Rating: 
Summary: a shockingly convincing well researched thesis
Review: The first time I heard Dr. Ivan Van Sertima speak was at Lincoln University a small historically black college in Pennslyvania. Dr. Van Sertima gave a powerful lecture about the African Presence in America before Columbus, a topic I never heard of before and honestly doubted it's validity.I thought I would leave the lecture only convienced that Van Sertima was a crank and his thesis was a fraud, but in fact the opposite happened. His speech was so articulate and his lecture so well researched and amazingly documented I decided I had to read his book and research the topic on my own. if skeptics think this book is solely for Afrocentrist they are wrong this book is very scholarly it gives botanical,cartographical,linguistic,artistic, and historical evidience in order to make a strong case for the African presence in America. Van Sertima shows us african cotton found in America.He shows the written accounts of the conquistadors themselves, Columbus and Balboa record the presence of Africans already arriving in America, in fact Balboa eyewitnessed Africans in Central America fighting among the "Indian" population..He highlights the mysterious Piri Reis map that shows Antartica mapped before it was covered with ice,when was the only time this could happen? 4,000 B.C.,the point is ancient man had the nautical skill to travel the world at a very early date. He touches on the journeys of Thor Heyerdahl and his ship the Ra successfully crossing the Atlantic, proving that ancient man could travel the high seas. I personally researched on my own the parallels between the Egyptian god(Osiris)and American god(Queztatcoatl)both are virgin born both are ressurection gods, it is amazing.Another enigma would be the cocaine found in the stomach of RamesesII and in many other Egyptian mummies how is it that a New World crop is found in Africa if contact was not made...scholars answer this evidience with silence.One of course can not leave out the colossal Olmec heads with clearly African features with braided hair, and of course the parallel of pyramids found in both cultures Africa and the Americas.Some say that the Olmec heads could be Pacific Islanders or people from South East Asia, but that does not explain all the other pieces of evidience Van Sertima shows, like for instance the identical reed boats used on the Nile by Nubians and on the Amazon or the hieroglyphs and the sun worship.The parallels are almost to the point of exhausting.This book is hard to explain away, and I advise all serious researches and historians to read it....challenge yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Required reading?
Review: I've heard this book is now being introduced into history classes, and taught to children in the fourth grade. That's good- they probably couldn't handle the complexity of Erich von Daniken's works until at least fifth grade.
When will we have faith-healers teaching health class, hmmm?
-Scott
Rating: 
Summary: Conclusions Unproven Until DNA Tested
Review: This book is quite well-written, although there are tedious repetitions of identical claims and a great number of highly dubious "proofs." Archaeology has given us some reasonably conclusive evidence that the Old Kingdom Egyptians were influenced by the civilization of their Negroid neighbors in Nubia, but that was thousands of years ago. Dr Van Sertima's assertions of Egyptian influence in America surprised me. Because of the time disparity between, for example, Egyptian Old Kingdom pyramids of the 3rd millennium BC and Mexican pyramids of the 1st and 2nd millennium AD, and their entirely different uses, these claims are entirely unconvincing.However, take away the romantic exaggerations and I believe that some of Dr. Van Sertima's assertions of a pre-Columbian African presence in America have a good probability of being true. It seems plausible that traders and marooned sailors from African seagoing vessels, both accidentally and deliberately came to American waters now and then, along with rare landfalls of European, Asian and Oceanian boats and ships. Only the Oceanian Polynesians are known beyond doubt to have set up a permanent colony in America, on Easter Island off the coast of Chile. Easter Islanders may have had brief contacts with the mainland before they ruined their forests and their seagoing capabilities, but despite Thor Heyerdahl, anything beyond minor influence is still unproven. The vital question is: did the African visitors make important changes to vital aspects of Native American society such as religion or architecture - changes far greater than the minuscule influences of occasional visitors to America from, say, China or Greenland? Although I'm partly Native American I hope there's a grain of truth in the idea that some Africans came to America, influenced culture, and became "gods." It's a promising thesis and I'd jump for joy if it could be proven. Unfortunately, after adding up all of Dr. Van Sertima's arguments, even the linguistic ones and especially those citing art, his conclusions remain unproven. The least convincing arguments are the photographs and chapters on art. Years ago I noted physical resemblances to Africans (and to Europeans and Asians) in Latin American portrait head sculpture and ceramics, but were these heads meant as faithful copies of facial features or as stylized icons? More troubling to me is the fact that certain sculptures are demonic -- unflattering caricatures of presumably African facial features, as stereotyped as the "Der Sturmer" cartoons of Jews. Right now my money is on iconography. The thesis of a ruling class of Africans in America, although unproven, isn't necessarily unprovable. DNA testing of Native American populations the author believes to be partially descended from Africans would disclose the closeness (or not) of the relationship. If the people aren't willing to be tested, then the DNA of the domestic plants Van Sertima says were imported from Africa should be compared to that of African vegetation. DNA doesn't lie and it passes down through the mitochondria and certain other cell components for a vast number of generations. Once the tests are completed, this book, which has been in print a long time, will either stand as a champion of far-seeing science, like Wegener's early continental drift hypothesis (given that in both of them certain ideas were exaggerated or overlooked) or it will slip into the limbo of most other diffusionist ethnology.
If someone has already published these DNA test results, I'd like to know how to find them. In the meanwhile, at least temporarily, I'll shelve this book with Donnelly's ATLANTIS, Churchward's MU, Velikovsky's WORLDS IN COLLISION, Fort's LO! and my other collected works of entertaining pseudoscience.
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