Kilmartin, Argyll, many of them are are prehistoric. This extraordinary concentration and diversity of monuments distinguishes the Kilmartin Glen as an area of outstanding archaeological importance. It is one of Scotland’s richest prehistoric landscapes."

The beauty of my decipherment is that once one knows the solution to the monument puzzle, that solution is open to anyone who has or obtains a minimal understanding of astronomy and the stars of the heavens.

The key to the decipherment was the initial  identification of the stars of Cygnus, Draco and Leo. The rest followed. If the decipherment were correct, the other stars had to fit. They do, and ANY reader can check the solution. That solution is not perfect, and surely much will be done down the road to improve it, but its general correctness is without doubt

Of course, the ancients may not have made the same groupings of stars into constellations or asterisms as we do today, and it is unlikely they used exactly all the same stars, but the bright stars in the sky lend themselves to stellar organization and sky-mapping such as we find in our modern Zodiac.

The three images presented below are:

1. Kilmartin Monuments Deciphered as Astronomy by Andis Kaulins, 2000 to 2012, as based on an Ordnance Survey map that maps monument positions at Kilmartin. Kilmartin (page x), An Inventory of the Monuments Extracted from Argyll, Volume 6, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), 1999.
2. Sky map excerpts clipped from Starry Night Pro, the best software program out there for this kind of work, http://www.starrynight.com/, showing how the stars actually looked ca. 2500 B.C.
3. A combined image which combines 1 and 2 above, for comparison.
   

Image 1: Kilmartin Monuments Deciphered

    Image 2: Starry Night Pro Clip, Stars of the Sky for Top and Bottom of Kilmartin Decipherment

    Image 3: Kilmartin Monuments Deciphered plus 2 Starry Night Pro Astronomy Software Image Clips to Show the Stars Depicted

Please be advised that the work above continues the basic research on ancient monuments, signs and symbols published by Andis Kaulins in:

• Stars Stones and Scholars: The Decipherment of the Megaliths
  
  and
   
• Ancient Signs: The Alphabet and the Origins of Writing

The author has deciphered a similar map of the heavens on Earth in the case of Tanum, Sweden. See megaliths.net and for related works, lexiline.com.