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A worker is clearing a forest for a cornfield when suddenly his shovel hits something hard. He thinks it's an upside-down He digs deeper, and an eye looks at him from under the ground. A stone face, taller than a human. Today we know of 17 such goals. The heaviest of them weighs about 40 tons. The stone for them was dragged over 90 miles without wheels or pack animals. For a century and a half, people attributed them to Africans, Atlanteans, and giants. So who actually carved them? And why did the creators themselves later distort them and bury them face down? Southern Veracruz, at the foot of the volcanic Tuxtla Mountains. It's hot and humid here, and the forest grows back faster than it can be cut down. In the mid-19th century,
local haciendas expanded their fields, and workers burned and cleared the forest plot by plot. The man who first stumbled upon the head did not leave his name in history. We only know that he mistook it for a cauldron, huge, upside down, growing into the ground. Only this cauldron was made of stone and had a face. A few years later, Mexican scientist José María Melgar y Serrano came to see it. He examined it, described it, and published a brief report in 1869. There was one word in that report that outlived him. He called the facial features Ethiopian. Melgar was an educated man of his time and saw things through the eyes of his era. The broad nose and full lips-that was something he could only explain as Africa. This word was remembered. A
hundred years later, entire books were based on it. And the head stood in that field for another 70 years, half in the ground, almost forgotten outside of Mexico. In 1938, an American named Matthew Stirling arrived with his wife Marion. Stirling worked for the Smithsonian Institution. Marion went with him on almost every expedition, and he called her his co-explorer and co-author. They saw the head, saw the mounds around it, and realized that there was an entire city beneath their feet . That same year, Stirling also traveled east to the swamps of the Coatzacoalcos River, to a place called San Lorenzo. A year later, he was already conducting excavations at La Venta, just by the bay.
The National Geographic Society paid for the excavation, and this was the beginning of his 16- year work in the region. In 1940, National Geographic magazine published an article by Stirling. The name spoke for itself. The large stone faces of the Mexican jungle. Back in 1939, the Sterlings found a broken stone monument at this location. It used by the Maya. The top was chipped and the first digit was missing. There were two options. If it were a figure eight, the inscription would date to the 300s AD. e., flourishing in May, and this would not surprise anyone. Marion insisted that the missing number was seven. This meant that the date was September 3, 32
BC. Older than any known May date at that time. Many archaeologists refused to believe this. The controversy lasted for 30 years until the upper half of the monument was finally found. It had a seven on it. Marion was right. So the people who carved these faces were older than the Maya. Much older. Olmecs. This word comes from the Aztec language, Nahuatl. It means, roughly, "rubber people." This is what the Aztecs called the inhabitants of the hot Gulf Coast of Mexico, where rubber trees grow. But the Aztecs were talking about their contemporaries who lived 2,000 years after the creators of these heads. 20th- century archaeologists took someone else's nickname and stuck it on a people who disappeared long before the Aztecs.
We do not know what these people called themselves. We know their faces. 17 faces and no names. And the oldest of those faces waited in the swamps to the east, where the largest city in all of Mesoamerica once stood. The Coatzacoalcos River flows to the Gulf of Mexico through a flat lowland. During the rainy season, it overflows its banks and floods everything around for many miles. The only way to live near such a river is to settle high up. So the Olmecs built their own high place. This place is called San Lorenzo. There was a natural hill here, but it wasn't enough for the Olmecs. They built on it, cut off the top, leveled it, and surrounded it with terraces. The result was a plateau rising about 160 feet above the floodplain. Its construction, according to
various estimates, took from 18 to 70 million cubic feet of earth. The upper limit of the estimate is approximately 3/4 of the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza. And just like in Egypt, all this earth was carried in baskets. One retaining wall on one of the terraces reached 23 feet high. This is the height of a two-story building. San Lorenzo began to flourish around 1400 BC. e. Approximately from 1200 to 900 BC. BC it was the largest city in Mesoamerica. For comparison, in the same century when the first stone faces were carved here, Egypt was ruled by Tutankhamun. The elite lived on the plateau. Archaeologists found a building there called the Red Palace. Its clay walls and floors were covered with
sand colored with hematite-a red iron ochre. The entire building was red. Its roof was supported by basalt columns 13 feet high. Recall that basalt had to be transported from mountains over 90 miles away. Ordinary people lived below, on terraces that descended the slopes. The poorest dwellings stood about 130 feet below the summit. The lower the terrace, the simpler the house. The city was built as a ladder of power. The red palace at the top, huts by the water below. And under this plateau was something no one expected to find here.
Plumbing. Long rows of stone blocks with a U-shaped groove, laid one after the other and covered with stone slabs. Closed pipes. They passed underground and carried water to the edges of the plateau. It is not entirely clear what exactly they were needed for . For drinking water, rituals, or both. But 3,000 years ago, in the swampy jungle, people laid stone pipes under their city. How many people lived here? In the center, according to estimates, there were up to 5,500. Together with the surrounding villages, up to 13,000. By the standards of that world, it was a metropolis. Archaeologists have found over 120 stone sculptures on the plateau and believe that even more are still underground. A city built on an artificial
mountain with a water supply system and a red palace could not do without stone. Stone for columns, drains, thrones and for faces. But there was no stone here. Not a single suitable boulder in the entire lowland. The nearest suitable stone lay in the Tuxtla Mountains, on the slopes of the extinct volcano Cerro Sintepec. There, in the frozen mudflows from ancient eruptions, lie rounded boulders of dense gray basalt. Analysis shows that every head from the Olmec region was carved from this stone. From the volcano to San Lorenzo is over 90 miles. The largest heads weigh between 25 and 40 tons. 40 tons is more than a fully loaded truck.
The tallest head is 11 feet. That's taller than a basketball hoop. The Olmecs had no wheels, no horses, no oxen, no mules, nothing to pull loads-only people, ropes, and rivers. How did they do it? No one knows for sure. Most researchers believe that wherever possible, they floated the boulders on huge rafts of logs, down rivers, and possibly along the coast of the bay. Where there was no river, they built dams, ramps, and roads and dragged stones on ropes. The backs of many heads are flat. Maybe it was easier to tie them up that way. Imagine what it might have looked like. Volcano slope, morning. Hundreds of people around a gray boulder the size of a small house.
Ropes made of plant fibers are thrown through it. On command, everyone pulls at the same time, and the boulder shifts to one palm, then another. It takes several days to get to the river. Near the river, he is rolled onto a raft of tied trunks, and dozens of people with poles guide him downstream, making sure he doesn't run aground and capsize. One mistake-and 40 tons go to the bottom forever. We don't know how many people were needed for one boulder or how long the journey took, but every head in the museum today represents months of someone's labor. Work that someone organized, fed, and directed. Two damaged sculptures depict rectangular stone blocks tied with ropes.
Human figures sit on them. Perhaps these are rulers who personally accompany the stone on its journey. A boulder like a throne on the road. Distance, weight, lack of wheels. These three facts are the source of all legends about giants and aliens, but there is one detail in this story that explains more than any legend. It seems that the Olmecs almost never threw stones. At least two of the heads from San Lorenzo were carved from old thrones. Archaeologists call them thrones- huge rectangular stone blocks with a flat top. At the front of the throne there is usually a niche, similar to the entrance to a cave, from which a man emerges. throne from another Olmec city, La Venta.
It is about 2 meters high and twice as wide. The man sits in a niche, as if in the mouth of a cave or a monster. He holds ropes in his hands. Ropes wrap around the base of the throne and lead to figures carved on the sides. Some researchers see these figures as ancestors who assist the ruler. Others see them as bound prisoners. The stone does not say who is right. One theory goes like this. The ruler sat on such a throne during his lifetime, and then the throne was transformed into his face. The same stone that once covered 145 kilometers was split, hewn, and turned into a
head. Why? To understand this, we must look closely at the faces themselves. 10 heads were found in San Lorenzo. Four in La Venta. Two in Tres Zapotes, where it all started with a cauldron in the field. And another one on a hill called La Cobata. From a distance they look similar. Heavy eyelids, wide noses, full lips, round cheeks. A helmet that fits snugly to the head. But put them side by side, and no two will be the same. Each head has its own outfit, with its own pattern and its own decorations. The ears are decorated in various ways. The lips are placed differently.
The eyes are placed differently. Cheeks have different shapes. These are portraits. Real people that the sculptors saw and knew. Who were they? Almost all researchers agree. Rulers. Each head represents a person who once sat on the throne. What about helmets? For a long time, it was believed that these were ball players' helmets. Today, this idea has fewer supporters. But a ruler dressed for a sacred game could well have been depicted like this. The helmet could also be a military or tribal symbol, so that everyone in the city knew which ruler they were looking at. Now
the question that started this whole story. Are these African faces? Melgar's 1869 word, "Ethiopian," launched an entire school of thought. In the 1970s, a book was published that claimed that the Olmec civilization was founded by seafarers from Africa. Later, TV shows and popular authors appeared with theories about Atlantis and sunken civilizations. Heads have become the most recognizable evidence in this genre. There are two ways to check this. The first is to look at the people who live there today. The features on the heads, broad noses, full lips, heavy eyelids, are still common among the indigenous population of Tabasco and Veracruz.
Sculptors sculpted the people around them. Studies of ancient DNA show that the first people in the Americas came from Northeast Asia and are related to ancient Siberian populations. Geneticists have found no traces of African migration into pre-Columbian Mexico. Leading Olmec experts do not take this theory seriously. Melgar looked at the face and saw a foreigner. In reality, he was looking at a local resident who lived 3,000 years ago, the great-great-grandfather of the people who were helping him excavate. However, there are faces that are much harder to explain. Along with the heads, the Olmecs carved other figures. Plump as babies, with the corners of their mouths turned down
like a crying child's, and a cleft at the top of their heads. In general, there is something animalistic in the facial features. Fangs, the flattened nose of a jaguar. Sterling, describing such sculptures, said that they looked almost like baby jaguars. Jaguar man, jaguar baby. A creature on the border between man and beast. What this meant to the Olmecs we still don't fully understand, but this image appears again and again on sculptures, axes, and greenstone figurines. And the oldest, strangest traces of this belief were found not in the city, but in the swamp. In 1987, villagers digging a fish pond near San Lorenzo began pulling jade axes out of the mud. This place
is called El Manati. This is a swamp at the foot of a small hill, about 9 miles from the ancient city. Archaeologists arrived and realized that the swamp was a sanctuary. For centuries, people have brought gifts here and immersed them in the water. The oldest layers date back to approximately 1600 BC. This was before the heyday of San Lorenzo, before the appearance of heads, before everything we call the, arranged in a deliberate order. Green bead necklaces, obsidian knives without any trace of use. They were created solely to be a gift. Carved wooden staffs, fragments of clay figurines with childlike faces-the same ones that look like baby jaguars.
Many of them were sprinkled with red pigment, most likely hematite. Perhaps it symbolized blood. And also balls. 12 rubber balls. These are the oldest rubber balls ever found on Earth. They are about 3600 years old. The Olmecs made their own rubber. They collected the milky sap of the rubber tree and mixed it with the sap of a vine from the birch family. The sap of the vine changed the latex, making it elastic and strong. In Europe and America, this secret was rediscovered only in the 1800s. Charles Goodyear, whose name is now worn on tires around the world, patented his method of processing rubber in 1844. The Olmecs solved the same problem 3,500 years earlier with the help of plant sap. This is where
the nickname the Aztecs gave them came from. Rubber people. For the Aztecs, it was the land where rubber came from. The nickname turned out to be more apt than the archaeologists who borrowed it could have known. The balls at El Manat lay next to the sacrificial axes. Whether they were used in the game or were gifts in themselves is impossible to say. But the oldest ball court in Mesoamerica, found on the Pacific coast, was built around 1400 BC. The game, where a heavy rubber ball was hit with the hips, passed through all the civilizations of Mexico. Spanish conquistadors saw it with their own eyes. It all started here, in the swamp. Later, around 1200 BC. e., people began to lower another type of offering into the swamp.
Wooden busts. 37 human figures carved from wood, long and thin, with elongated heads. Each of them was carefully wrapped in a mat of plant fibers, like a body, and placed in the mud. These are the oldest wooden sculptures ever found in Mexico. In ordinary soil, a tree rots in a few decades. In the swamp, without air and in stable cool water, they lay for 3,000 years. The Olmecs buried valuables the way humans bury their dead-with ritual, wrapped in burial mats. And in 2008, Mexican archaeologists announced another find in El Manat. A clay vessel about 3,750 years old. Remnants of the contents were preserved on its walls. Analysis revealed theobromine in them. This is a compound found in only one plant in this region- cacao. Someone here was drinking
chocolate long before the " golden age" of San Lorenzo. Rubber balls, chocolate, jade. This sounds like heaven. But to understand what this world was really like, we need to come down from the plateau. Go down to where ordinary people lived. Mornings in San Lorenzo begin with water. The river exhales fog, and from the terraces you can watch it spread across the floodplain. Below, on the riverbank, fishermen are already pulling out their nets. Fish was a huge part of this city's diet. In the trash heaps, archaeologists found the bones of snook and tarpon-huge silvery fish that swim into rivers from the Gulf of Mexico. Catfish, local moharra fish, turtles.
The water fed the city better than the fields. The rest of the meat came from dogs. Dogs were raised here for food, just as chickens or pigs were raised elsewhere. Dog bones are constantly found in the garbage of San Lorenzo. Corn grew in the fields around the city. American researchers who studied San Lorenzo in the 1960s estimated that all that the local fields could produce would have fed about 5,500 people. Exactly as many as lived in the center. The city was living on the verge of survival. The houses of ordinary people stood on terraces below the palace.
Most likely, it was a frame of poles, walls covered with clay, and roofs of leaves. Inside-a fire, mats, and clay pots. Nothing superfluous. But some of the finds in this city are impressive. Lorenzo, next to one of the basalt heads. Later, even more were discovered in the Tuxtla Mountains and in Chiapas. Ilmenite is a heavy iron ore. Each block is about the size of a fingertip, about an inch by an inch and a half. Each has a large hole drilled in it and two smaller ones at right angles. Circular scratches are visible inside the holes. It looks like they were drilled with a wooden stick filled with wet quartz sand. Each bead took hours to make, and the ore is somewhat
magnetic. Judging by the composition, it was brought from the mountains of Oaxaca, 140 miles from here. What were they needed for? Jewelry? Money? Hammers for processing obsidian? Links of armor? Each of these ideas was seriously considered. None has been proven. Obsidian was also brought from far away, from mountains, from volcanoes. Jade from Guatemala, shells from the coast. San Lorenzo was the center through which all the stones and jewels of that world passed. And people here may have also used writing. In 1999, road workers, while selecting gravel in a quarry called Cascajal, found a stone block the size of a book. It has
62 characters engraved on it, 28 of which are different. The signs are repeated and run in rows, like words. The block was dated to approximately 1100-900 BC. If this is writing, it is the oldest writing in America. But the block was found in a pile of gravel without archaeologists, and it cannot be linked to a specific layer. Therefore, some experts have doubts. Others believe it is a genuine artifact. The debate is not over yet. In the evening, on the court near the palace. Somewhere on a terrace, a woman is preparing cocoa for a noble family. Down by the water, fishermen are mending their nets. And from the plateau, the giant stone faces of the rulers contemplate all this from above. Very soon these faces will be lying in ravines, face down in the
mud. Around 950 BC. Something happened in San Lorenzo that archaeologists still can't fully explain. The city's monuments began to be destroyed on a massive scale. One head, which archaeologists call "head two," has a face and helmet covered in pits. More than 60 of them, small ones, drilled into the stone, plus two large holes. On the " head of nine," nine dimples were punched directly into the face and headdress. The thrones were broken. Other statues had their faces knocked off, and several stone heads were found in ravines on the slopes of the plateau. Some were covered with earth. Imagine this scene: a plateau above a river. People with stone hammers and drills stand before the face of the ruler, which until recently was the most important
image in the city. Blow after blow, they knock his nose off. They drill dimples in his cheeks. Then they tie ropes around their heads, drag them to the edge of the ravine, and throw them down. The stone face sinks into the ground. When American archaeologists first saw this in the 1960s, they came to a completely logical conclusion. Rebellion or conquest. The people rebelled against their rulers, smashed their images, and threw them down the mountain. Or a foreign people came and destroyed the foreign gods. A clear and understandable picture. Only later did the If you look closely at the damaged monuments, many of them were not just broken. Someone started recycling them.
Head number two, the one covered in dimples, was once a throne itself. It was carved from an old throne, and then someone started working on it again. The pits could have been the beginning of a new carving that was never completed. One of the two American scientists who first described this destruction later changed his mind. He concluded that much of what appeared to be an act of vandalism was actually the reworking of stone. The stone was transported 90 miles. Throwing it away would be madness. The old throne became the head. And the old head could become a throne again.
The ruler died, and his stone passed to the next. There is also a reverse example, far to the south, in Guatemala, in a place called Takalik- Abach. There stands a stone throne, which may once have been a colossal head. A head transformed into a throne. This is the only possible colossal head found outside the center of the Olmec culture. What about heads in ravines? Manat. Wooden busts wrapped in mats are placed in water. Jade axes laid out in rows in the mud.
The Olmecs buried things they considered alive. Perhaps the stone head of the ruler who died was also destined to die. She was killed. They dug holes, distorted facial features, and then buried them. Face down. What is the truth? Rebellion, reworking or burial? Maybe all together. Maybe different things at different times. There is still no answer. After 950 BC, San Lorenzo began to decline. By 800 BC. BC, almost no one lived on the plateau. The largest city in Mesoamerica, built on an artificial mountain with a water supply system and a red palace, was emptied in less than two centuries. But the Olmecs did not disappear.
There, near another river, among swamps and mangroves, a new city was already being built. And in that city they did not hide their heads. They buried entire mountains of green stone. La Venta stands on an island among the marshes along the Tonala River, almost on the very coast of the bay. Lorenzo, it became the main city of the Olmecs and remained so from about 900 to 400 BC. In the middle of the city stands the Great Pyramid, about 110 feet high. Today it looks like a giant cone, eroded by 2,500 years of rain. Originally it was a step pyramid, the largest structure in Mesoamerica of its time. Inside is about 3.5 million cubic feet of earth. And again -everything was transferred manually. It has never
been excavated. In 1967, it was scanned with a magnetometer, and What it is, no one knows yet. To the north of the pyramid lies a complex that archaeologists call "Complex A." It was built in four stages from approximately 1000 to 600 BC. It was surrounded by a fence of basalt columns. Only the chosen ones were allowed to go inside. In 1942, the Their next article in National Geographic was titled "Searching for Jade Jewels in a Mexican Swamp." They found jade, but what lay deeper turned out to be much more extensive. They also found five tombs here. One was built of basalt columns set up as a palisade. In another was a sandstone sarcophagus decorated with a carving of a fantastic beast. more than 50
hiding places were found under "Complex A". Jade axes, polished iron ore mirrors, and five so- called massive offerings. Massive offering number three. First they dug a huge hole. About 50 tons of blocks of serpentinite, a green stone brought from afar, were placed at the bottom. Then they covered it all with clay. Approximately 4,000 tons of clay were poured on top. 50 tons of precious green stone, brought hundreds of miles away without a single wheel, were buried in the ground so that no one would ever see it again. In other pits, serpentinite blocks were laid out in
mosaic floors measuring approximately 15 by 20 feet. Up to 485 blocks each. The pattern looks like a stylized jaguar face or a sign that we can't read. They laid it out, leveled it, and buried it. Floors that no one was supposed to walk on. The same gesture, again. Give the earth your most precious possessions. Like a bust in a swamp. Like heads in ravines. Sacrifice four. A small pit, and in it are 16 stone human figures and six jade axes, standing vertically, like columns or monuments. 15 figures stand in a semicircle. Two of jade, 13 of serpentinite. One, the sixteenth, is made of reddish granite. She stands
aside, her back to the axes, facing everyone else. As if they had gathered for a council or a court. The stage was set and buried. And then someone came back. They dug a small hole on top. In just the right place, exactly at the level of the figures' heads. They looked and filled the hole back up. Who was it? How did they know where to dig if there was only flat ground above? Why did they need to check if those 16 figures were still there? This means that someone remembered. Someone, years later, perhaps generations later, knew exactly what lay underground and where. And another find from La Venta. A stone relief that archaeologists call
Monument 19. A man and a huge snake wrapping around him. On the snake's head is a crest of feathers. This is the oldest known feathered snake in Mesoamerica. 2000 years later, the Aztecs will pray to a feathered serpent named Quetzalcoatl. The Mayans will know him as Kukulcan. The Spanish would see his image on the walls of temples, and the first image of him lay in the swamps of La Venta. The city that so carefully hid its treasures lasted for several more centuries. And then it was all over. Olmec images are not only found in the bay's swamps. They are in places where the Olmecs would seemingly have had no reason to go. In
the mountains of Guerrero, to the west, hundreds of miles from La Venta, there is a cave called Hustlauaca. Its passages stretch for over 3 miles. To get to the drawings, you have to walk more than half a mile deep into the darkness. It's about a 2-hour journey, through partially flooded passages. Halfway through, in a place called the Hall of the Dead, lie about a dozen ancient skeletons. Immediately in front of the drawings, someone had long ago cut a channel about 250 feet long into the rock. And there, deep in the mountain, a man about 6 feet tall is painted on the wall. Black cloak, striped tunic, tall headdress. Its arms and legs are covered in jaguar fur, and a short tail is visible behind it. Next to it is a
red snake with green feathers. as in La Venta, only painted in complete darkness, where not a single ray of light penetrates. These murals are considered the oldest masterful painting in Mesoamerica. Who went so deep into the mountains with fire and paints? And how did Olmec images end up hundreds of miles from Olmec lands? Nobody knows. North of Hustlauca, in the Morelos Valley, there is a village called Chalkatzingo. There, on the rock, there is a carving of a man sitting in a cave. Curls burst from the cave like wind or breath. And above it hang clouds, from which raindrops fall, resembling exclamation marks. A man in a cave, like a ruler on a throne from La Venta.
Only here he calls for rain. For a long time, people thought that the Olmecs or their governors lived in Chalkatzingo. But when the houses were excavated there, it turned out that almost everything else in the village was local. Local figurines, local ceramics, local customs. Only the images on the rocks were Olmec. It seems that the Olmecs spread their faith and symbolic language much further than their power. Just like people all over the world today wear someone else's logos without knowing anything about the company. And now-the last find of this section. On July 16, 1965, two local children near the village of Las Limas in Veracruz found
a statue in the ground. A green stone, about 2 feet high, weighing about 130 pounds. A young man sits holding a limp baby with the face of a jaguar. The villagers dug up the statue and took it home. They placed her on their own altar and called her the Virgin of Las Limas. For them, the young man holding the child was the Madonna and Child. People prayed before her. Archaeologists from Xalapa learned about this find. They promised the village that the statue would be put on display and a school would be built in Las Limas, and they took it to the museum.
This is the largest known Olmec sculpture made of greenstone. In bright light, finely carved images of four Olmec supernatural beings are visible on her shoulders and legs. In October 1970, the statue was stolen from the museum. She was found in a motel room in San Antonio, Texas. The thieves couldn't sell it. She was too famous, and no buyer wanted to take the risk. The statue was returned to Xalapa. Olmec greenstone was buried and dug up, prayed to and stolen. He was drowned in swamps, buried under tons of clay, taken to motels in Texas, but he kept coming back. The Olmecs themselves disappeared over 2,000 years ago. Around 400 BC. La Venta was
abandoned. The latest date from the Great Pyramid is approximately 394 BC. Between 400 and 350 BC. the population of the entire eastern Olmec center The most convincing explanation has to do with rivers. The rivers of this lowland are unpredictable. They carry so much silt that they clog their own channels and shift sideways. Villages that stood on the shore, in a few years find themselves far from the water. Fields that lived thanks to floods are drying up. The paths used to transport stones by water are becoming shallower. Add to this the volcanoes of the Tuxtla Mountains, earthquakes, and subsidence. Nature here was changing the rules faster than people could adapt. For the village it looked like this. At first, the water near
the pier is shallow, and the canoe has to be dragged further through the mud. The fish then move to where the river now flows. Fields that have been fertilized by floods for centuries stop receiving silt, and yields decline. Within a few years, families begin to move to a new channel, and the city with its pyramids, treasures, and squares remains standing near the old silted-up factory. The Olmec culture disappeared. But her people remained. San Lorenzo, deserted by 800 BC, was subsequently reoccupied several times between 600 and 400 BC, and again in the 800s and 900s AD. People built their homes on the same
artificial mountain and most likely had no idea what lay beneath their feet. Three and a half centuries after the fall of La Venta, in the same Tres Zapotes where the cauldron once stood, people were still erecting carved monuments. One of them has the date engraved on it: 32 BC. It was written according to the "long count" calendar that the Maya later used to count their days. Three of the six oldest known monuments with " long count" dates were found in former Olmec lands. In this system, zero was represented by a shell sign. Perhaps this calendar, and with it the zero sign, was invented here. Maybe not. The Olmecs themselves disappeared a century before the earliest known date. This question remains open. But much of what we consider Mayan or
Aztec appeared here for the first time. A game of rubber ball, a feathered serpent, a love for a green stone that was valued higher than gold, a ruler emerging from a cave as if from the womb of the earth, pyramids oriented according to the cardinal points. In 1942, at a scientific conference in Mexico, the Olmecs were named the mother culture of Mesoamerica. People have been arguing about it ever since. Discoveries in recent decades have shown that other peoples of Mexico in the same centuries built, cultivated, and decorated homes without the help of the Olmecs. Perhaps the Olmecs were the older sister of other
cultures in Mexico. The brightest, the most influential, but not the only one. Now we can answer the first question. Who carved the stone heads? Not African sailors, not Atlanteans, not giants. The heads were carved by people whose descendants, by all indications, still live in Veracruz and Tabasco. Many linguists believe that the most likely successors of the Olmecs are the peoples who speak the Mihe-Soque languages. And their languages, it so happens, contain one of the oldest words for cocoa. We don't know what the Olmecs called themselves. The Aztecs gave the name " rubber people" to completely different peoples.
Archaeologists mistakenly adopted this name. And Melgar called their faces Ethiopian. And for 150 years, this word prevented people from seeing the obvious. The people who did not leave us their name were also deprived of their face. And then the 20th century got to work. In the 1950s, just as archaeologists were finishing work at La Venta, oil came to the island. The Mexican state-owned oil company has begun drilling directly on the site of the ancient city. An oil refinery was built nearby. The southern part of La Venta was almost completely destroyed. The large monuments were taken away, no one even recorded where they stood. Robbers dug holes in search of
jade. In 1957, a poet stood up for the heads. Carlos Pelícer, a native of Tabasco, had most of La Venta's sculptures loaded onto trucks and taken to the state capital, Villahermosa. There, in the park by the lake, among the trees, they were placed along the footpath. La Venta Park Museum. Three giant heads still stand there. The stone faces that had once traveled 90 miles on rafts set out once again. On trucks. On January 11, 2009, three people entered that park. Two Mexicans and one American. According to reports, they belonged to a religious sect. They doused 23 Olmec sculptures with salt water, grape juice, and grease.
3,000 years after the Olmecs threw their heads into the gorges, humans came again to destroy these faces. Mexican lawmakers then proposed harsher penalties for damaging monuments. The heads from San Lorenzo were scattered throughout museums. Seven of them stand in the Museum of Anthropology in Jalapa. Two are at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. One remained in a small public museum near San Lorenzo. Stone rulers, thrown face down into gorges 3,000 years ago, now stand in illuminated halls, with schoolchildren taking selfies against their backdrop. And what about the "boiled" head? It stands in the small museum of the village of Tres Zapotes.
About a half mile from where a hired hand hit her with his shovel in the 1800s. Residents of the same village see her every day. Many of them have the same wide cheekbones, heavy eyelids, and full lips. There is one more chapter worth mentioning. The biggest of all. The one from La Cobata. 11 feet tall, about 40 tons in weight. She is not like the others. Her features are rougher, and it seems like she was never completed. The carvers abandoned their work halfway through. Today it stands in the main square of the city of Santiago Tuxtla at the foot of the same mountains where the Olmecs quarried the stone for all their faces.
Maybe this is the last of the heads, and she never left the mountains. The Olmecs did not leave us a single line that we could read. So let the last word belong to a man who lived on this earth almost 2,000 years after them. Nezahualcoyotl, poet and ruler of the city of Texcoco in the 1400s. In his poems, he compared jade to the most valuable thing in the world, and he, like the Olmecs, knew that no stone is eternal. I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this. Do we really live on the earth, having put down roots? Not forever on earth, just a short time here. Even jade will crack. Even gold will break.
Even the feathers of a quetzal will tear. Not forever on earth, just a short time here.
