This article first appeared in New Dawn Magazine issue 177, November - December 2019. © Brett Lothian
Denisovans at the Gates of Dawn: Interview with Andrew Collins
Andrew Collins is a British writer and researcher specializing in books that “challenge the way we perceive the past.” They feature such subjects as ancient astronomy, archaeoastronomy and the origins of civilization. A central theme of Collins’s books is that the Watchers and Nephilim of Enochian literature, as well as the biblical “fallen” angels and Anunnaki of Mesopotamian mythology, are memories of a human elite group that helped forge the foundations of civilization in Anatolia and the Near East. He asserts that this same region, particularly eastern Turkey, was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden and terrestrial Paradise. In this exclusive interview for New Dawn magazine Andrew Collins talks about his outstanding new book, co-written with Gregory L. Little, Denisovan Origins: Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America and lots more.
6) After the Earth shattering events of the Younger Dryas impact, the way humans think, our social organization and the way in which we interact with the environment was forever altered in many parts of the world. Can you explain these drastic changes and how they are still impacting us today?
7) Of particular interest to our more esoterically minded readers is the belief system, cosmology and spiritual practices of the “Shamanic Elite” that are so central to your theories, and no doubt formed the very bedrock of so many of our ancient and modern spiritual belief systems. Just what did these enigmatic bird shaman believe and how did they practice their religion?
8) A large part of Denisovan Origins, focuses on the peopling of the Americas, where you and your co-writer Gregory L. Little propose a radical re-thinking of the established paradigm. Using both archaeological and DNA evidence, you both quite skillfully paint an entirely new and far more interesting picture of America’s ancient past, even explaining the mysterious finds of giants that the mainstream continually ignores. Can you give us a brief outline of this radical reinterpretation?
9) In Denisovan Origins you explain how the Denisovan and the Neanderthal homonids minds, most likely worked in a very different way to that of our own. In your opinion, just how did these archaic homonids differ from us mentally and what advantages did this give them?
* This is part one of my two part interview with Andrew Collins, more to come very soon.
Denisovans at the Gates of Dawn: Interview with Andrew Collins
Andrew Collins is a British writer and researcher specializing in books that “challenge the way we perceive the past.” They feature such subjects as ancient astronomy, archaeoastronomy and the origins of civilization. A central theme of Collins’s books is that the Watchers and Nephilim of Enochian literature, as well as the biblical “fallen” angels and Anunnaki of Mesopotamian mythology, are memories of a human elite group that helped forge the foundations of civilization in Anatolia and the Near East. He asserts that this same region, particularly eastern Turkey, was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden and terrestrial Paradise. In this exclusive interview for New Dawn magazine Andrew Collins talks about his outstanding new book, co-written with Gregory L. Little, Denisovan Origins: Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America and lots more.
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| Andrew Collins at Göbekli Tepe © Andrew Collins |
1) In your fantastic
new book Denisovan Origins: Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of
the Giants of Ancient America, you quite
aptly begin with the paradigm shattering findings at Göbekli Tepe. Can you
explain to our readers just what Göbekli Tepe is and how it has changed our
understanding of human history?
Göbekli Tepe is arguably one of the most important
archaeological discoveries of the twenty-first century. It is a series of stone
enclosures with rings of carved T-shaped pillars facing two large monoliths standing
at their centres, like twin gateways into some invisible liminal realm. Located
on a mountain top in SE Turkey, Göbekli Tepe was built enclosure by enclosure
between 11,600-10,000 years ago.
Thereafter the site was abandoned, its inhabitants spreading out across
Anatolia and the Near East, and eventually into Europe, creating what is known
as the Neolithic revolution.
Göbekli Tepe’s importance is its immense sophistication, and
the fact that it constitutes the world’s earliest known monumental
architecture. Of even greater importance is that it shows us that even by this age
modern humans had a tiered hierarchical societies able to pull off such
incredible feats of engineering. The question then becomes: Who built it and why?
For me it existed as part of a response to the cataclysmic
events surrounding the Younger Dryas comet impact event of approximately 10,800
BCE. Caused most likely by multiple fragments of Comet Enke entering the upper
atmosphere, air blasts triggered unimaginable wild fires across the Northern
Hemisphere. The ash, smoke and debris rising into the air brought about a
nuclear winter that instigated a 1200-year long mini ice that gripped both the
American and Eurasian continents and did not end until 9600 BCE, the very time frame
of the construction of Gobekli Tepe.
There is very clear comet imagery on one of the standing
monoliths at Gobekli Tepe which tells us that its purpose was to create a place
of easy access to the sky world, which was thought to lie in the northern part
of the heavens. Here the supernatural creatures thought to be responsible for
such cataclysms were seen to roam, their arrival in the skies marked by the appearance
of comets.
These were ideas I first proposed in my 2014 book Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods. I am now
pretty sure they are correct, as they have now been adopted by other researchers
in this field, who also see the construction of Göbekli Tepe as a response to
the Younger Dryas comet impact event.
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| © Andrew Collins & Gregory L. Little |
2) The enigmatic Denisovans
are the most recently discovered additions to the Homo genus, can you tell us
what we know about these mysterious archaic hominids?
The Denisovans were not even known about before 2010. It was
in this year that a small fragment of finger bone found two years earlier
during excavations at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia was
sequenced. This was undertaken by the Max Planck Institute of Physical
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who determined that the bone came from a girl
of around 13 years old who lived approximately 50,000 years ago. The uniqueness
of the individual’s genome made it clear that she belonged to a previously
unknown hominin group that would thereafter be known as the Denisovans after
the place of their discovery (incidentally, "Denisovans" is correctly
pronounced dee-niss-o-vans and not denis-o-vans). The exact status of the
Denisovans does, however, remain undecided since some scholars are convinced
they are simply an early form of Homo
sapiens, and not a unique human type, the reason why they have so far not
been given their own species name.
What the so-called Altai Denisovan genome also made clear
was that this unique human group shared more gene alleles with Neanderthals
than they did with modern humans, leading to the surmise that the Denisovans
must have been a sister group of the Neanderthals. This conclusion was backed
up in 2016 with the discovery during excavations at the Denisova Cave of two
fragments of a Denisovan skull that was particularly robust like that of
Neanderthals and other early hominin. Even earlier the discovery, again at the
Denisova Cave, of two enormous molars had also suggested that the Denisovans
would be found to be particularly robust in nature. However, this is now known
to be only part of the story, for a recent examination of the finger bone of
the 13-year-old Denisovan girl who lived 50,000 years ago makes it clear that
the Denisovans had long, gracile fingers like those of modern humans. This
means there is every chance they looked more like us, and also perhaps thought
more like modern humans that they did Neanderthals.
What is more, evidence of a sophisticated mindset existing
in connection with the Denisova Cave’s Denisovan layer had already been noted.
This stems from the discovery of the beautiful choritolite (chlorite) arm
bangle dubbed the Denisovan bracelet, which shows evidence of sophisticated
drilling, sawing and polishing, along with the earliest known bone needles used
to make tailored clothing. In addition to this, fragments of a bone whistle or
flute were found in the cave’s Denisovan layer, telling us that the Denisovans
must have had an understanding of music, while more recently archaeologists
working at the cave found an ocher “pencil” with evidence of usage. This
suggests that the Denisovans were able to write and draw. The discovery of
horse bone fragments and equine DNA has suggested to some scholars that the
Denisovans might even have domesticated and ridden horses.
All this implies that certainly by 45,000 years, and
arguably earlier, the Denisovans displayed immense technological capability and
advanced human behavior. It is also now thought they developed what is known as
blade tool technology, which is the product of a complicated process known as
pressure flaking. This is where a handle-like instrument, usually made of bone,
antler or wood, is applied to a prepared stone core to literally prise off
long, slim blades or bladelets.
This blade tool technology, which starts its life in
southern Siberia and northern Mongolia, is then carried westwards across the
Ural Mountains into Europe, as well as into southwestern Asia, where it is
introduced to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic world of southeastern Anatolia around
the same time that Göbekli Tepe comes into existence. This recorded path of
blade tool production suggests that the ancestors of those who built Göbekli
Tepe came not just from the north, beyond the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian
steppe, but from much farther east – beyond the Ural Mountains in western
Siberia somewhere. It is even possible they came from as far away as the Altai
Mountains of southern Siberia, where the Denisova Cave is located, or even northern
Mongolia, close to the great inland sea called Lake Baikal.
Archaeologists now believe our earliest ancestors first
encountered Denisovans and Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrids somewhere in northern
Mongolia around 45,000 years ago. Sites in this region such as Tolbor-16 show
evidence of modern human occupation, and yet they also have the same high
culture associated with the Denisovan layer in southern Siberia’s Denisova
Cave. This, then, is where our own slow rise to civilization began at the
beginning of the Upper Paleolithic epoch.
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| The Denisova cave, tooth and jewelry. © Andrew Collins |
3) DNA evidence has
shown that ancient modern humans interbred with not only the Denisovans, but
the Neanderthals as well as certain as yet unidentified archaic homonids. Can
you explain this complex web of interactions and how modern humans have
benefitted from this gene flow?
What becomes clear is that both the Denisovans and modern
humans must have gained their gracile fingers from the same source, a common
ancestor of both populations from whom we split around 700,000 years ago. If
correct, then it means that the stubby, blunt-ended fingers displayed by Neanderthals
only developed after they split from the Denisovans some 400,000 years ago (and
arguably earlier still).
All this gave every branch of hominin – Denisovans,
Neanderthals and modern humans – the chance to develop their own unique genome,
which helped engineer their physical appearance, capabilities, and material
culture. By around 45,000 years ago the Denisovans were out in front with an
acute level of human development, suggesting that as we encountered them in
places like northern Mongolia we not only interbred with them, but also at the
same time gained their technologies and understanding of our relationship to the
cosmos. This then would have been the legacy passed down through their hybrid
descendants to the founders of human civilization.
After this time the Denisovans disappear from the scene, in
Siberia and Mongolia at least. However, one recent genetic study suggests that
some Denisovan groups might have survived in Island Southeast Asia and
Melanesia through till as late as 15,000 years ago. This tells us that the
sophisticated Denisovan mindset might well have been behind the spread of
Australo-Melanesian ancestry from Island Southeast Asia all the way across the
South America, where both Australo-Melanesian and Denisovan DNA has been found
among certain tribes of the Amazon.
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| Homo species interbreeding |
4) A key theme of Denisovan
Origins is the cultural and technological
exchange that interacting and hybridizing with archaic hominids such as the
Denisovans afforded us. In your opinion, how did this put us on the road to the
flowering of modern civilization?
What the evidence is beginning to tell us is that the
Denisovans were truly sophisticated in many ways – they created beautiful
jewelry, almost certainly wore tailored clothing, used musical instruments, and
may even have ridden horses. On top of this, there is every possibility that
they were sea voyagers, and might well have traveled between Island Southeast
Asia and the Americas, South America especially. All of these technologies were
thereafter passed on to their hybrid descendants, who carried them out to the
farthest reaches of the Eurasian continent. Yet it is the Denisovans’ apparent invention
of blade tool technology that becomes crucial in telling us exactly how far
their legacy reached and which cultures benefitted from it.
The westward pulses of Denisovan technology would eventually
flower among the Eastern Gravettians of central western Russia at key sites
such as Kostenki and Sungir. From these sites, as well other settlement areas
in places like the Czech Republic, the Denisovan legacy was carried westward in
western Europe by Proto-Solutrean groups, from whom emerged the Solutreans of southwestern
Europe. Also benefitting from the Denisovans’ blade tool technology were the much
later Swiderian and Post-Swiderian groups, who thrived just before, during and
immediately after the Younger Dryas impact event of circa 10,800 BCE. They were
an incredibly sophisticated bunch transporting exotic materials for use in
blade tool manufacture across many hundreds of kilometers at a time. Indeed, in
their eternal search for exotic materials the Swiderians of Poland created some
of the earliest opencast mining operations anywhere in the world. As a whole,
the Swiderians were nomadic groups of what might be described as complex
hunter-gatherers. They used trade and commerce to gain control of communities
as far west as the Carpathian Mountains of central Europe and as far east as
the western foothills of the Ural Mountains, the later being their most likely
original homeland.
It is the Swiderians who I believe came to bear on the
Pre-Pottery Neolithic peoples of southeastern Anatolia, resulting in the rapid emergence
of Göbekli Tepe circa 9600 BCE. You can see clear similarities between the
carved art of Göbekli Tepe and that being produced around the same time by
Mesolithic peoples of the Ural Mountains. The 11,600-year-old Shigir Idol best
exemplifies this connection. This is a carved wooden totem pole that was found alongside
other fragments of similar idols in a peat bog in the Middle Urals in 1984. It
is fashioned from an enormous tree trunk and was originally around 5.3 metres
in height. The style of carving, particularly of the human heads it displays, bears
striking similarities to some of the carved human heads unearthed at Göbekli
Tepe. It is surely no coincidence then that the same blade tool technology
found at Mesolithic sites in the Ural Mountains is found also at Pre-Pottery
Neolithic sites like Göbekli Tepe. There was clearly a connection between these
two very distant worlds as early as 9600 BCE.
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| Solutrean and Pre-Clovis points side by side. © Andrew Collins |
5) To this day,
legends such as the destruction of Atlantis, floods of astonishing proportions
and of the very sky itself falling persist all over the world about a
cataclysmic catastrophe on a scale we can barely imagine, which you date to a
single day around 10,800 BCE. Can you explain for our readers just what did
happen on that fateful day long ago and what evidence there is to support this?
The Younger Dryas comet impact event occurred around 10,800
BCE. It was a devastating cataclysm that ignited as much as 10 percent of the
world’s biomass. However, the cosmic events just kept coming, with further
fragments hitting the Northern Hemisphere periodically for around 11 years,
with some estimates suggesting they continued through until around 11,340 BCE;
this being at least 500 years after the initial impact event.
What we can say is that the termination of the Younger Dryas
around 9600 BCE coincides almost perfectly with Plato’s proposed date for the destruction
of Atlantis, and also the emergence of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia.
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| Göbekli Tepe © Andrew Collins |
6) After the Earth shattering events of the Younger Dryas impact, the way humans think, our social organization and the way in which we interact with the environment was forever altered in many parts of the world. Can you explain these drastic changes and how they are still impacting us today?
Understanding why Göbekli Tepe was built so soon after the
Younger Dryas episode can be shown to relate to the state of mind prevailing
among indigenous populations in the wake of this terrible human tragedy. Those
that did survive would have feared that it would all happen again, and next
time the world really would come to an end. Paranoia of this kind will have
been widespread.
Visionary writer Barbara Hand Clow has aptly termed this
fragile state of mind catastrophobia, the fear of further catastrophes. I think she is entirely right in not only
predicting the existence of catastrophobia, but also in the way it would have affected
generations of humanity for many thousands of years afterward.
But how could you stop people feeling this way? How could
you prevent catastrophobia from eating at the heart of a community every time a
comet appeared in the skies? There were no psychoanalysts or counsellors back
then, who could offer advice on how best to overcome this problem. There were,
however, go-to people who would have been considered able to allay the fear of
further catastrophes. These were the complex individuals known as shamans. They can act as human interfaces between the
world of the living and a perceived otherworld existing beyond the normal
senses, and accessible only through dreams, visions, and the achievement of
altered states of consciousness.
Shamans are able to induce trance-like states to propitiate,
appease or negotiate deals with, among other things, the supernatural creatures
seen as responsible for malefic intrusions into the physical world. This
includes the appearance in our skies of comets, which in many ancient societies
were seen as harbingers of death and destruction. Supernatural creatures of
this type were generally considered animistic in form, most obviously monstrous
canines (dogs), lupines (wolves), and vulpines (foxes). Comets were also associated with snakes,
which in myth and legend are occasionally seen as responsible for natural
catastrophes associated with impact events.
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| Mississippian era shaman dressed as a bird-man representing the character Brain Smasher encountered on the Path of Souls cosmic death journey. In the sky, Brain Smasher is identified with the constellation Cygnus. © Andrew Collins |
7) Of particular interest to our more esoterically minded readers is the belief system, cosmology and spiritual practices of the “Shamanic Elite” that are so central to your theories, and no doubt formed the very bedrock of so many of our ancient and modern spiritual belief systems. Just what did these enigmatic bird shaman believe and how did they practice their religion?
From the Upper Paleolithic age through till Neolithic times
there would appear to have been certain universal principles in cosmology that
were reflected not only in shamanic beliefs and practices, but also in ideas
regarding both the origin of the soul and its destination in death. They featured
the Milky Way as a kind of road or river along which the souls both of the
deceased and those of shamans would take to reach an afterlife among the stars.
Such beliefs were universal in both the Eurasian continent and in North
America. For these beliefs to have existed simultaneously on both continents
means that they must be at least 12,000 years old, and arguably much older
still, for it was shortly after this time that the Beringia land bridge linking
the Russian Far East with North America was drowned beneath the waters of the
Beringia Sea. After this time there would have been no widespread contact
between the two continents.
As many as 30 to 40 Native American tribes of North America share
a belief in what can only be described as the Path of Souls death journey. This
involved a leap of faith at the time of death (either for the deceased or the
shaman in a death trance) towards a portal located where the ecliptic, the sun’s
path, crosses the Milky Way on one side of the sky. This portal was located generally
in the Orion constellation, with the messier object named M42 in the sword
being singled out for this purpose, or in the Pleiades star cluster located in
the constellation of Taurus, the bull. The first appearance of the Pleiades
following a period of absence each year signaled the beginning of a new year or
season on both the American and Eurasian continents. It was a perfect time
keeper, and so must have become important to ancient peoples at a very early date.
This soul journey was often made, certainly for shamans,
when either of these asterisms, Orion or the Pleiades, were about to sink below
the western horizon shortly before the rising of the sun at the time of the
midwinter solstice.
From here the soul was thought to travel along the Milky Way
sometimes going to the south, and even directly beneath the earth, until it
would eventually turn northward and reach a point where the starry stream split
into two separate branches. Each branch symbolised one of two possible outcomes
for the soul: one led to the afterlife, while the other led only to oblivion
(or at best reincarnation). A supernatural figure standing at the fork in the
Milky Way would pass judgment on the soul. It could be male or female, although
most usually it was a supernatural bird or birdman, which went by the appealing
name of Brain Smasher or Skull Crusher. Its purpose was, we believe, to liberate
the spirit of the person trapped inside the soul in its form as a skull or head.
This enabled the freed spirit to enter the afterlife proper. As Graham Hancock
points out in new book America Before,
a very similar skull crushing figure stood at the same position in the soul’s
journey in ancient Egyptian tradition.
These ideas are connected with the age-old belief that the seat
of the soul was located in the head, the reason why the skulls of deceased peoples
were revered during the prehistoric age as points of contact, not just with its
former owner, but also with any ancestor associated with the person’s familial line.
Brain Smasher in Native American tradition was almost
certainly identified with the Cygnus constellation, which is positioned exactly
where the Milky Way splits into two separate branches. Almost universally
Cygnus is seen as a sky bird. What species it takes varies from country to
country. Across most of the Eurasian continent it is usually seen as a swan or
goose flying down the Milky Way. In southwestern Asia (Armenia and ancient
Greece in particular) it was the vulture, while in North America it was very
often a large raptor or vulture. Among the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the
Great Lakes-St Lawrence River region it was a crane, goose, as well as the
Thunderbird.
The one thing these birds have in common is that they were
all considered soul birds – vehicles for the soul to travel from this world to
the next, and then, when required, back again to the world of the living. It is
most likely for this reason that bird related paraphernalia, such as bones,
skulls, feathers and talons have been incorporated into the ritual clothes of
shamans since the age of the Neanderthals.
I have no doubt that belief in a universal cosmic death
journey involving Orion, the Pleiades, and the Cygnus constellation, all linked
via the Milky Way, is as least as old as our first point of contact with
Denisovans in places like northern Mongolia some 45,000 years ago. Why do I
think this? Firstly, because these beliefs are so universal, and secondly
because there are a great number of tribes and clans, particularly in Mongolia,
southern Siberia, Central Asia and North Asia that have traditions of a
progenitor referred to as the Swan Maiden. She descends from some kind of
heavenly Birdland, often located in the north, and is forced to remain on earth
when a mortal male steals her swan shrift or wings, which she has removed in
order to bath in a body of water in mortal form. The man forces her to marry
him and they have children who become the earliest ancestors of a particular
human group or culture. The Swan Maiden of the story very often tricks her
husband into giving her back her swan shrift, and once she has this she departs
immediately for her home world.
Beyond the western shores of Lake Baikal – itself the
location of a swan maiden legend – is the archaeological site of Mal’ta, which
dates back 24,000 years. Here, aside from a large number of mammoth ivory
female figurines, archaeologists have found as many as 14 mammoth ivory
pendants of straight-necked swans, some with eyeholes at one end. They almost
certainly depict swans in flight, even though the birds’ outstretched wings
have been truncated. Four at least of these swan pendants, when uncovered, were
found to be aligned north-south, as if this had some significance. After due
consideration, noted Russian paleoarchaeologist Antoliy Derevianko wrote that
this deliberate north-south directionality of the swan pendants, along with the
special attention paid to them by the Mal’ta community (one was found with a
child burial), suggests a connection not only with the north-south migration of
birds, but also with the universal idea that in death the human soul took the
form of a bird. Derevianko also saw the
existence of these swan pendants as a “significant first appearance of animism”
in Siberia.
So we know that from as early as 24,000 years ago, and
arguably much earlier, the swan was seen as a vehicle of the human soul on its
way to a northerly placed heaven, no doubt the same Birdland from which the
Swan Maiden at the root of many Siberian and Mongolian cosmogonic myths was
seen to come. I would identify that Birdland with the stars of Cygnus, its
bright star Deneb in particular, which I suspect has been seen as a point of
entry and exit to the afterlife since the Upper Paleolithic age. Indeed, around
the time of first contact between modern humans and Denisovans in northern
Mongolia some 45,000-40,000 years ago the stars of the Cygnus constellation
acted as pole stars, meaning that they were at the center of the heavens each
night. This pivotal location, known as the northern celestial pole, has
universally been seen as a hole through which the souls of both shamans and the
deceased reach the afterlife.
Thus these beliefs are the legacy of our first contact with
Denisovans as much as 45,000 years ago, their persistence lingering through till
the age of Göbekli Tepe. Here the oldest and most sophisticated stone
enclosures are orientated north-northwest towards the setting of the Cygnus
star Deneb during the epoch of their construction. Similar ideas were carried
into Egypt around 8000 BCE and later came to influence the design, layout and
geographical orientation of the three main Pyramids of Giza, which all reflect
the astronomical positions of the Cygnus constellation, the subject of my book The Cygnus Key (2018).
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| Artist representation of a Denisovan - Modern Human hybrid. © By Russell M. Hossain |
8) A large part of Denisovan Origins, focuses on the peopling of the Americas, where you and your co-writer Gregory L. Little propose a radical re-thinking of the established paradigm. Using both archaeological and DNA evidence, you both quite skillfully paint an entirely new and far more interesting picture of America’s ancient past, even explaining the mysterious finds of giants that the mainstream continually ignores. Can you give us a brief outline of this radical reinterpretation?
Until recently North American anthropologists, paleogeneticists
and archaeologists all perpetuated the view that the First Americans came
across from the Russian Far East some 15,000 years ago. They created what are
known as Pre-Clovis bi-points, which with the emergence of the Clovis culture
around 13,200 years ago would evolve eventually into the highly distinguishable
Clovis Point.
This view has now changed. Firstly, a large number of
Pre-Clovis sites have yielded types of stone tools and projectile points that
have nothing to do with the later Clovis culture. Many of these sites are in
the American Southwest suggesting a point of foundation in this region and not
in the American Northwest, close to the former Beringia land bridge. Secondly,
there is now overwhelming evidence from various genetic studies telling us that
the picture is even more complicated, with migrations across the Beringia land
bridge taking place as early as 24,000 years ago, while the presence of
Australo-Melanesian DNA in South American tribes suggests further migrations to
South America no later than 10,000 years ago.
Paleogeneticists and archaeologists are unwilling to accept that
peoples carrying Australo-Melanesian ancestry arrived in South America directly
from Island Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Instead, they propose that
Australo-Melanesian peoples must have embarked on an extremely arduous coast-hopping
journey all around the rim of the Pacific until they reached the Aleutian
Islands off Alaska, where Australo-Melanesian DNA has also been found among the
indigenous Aleuts. From here they would have traveled down the Pacific coast of
North America, finally entering South America.
Such a theory can certainly explain the presence of at least
some Australo-Melanesian ancestry in the Americas, although it makes far more
sense to assume direct transpacific journeys as well, perhaps using the ocean
currents and prevailing winds that would take a vessel from the northern coast
of Sahul, the former continent embracing Papua New Guinea, Australia and
Tasmania, past New Zealand and down to the Antarctic continent. From here the
ocean currents would have carried a vessel toward the southern tip of South
America, from where it would have been an easy journey northwards along the
continent’s west coast, making landfall in what is today Chile, or along the
continent’s east coast, making landfall in Argentina, Uraguay, or Brazil.
Navigable rivers would then have permitted a vessel entry into the interior of
South America, accounting perhaps for the presence of Australo-Melanesian
ancestry among certain tribes of the Amazon. With all these journeys Denisovans
or, more likely, Denisovan hybrids, would no doubt have been present, explaining
the presence of Denisovan DNA in some South American tribes and populations.
Then there is the likelihood also of Solutrean peoples from
southwestern Europe crossing the ice flows that spanned the entire Atlantic
Ocean from northern Spain across to the area of the Chesapeake Bay on the
Atlantic coast of the United States at the height of the last ice age circa
22,000-20,000 years ago. This might explain why a large number of Pre-Clovis
bi-points have been found in the Chesapeake Bay area that closely resemble very
similar so-called leaf points manufactured by the Solutreans of southwestern
Europe between 22,000-17,000 years ago. One particular example of a Pre-Clovis
projectile point found in the Chesapeake Bay area is even made of a type of
stone only available in France.
The presence of Solutreans in North America is backed up by
genetic evidence, particularly in the fact that a particular mutation of
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) found extensively among the Algonquian-speaking
peoples of the Great Lakes-St Lawrence River and known as haplogroup X is found
also among the indigenous peoples of southwestern Europe, this being the former
territories of the Solutreans. It is not found anywhere in the eastern half of
the Eurasian continent, telling us that it did not enter North America from the
Russian Far East.
In the book I show that the Proto-Solutrean ancestors of the
Solutreans came originally from as far east as Siberia and Mongolia and were
most likely North Asian in origin. This is important since there is every
reason to suspect they were carrying at least some Denisovan ancestry, as well
as haplogroup X. Such a surmise makes perfect sense of the fact that the
Algonquian-speaking peoples with the highest incidence of haplogroup X, the
Ojibwa and Cree, also have the highest incidence in North America of Denisovan
DNA, something that surely cannot be coincidence.
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| Map of the ocean currents and prevailing winds that may have determined trans-pacific oceanic voyages. © Andrew Collins |
9) In Denisovan Origins you explain how the Denisovan and the Neanderthal homonids minds, most likely worked in a very different way to that of our own. In your opinion, just how did these archaic homonids differ from us mentally and what advantages did this give them?
There is good reason to suspect that the Denisovans had a
completely different mindset to that of modern humans – one that acted almost
like that of someone who would today form part of the autistic spectrum. If so,
then some of their number might well have displayed what is known as savant
syndrome, enabling them to advance quicker than their western counterparts, the
Neanderthals. This is suggested by the fact that the Denisovans are known to
have possessed two genes – ADSL and CNTNAP2 – that have been linked to autism
in modern human populations. Is it possible that autism, and the savant-like
qualities that often accompany autism, were responsible for the rise of the
shamanic civilization at the start of the Upper Paleolithic age? This is the
theory outlined in both Denisovan Origins
and my previous book The Cygnus Key.
* This is part one of my two part interview with Andrew Collins, more to come very soon.
