Where the Olmecs influenced by East Africans? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

As I've outlined here, there is simply no evidence for this. (Seems like while I was writing this others have posted other links as well)

African origins for the Olmec were a lesser-known, fringe theory from the beginnings of archaeology in the Americas. The idea only gained real popular traction in the '70s when Ivan van Sertima published They Came Before Columbus. As all of the provided links can tell you, that book is a tremendous mess of misquotations, artifacts stripped from context, and, weirdly enough, 19th-century race theory. Despite this, non-archaeologists and non-historians continue to cite the book as an example of how American school curricula ignore Africans: see this article published two months ago or the bestselling Lies My Teacher Told Me.

One cannot overstate the legitimacy of Afrocentric claims that African contributions to global history have been intentionally and systemically left out. One also cannot overstate the paucity of evidence that that the Olmec were African.

The claim is practically never seen outside of contexts where someone is explicitly trying to diversify the history of the Americas- and, more specifically, diversify the way it is taught. This makes it a particularly thorny issue to discuss. As I've discussed here, most lay people read history or social science texts not to learn, but to understand of their role in the social world. People evaluate texts based on how much they "make sense," how much utility they provide in ordering things they already know or fill in the gaps of their knowledge. Read Reddt threads on Jordan Peterson or Jared Diamond, and you'll find people defending them not because of their accuracy (in fact, it's often explicitly despite their inaccuracies) but because they "answered questions they always had in a way that made sense" or "helped them become a better person." Critiquing the histories of these authors is therefore incredibly difficult to do effectively. Those authors have popular appeal because they let problematic assumptions be. Guns, Germs, and Steel never asks "Did Europeans really conquer the Americas that decisively?" but builds on the popular assumption that they did.

Yet the people appropriating the Olmec as African are doing so in response to centuries of legitimate grievances. Whether or not their claims are correct, those are grievances that must not be ignored. This is why most archaeologists aren't keen to tackle the issue. Whole books have been written in response to Diamond and others because he is appealing to the authority which we represent. I feel comfortable engaging with claims that Bolivia's archaeological site of Tiwanaku is "impossibly designed" and "must be alien" because the sentiment behind those claims- that academia is all just a big cover up- is something I fundamentally disagree with.

The most concerning thing, and the point that African-Olmec-thinkers have not contested enough, is the way the idea robs indigenous Americans of any kind of agency or ingenuity. Writing? Nope. Monumental architecture? Nope. Mathematics? Nope. Those all had to be brought over from somewhere else. Van Sertima even has the gall to ask "How do you think Native Americans feel about being told they were discovered?" before writing an entire book about how all their accomplishments were done in admiration or mimicry of African visitors. If you read the recent article I linked above, the authors make very little effort- if any- to distinguish indigenous Americans from the "Olmec." You couldn't be faulted for thinking there wasn't anyone else in Mexico before the "Africans arrived." Sadly, I don't think most archaeologists are aware of just how frequently this idea is repeated in literature outside the field.