Bantu stone circles dating back 75,000 years ...

[Ishtar]

From Archaeologica:

This is fascinating stuff. I've got something on the Bantu, so I'll add it later. In the meantime, here's the article and some great pics:

When historians first stumbled upon these structures they simply assumed that they were cattle kraal left behind by the Bantu people as they moved south and settled the land from around the 13th century. But research work done by people like Cyril Hromnik, Richard Wade, Johan Heine and a handful of others over the past twenty years, into ancient southern African history, has revealed that these stone structures are in fact more than just cattle kraal, but the remains of ancient temples and astronomical observatories of lost ancient civilisations that stretch back for thousands of years.

These circular ruins are spread over thousands of square kilometres. They can only truly be appreciated from the air, and those lucky enough to view these ruins from the air will be able to see hundreds of ruins in a one-hour trip.

Many of the circular structures are aligned to specific geographic points including solstices and equinoxes. But only when Johan Heine began to experiment with other possible encoded geometry, that the real hidden secrets of the ruins began to emerge. They are riddled with sacred geometry, Reiki symbolism and the Phi factor or golden ratio of 1,618.

The discovery of the ancient stone calendar site by Johan Heine (Adam’s Calendar) in among all these stone dwellings and temples, would suggest that some of the structures would date back to the same era as the calendar some 75,000 years ago. It shows us with a certain level of clarity that these lost civilisations have been around for much longer than anyone could ever have imagined. It would not be absurd to then suggest that we may be staring at the very first concentrated human settlements inhabited by the early Homo sapiens.

There's more here from the Makomati community, who are bringing these southern African circles to world attention

[Ishtar]

This is an interesting interview with Michael Tellinger of the Makomati Foundation who has said in an email to me that he is very keen to get this information out there. Some are sceptical, including the author of this blog. But Tellinger answers questions here about they arrived at the dates they did, and it sounds as if they are running up against an old colonial version of the Club.

Lucky for me, Michael Tellinger stopped by the site a couple of weeks ago. I followed his initial comment on the September 20 article with a list of questions, to which he graciously responded. Here are his answers in their entirety:

1. First, according to makomati.com, conventional wisdom explains the ruins as cattle kraal built and used by the Bantu people within the past 1,000 years. The Makomati Foundation dates these structures as being far older: somewhere between 75,000 to 250,000 years old. This is actually the basis for several questions:

75,000 - 200,000 years seems like a pretty broad estimate, given what little I personally know of dating techniques. What accounts for the 125,000 year discrepancy?

We are dealing with a very complex site that covers over 500 square kilometres and makes up the largest and oldest city on Earth that has almost completely eroded.

We have gathered artifacts from the same site that date back from 300,000 yrs and 600 years. This points to a very long occupation of these sites.

BUT we deal with Archaeoastronomy mainly to determine the deviation from today’s cardinal points. 3 degrees; 17 min. and 42 sec deviation.

The presessional cycle of 25,800 years has almost been completed - this means that we are in essence working with chunks of 25,000 years.

Now we have to look for other clues as to how many years it actually is.

The main indicators are the alignment with Orion – which could have only happened 75,000 years ago and more.

And Geology – erosion.

Dolerite erodes very slowly and the erosion patterns on most monoliths indicate that they were brought there a long, long time ago.

Lichen growth is also a reasonable indicator. We have lots of evidence there.

2. What techniques have been used? What are the advantages of these techniques?

Archaeoastronomy; Geology – alien rocks brought from elsewhere; astronomy; and what most of us often forget about – logic and reason.

3. Did the Bantu in fact use these structures as cattle kraal, as recently as the 13th century? If so, were they making use of what at that time were already ancient artifacts, or were additional structures built by the Bantuu (or other indigenous peoples) in the intervening time?

Many examples indicate that the Bantu people used the existing materials to build their own dwellings and kraals and sometime simply occupying existing structures.

They were also used by the British and Boer soldiers in the South African War around 1900. This has introduced many contaminants into the original sites but many still remain pristine.

4. If not, would you care to theorize on how this wrongful theory came to be accepted as doctrine?

This incorrect doctrine was adopted by ignorant and lazy historians who have done very little research themselves into ancient human history – and simply accepted the stories taught in mainstream academic institutions.

I know this sounds conspiratorial but unfortunately it is so. When ill informed people deal with the current finds they simply cannot see the bigger picture.

It is as if there was no history in South Africa before the Bantu people arrived. This is obviously a very ignorant and arrogant stance – but it doe hold a firm grip an many academics in this part of the world. It is called political correctness and is doing us all a great disservice.

5. The ruins cover a considerable piece of real estate. When I think of empires or civilizations with both a) similar geographical spread and b) an inclination to build durable structures ( for example, the Egyptians, Romans, Incans and Greeks, as opposed to the Sioux or Aborigine), I typically picture a display in a museum that includes all manner of ‘household items’: pots, tools, earthenware, jewelry and so forth. Has Makomati discovered any such artifacts?

We are dealing with the largest and oldest city on Earth with many thousands of habitants over an extended period of time.

With ancient terraces; roads; wells; irrigations systems; dwellings, temples and work places.

Many artifacts that show a habitation period of over 300,000 years. With specific items pointing to various incidents.

We also have what we now believe to be the OLDEST pottery in the world – maybe as old as 50,000 years. But the academics that dated it from WITS university in 1986 were so freaked out by this discovery that they returned the fragments to the owner with a short message – “They are about 10,000 years old.”

Other archaeologists recall this find and attest that the ash heal in which the potter was found was around 30 – 50,000 years old.

6. Same question as 1, above, applied specifically to Adam’s Calendar.

Adam’s Calendar is the flagship among all these because it is unique in the world today and can be dated with some accuracy to a great time in antiquity.

7. The people who built these structures: do they have a name? Beyond their architectural capabilities, what else do we know about them?

We know very little about them except what we are discovering on a daily basis in the expansive ruins.

They were most likely all involved in gold and other metal mining.

[Ishtar]

These are some excerpts from a book by a Bantu about southern African folklore and history. His name is Credo Mutwa, the book is called Indaba, My Children and it was dubbed “a work of genius” by the Sunday Times when it was published in the 1960s.

Here Mutwa explains how the astronomical knowledge of the Bantu was passed down orally, generation by generation, over tens of thousands of years, and explains what he was taught.

I don’t know whether these theories about the creation of our solar system are correct, as I’m not an astronomer or an astrophyscist ... but, fwiw, they make sense to me, or at least as much sense as anything else.

According to your religion, you were all heathens and pagans some two thousand years ago, and many of your people were heathens for many centuries subsequently. We can trace our religion, culture, mythology, legends and history back tens of thousands of years in the past, farther back than any known civilisation on earth, to the later Stone Age. It is part of our culture — we did not learn these from recent archaeological discoveries ....

Man’s environment is the world as a whole, and the latter’s environment is our solar system. “Man is part of the stars — and the stars, sun and moon are all part of Man!” Thus believes the Fire-Worshippers of the Southern Bu-Kongo.

Astronomy was not brought to Man in Africa by Western civilisation.

We have our own theories on the origin of the solar system. These we have jealously withheld from foreigners for fear of being ridiculed. But I have compared our theories with those brought to us from beyond the seas, and the latter do not impress me.

I do not fear ridicule and scorn, because it is said in our sayings of wisdom that “He that is the first to walk past the village of cannibals is the quickest to land in the cooking pot,” an expression used for those who invite scorn and ridicule merely by being the first to promote a new idea...

The reason people from beyond the seas look upon the Black Man of Africa as stupid is that we have all along been too afraid to show the them that we too can think, that we too have ideas of our own....

I do not believe that all the planets of our solar system sprang from our sun. Our sun is an ordinary star of which there are millions in the Universe, and how many of these have planets? I believe that the planets are formed through the disintegration of such stars. A star merely explodes or is torn apart by collisions or gravitational forces and scatters as countless droplets hurled in all directions. These smaller bodies lose their inherent heat sooner and solidify as they wander through space. Many are subsequently caught by the gravitational force of other stars and go into orbit around them. Our sun’s planets are such droplets that had been caught from time to time through the millennia.

The very smallest droplets lack the momentum to persist in orbit and plunge into the sun, but some were caught by the gravitational force of the various planets already in orbit around the sun. The larger planets caught more satellites than the smaller, and this would appear to be the only phenomenon accountable in terms of natural laws.

Otherwise, all characteristics of the solar system seem to oppose every alternative theory.

Sizes and distances, planes of orbiting, speeds and temperatures would have been more regular or systematic had the solar system originated according to any of the other theories. Our solar system is, on the contrary, inconsistent; planets are not logically arranged according to size and distance. Our planet has one moon while Venus of similar size has none and a smaller planet like Mars has two. Jupiter’s planets all seem to be in good shape while those of Saturn have all collided and disintegrated. Apparently, a sizable ‘moon’ entered the solar system after many planets were already orbiting and instead of being caught by one, collided with it to produce the belt of asteroids. Everything seems to point to the fact that our solar system was not formed as a result of a single process, but gradually came into being as a result of successive occurrences.

For this theory, there is no better proof than the condition of our own moon. Its surface is pocked with scars caused by meteoric bombardments and these bombardments did not occur while the moon was a satellite of our planet. Some of these scars and craters are so large the objects responsible for them must have been of such a size that, had they turned their attention to the earth instead, our atmosphere would not have offered adequate protection. Our moon came into orbit around this planet at a later stage, with a face not much different to what it is today.

If a single process had produced our solar system, all orbits of both planets and satellites would have been in the same plane. The fact that they do in fact come near to a particular plane is simply because all bodies in our nebular system move closely in a particular plane. [Sun’s gravitational waves, I think ... Ish]

This theory explains more successfully all the strange geological phenomena we see in the crust of our own planet. Vast orogenetic processes caused whole continents to rise and sink, to split, to bend and wander, but all at different times during our geological history.

It would appear that every time the sun caught another planet and especially when the Earth caught its moon, heavy disturbances were caused on the face of the earth which not only affected the structure and nature of land and water masses, but also played havoc with animal and plant life. Such spectacular events certainly took place even after the origin of Homo sapiens, as is also borne out by the terrific ice ages of the Pleistocene.

And if these occurrences have disappeared from the memory of the other races of mankind, they still live in the folklore of Africa.

[Ishtar]

Michael Tellinger has just emailed me this picture from Adam's Calendar, one of the stone circles in question.



His explanation is:
A dramatic view of Adam’s Calendar showing the carved edge of the front stone. These stones were most likely brought here from about 2 -5 kilometres away and placed into position. It seems the front stone was positioned so that the right edge caught the setting sun in the summer months. After this the left edge was carved to the exact point so that it would cast a shadow on the flat calendar rock during the winter months.

There seems to be some low lying cloud in the background to the right, so I'm wondering if this location is very high up.

[Ishtar]

Michael Tellinger has just sent this through with the following comment on the geometry of the circle:

The Hexagon

This ruin has become the subject of much research and measurement by John Heine. There are multiple alignments with the cardinal geographical points. The perfect hexagon is formed by inserting the length of the flattened edge across the top right side into the circle. Notice the completely eroded and ruined walls and structures around the site that possibly indicate this was originally a much older structure that was rebuilt or maintained after the other structures around it became obsolete. When viewed from certain angles some distance away, the completely eroded remains of a much larger complex settlement is clearly visible.

Does anyone know who John Heine is?

[Ishtar]

This has just come through from Michael Tellinger.

Seeing these magnificent ruined structures from the air, forces us to reconsider the size of the ancient population that lived in these part of southern Africa thousands of years ago. While some walls have remained, many of the lesser walls of the larger extended settlement have eroded to the ground. But the complexity and size of the original expanse is still clearly visible. Unfortunately this effect is completely lost to visitors on the ground and from my own experience you would not even know that you are in the centre of such a complex at ground level. This has caused much destruction by developers, landowners and forestry, mostly due to ignorance and disinformation from esteemed academics who have claimed that these ruins are just cattle kraal, of no historic importance.

[kbs2244]

Please stay on top of this!
It is fascinating and brings up all kinds of questions.
Like “How many times and over how long a period and with what kind of knowledge were humans ‘coming out of Africa’ “

[Ishtar]

I will stay on top of this, KB. I think it's very important, not least because it has great paradigm-busting potential. I also hear from Michael Tellinger a lot, and there is another email from him this morning.

I have encountered some opposition in the archaeology and megalithic community to the dating of the circles. But I think it's encouraging that one of southern Africa's forestry giants has acknowledged tham and begun to maintain those on its land.

Thousands of impressive ruins like this one have been destroyed by forestry over the last century. Here they put a road right through the ruin, pushing aside some huge monoliths that were arranged in the middle. The purpose and its original layout will never be known. It is however encouraging that SAPPI, a forestry giant in southern Africa has acknowledged the significance of these ruins and has begun a program to maintain and preserve some of the ruins on their land.

[cropredy]

Looking at all of these stones cast aside without a second glance reminds me of this,


Maybe it's TIME to gather up the stones, and make sense of them again?

The dogon, perhaps should be listened to at the same TIME?
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/unive ... rio06.htm#

Kevin

[Ishtar]

Great Dogon link, cropredy. I've posted some of it in the Prehistoric Astronomy thread.

[cropredy]

Ishtar,
it may pay to look through some of the links on afrovideo,
http://www.afrovideo.org/play.php?vid=2452
http://www.afrovideo.org/play.php?vid=487

Then link it into sirius?
http://exodus2006.com/nomocode.htm
http://fusionanomaly.net/dogontribe.html
http://www.halexandria.org/dward109.htm
kevin

[kbs2244]

I am not conversational with the different tribe areas of Africa.
Is there a connection between the Dagon and the Bantu?

[Ishtar]

I am not conversational with the different tribe areas of Africa.
Is there a connection between the Dagon and the Bantu?

I was going to say No, but then I did a bit of research and now I'm thinking 'possibly'..



The red bit is where the Dogon are. The orange bit is where the Bantu are. Both regions speak a form of Niger-Congo. Plus the Bantu say they originally came from further north.

[kbs2244]

Well, from what I know about the topography of Africa, The Dagon would have been able to observe the stars easy enough .
But living in a heavy jungle cover area they may not have had the open room to build long sight line observers platform.

The Bantu area is a more open land area with a better view of the horizon and a larger sky dome.

So they may be some connection.

[Ishtar]

More from Michael Tellinger:

The internal structure of these ruins are a real mystery and yet there are common structural threads that run through many of them. The small enclosures with no imaginable purpose and no doors is one such common feature.

[Ishtar]

From Michael Tellinger today:

One of the most perplexing things about these ruins is the size of the population that they must have housed. The settlement of southern Africa by the Bantu people only started in the 13th century and took several centuries before there were any substantial numbers of African settlers from the north here in the southern part.

Anthropologists claim that the influx of Bantu settlers from the north happened in very small groups, the largest being no more that 300 people. At the time of the South African War (Boer War) there were no more than 800 black settlers from north and east Africa who over time became known by the names we call them today. And yet there are thousands of ruins dating back thousands of years suggesting there must have been a population of between 200,000 and 600,000 people living here long before we previously imagined.

This is now certainly playing havoc with many academic minds since they have never before been asked to stretch their imagination this far back in time to actual human activity.

I don't know how true that last sentence is ... we have recognised human activity in the Wonderwerk caves in southern Africa stretching back 2 millon years in the form of stone tools (although attributed to Homo Habilis). Also this worked piece of hematite was found in the southern African Blombos cave (c. 77,000 BCE)




However, he's right in that nothing had been found in the middle Bantu regions before. Here's the map to show where the Bantu region is. It's the orange bit ...and the red bit is where Bantu are said to come from in the 13th century, which is where the Dogon currently are.



In addition, we have the San, (the Khoi San speakers, shown in the green bit) who are one of the few remaining shamanic cultures left in the world. They're thought to have been in southern Africa since the Stone Age, and cave paintings show San peoples with their trademark big buttocks, which is where they store their fat.

Khoisan is the name by which the lighter skinned indigenous peoples of southern Africa,the Khoi (Hottentots) and the San (Bushmen) are known. These people dominated the sub-continent for millennia before the appearance of the Nguni and other black peoples.

This is evident from their marvelous animated paintings on rocks and caves walls as far afield as Namaqualand, the Drakensberg and southern Cape. The many clicking sounds used in their speech had influenced the language of some of the African-speaking nations well before the arrival of the white colonists in the 17th century`

In the past they were hunter-gatherers, living largely off game, honey and the roots and fruits of plants. They lived - and some still do today in total harmony with nature, posing no threat to wildlife and vegetation by over-hunting or gathering. The semi-nomadic existence of the San was (and is) governed by the seasons and the movement of game.

The San have short, slight bodies, small hands and feet and yellow-brown skin that wrinkle early. The women tend to store fat in their buttocks and have sharply hollowed backs. They look exactly like the characteristic profiles depicted in the San rock paintings. They store fat in their buttocks - a natural adaptation to their precarious existence in a harsh environment.

In time the whites encroached upon the San's traditional hunting grounds. Some Bushmen went to live with them and others moved on west and north in search of land where they could live freely. Today they are found only in the northwestern Cape, the Kalahari, Namibia and Botswana.

But unfortunately, we really don't very much about Africa at all ... to our conception, it truly is the Dark continent. This is because European colonialists, over hundreds of years, did their level best to stamp out the culture, the beliefs and all the folklore stories which carried the African peoples' histories, and replace them with Christianity.

[Ishtar]

Hello, hello... what do we have here? Indian gold miners in deepest Africa 2,000 years ago, or earlier?

This is a famous ruin near Waterval Boven, Mpumalanga. Dr. Cyril Hromnik has done much research in this area showing the presence of Asian/Indian/Dravidian gold miners here some 2000 years ago or even further back in time. This is one of the ruins that has fortunately spared the bulldozers of forestry and is being maintained by SAPPI

This is all the more interesting because Credo Mutwa, the Bantu writer on southern African mythology, folklore and history, is convinced that the so-called Out of Africa 'movement of the peoples' was preceded by an Out of India into Africa move, and not the other way round.

I've written to Michael Tellinger to ask for more details from Dr Hromnik's research.

[kbs2244]

So these structures were housing for the miners?

[Ishtar]

Michael Tellinger sent this one through this morning, to highlight the difficulty finding all of these circles. This one was found in a forest ...which even from the air, would be difficult to spot:

A recognisable horseshoe shape ruin with pillars at its entrance lies in among the forestry trees. The boundaries that make up the larger ruins which surrounds this feature are not visible in this picture. Large boulder monoliths are often found scattered in close proximity.

[kbs2244]

So they are not restricted to an open savanna type location?
At least not in today’s climate?
Do we have any idea of the terrain for this one at the time they were dated?
They are sure looking less and less like “cow pens.”