User:Maizeresearcher/The Idea of the Elephant in Cultures of Pre-15th Century Americas

THE IMAGE OF ELEPHANTS DIFFUSED EARLY TO AMERICA

Carl L. Johannessen, Professor Emeritus Biogeography, University of Oregon

INTRODUCTION

If there is one animal that we think of as associated with exotic, old world lands, it is the elephant. We think of them as huge beasts and carriers of huge burdens in Asia and with a different species of elephant in Africa. Elephants in Southeast and South Asia were used for moving logs, transporting maharajahs, etc. Placing their images mentally in Central America and Mexico takes a bit of modification of your ideas perhaps. But prehistoric Mayan artists were making sculptures of them within their religious sites. The Olmec & Maya, among others, were worshipping the idea of the elephant, although the elephant was not supposed to have been in America. How did the Americans, working with their prehistoric tools, discover and come to know anything about these giant beasts? Sculptures of elephant heads and bodies are present in Middle America from Olmec & Mayan times. We have had evidence in academia of this image since at least 1924, when G. Elliot Smith published his book Elephants and Ethnologists: Asiatic Origins of the Maya Ruins. The book is about the symbolism of the Elephant in America. At the time it was published, the book was made fun of, ignored or dismissed. But it’s been 83 years and we can re-examine this evidence without harming the careers of his detractors because Smith was ultimately correct. The faces on the sculptures having the giant trunks have generally been interpreted as macaw bills, but this explanation has been an unsatisfying compromise by archaeologists and zoologists. This giant parrot’s bill does not regularly fit all the shapes of elephant trunks shown in the Mayan sculptures; the lower bill of the macaw is never present. (Figure 1) It’s a bit like drawing a mustache on an old picture to convince yourself that it’s really your uncle.

Given the evidence from both the Old World (South and Southeast Asia primarily) and the Americas it is evident that there was regular and sustained transoceanic trade between these tropical cultures long before Columbus (Sorenson and Johannessen 2009). The sculptural evidence of the images of the elephant being present in the Olmec (1400 B.C.E. – 400 B.C.E.) and Mayan (2000 B.C.E. – 1500 C.E.) cultures, long before European contact with these peoples, also strengthen this position. The presence of bas-reliefs of numerous plants of American origin in the temples of Southern Indian Hoysala Dynasty (950 C.E. - 1268 C.E.) further bolsters the evidence of regular and sustained interaction between the hemispheres. It is important to note that we are here discussing the images and concepts of the elephant and not elephants themselves being present.

POSSIBLE GANESHA The most improbable of the sculpted elephant images were found in Mexico and Honduras dating from the Olmec culture in the Huasteca region of Mexico in Pre-Colombian times. The oldest known elephant head sculpture is on a kneeling human body from this Olmec archaeological horizon in San Luis Potosi area,Mexico. The Huastecan culture from there, speak a Mayan Language. This image was located – without a title in the Olmec section of the National Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Mexico City. (Figure 2) This room has now been reorganized at the Museum since I was there last when it was in storage. Dr. Beatrice de la Fuente, the prime sculptural art historian of the Olmecs in Mexico, wrote in 1996 that this sculpture is the strangest and most enigmatic of all the Olmec sculptures. She asserts that it is either the head of an elephant or a panther positioned on top of a human body. Since panthers are not known for noses that extend down to their chests, I submit that it is an elephant head that was sculpted by a person who had never seen an elephant. It is higly likely he saw an model of Ganesha. Unfortunately, the elephant nose has been broken off and the scar of the sculpted block smoothed and polished, but you can still see by the more ancient patina elsewhere over the belly where the trunk used to be. I hypothesize that the sculptor was told how the statue, originally, should have looked by observing a small model of the elephant brought in from India by traders from that region of the world. It is also possible that the Mayan/Olmec sculptors had access to a small, easily transported statue of Ganesha. The head was positioned on a human body, in the custom of Hindu, Egyptian and other cultures’ religious etiquette for fused animals and humans. The human figure with the elephant head of the Olmec Period has its arms beside the rotund belly and its hands touching the spread knees of the human body, as the normal Ganesha has. The foot, ankle and toes of this elephant-headed-human statue (Ganesha) are barely showing under his backside; the toes against the ground. This rear view is similar to the form of the sculpted humans of Moslem faith at prayer sitting on their heels. This position is also an ancient Yogic pose known as Hero’s Pose or Virasana. (Figure 3) This carving of Ganesha is said to be totally unusual by the owner of the Ganesha store called Chandni, “The Biggest & finest Collection Of Ganeshas In All Mediums, M.G. Road, Bangalore, India” [Phone 080-594149/5580210]. How that happened will not be known until we find some more models of that era. The Olmec sculpture, which is dated between approximately 1,000 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., raises curious anomalous dates for Ganesha (de la Fuentes, Beatriz, et al., 1996). This is an earlier date for the development of Ganesha, than is believed to have evolved Ganesh in India. But since Ganesh is the most regularly carried image in India now, it was surely present in the early religious feelings there too. The nose on the elephantine head of the Olmec sculptures has been broken off where it curled away from the belly and the broken stump has been polished but the breakage is noticeable because of a darker patina on the statue’s belly. The statue has two large holes for eyes on its face and small ears protrude from the side of the head. The top of the head is relatively flatter than are most of the heads of Ganesha figures in India. The head of Ganesha is shown similarly with a relatively flat head in Karnataka with small circular, rounded bumps typical of the elephant (Figure 4). Perhaps this Olmec elephant-headed statue may have had a gold crown resting on that flat space on his head originally before the arrival of the gold-hungry Spaniards. (In north India-Nepal, when Ganesha is painted or sculpted, Ganesha is always shown with an elaborate head covering or a crown, which is variously sculpted.) In Karnataka Province the smoother top of the head without large crown is sometimes shown. Commonly the head has a ridge running transversely across the top/back of the head, from the right to left side of the head, with a grooved “V” at the back/center of the head, bisecting this ridge, reminiscent of the groove between the two, rounded, cerebral domes of the live elephant head. This same ridge and “V” is shown on this Olmec Ganesha. This back ridge and its bisecting groove and the long nose hanging down the middle of the chest-tummy are the marks that the Hindu recognizes as definitive of Ganesha in Bangalore, Mysore, or Mangalore, for instance. The Ganesha sculptures in India normally hold a bowl of sweets that helps to make him fat. At the Hindu temple dated to the 12-13th century in Bindur on the coast of western Karnataka Pradesh, there is a sculpture of Ganesha in their largest temple. He is holding a fat maize ear vertically, in his hand! (Figure 5) Because of the maize ear and the date of the Bindur Ganesha (11th to 13th Century) we can see a definite exchange of cultural traits, including the concept of the elephant in the form of Ganesha, between the Indian subcontinent and the Americas as well as the maize ear in an area of easy access (west coast) to maize from America. The name for maize in India, Maka, is similar to the Arawak Indian name, Makanadzi, Maaka. We should point out that this geographic region in the Indian Peninsula is a particularly fruitful location for my research on plants. There is an abundance of temple art containing maize and other sculptured American crops such as sunflower, annona, cherimoya, pineapple, cashew, even chili pepper. (Johannessen and Parker, 1989; Sorenson and Johannessen, 2009; and Gupta, 1996). The” Ganesha” of the Olmecs described here is not a total singularity. Another small human figurine with an elephant head has been found in the Mayan World Music Museum, three or four kilometers north of Antigua, Guatemala. Although, the elephant-headed God has a somewhat shorter nose - trunk - which indicates that the sculptor had never seen an actual elephant and had only a model of Ganesha from which to sculpt an “impossible” form of a “human” shaped god. (Figure 6) The Ganesha, Shiva, maize, sunflower, and all of the rest need a serious study to compare them with sculptures in America. At least we know that maize ears are carved with more nearly “photographic” accuracy in India than are typical for maize ears in Mexico, for instance. Perhaps in Mexico they could just sketch the maize ear and it would be recognized automatically. I knew that the Maya, unlike the Hindus, were rarely explicit in sexual motifs. And if there really is Mexican evidence of Hindu religious thought, there should also have been many of the phalluses, called Lingan or Lingam, representing Shiva, in their religious carvings. We have, in fact, discovered many phallus sculptures in and around Chichen Itza, Labna, and Uxmal, as well as many other Mayan sites. Some have been moved to museums while others remain in situ in the ruins. So, I asked at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City whether they had a record of finding a large phallus (a Shiva representative, possibly) in the sculptures of Mexico. They had found one large sculptured phallus in the Huasteca dating back to the early Olmecs; they have it at the Museum in the Olmec/Maya Room, and it was on display in 2005. I must refrain from intricate discussion out of deference to the discoverer, who is writing a report on it. This region is, after all, the Huastecan region where both the Ganesha-like and the phallus sculptures were found. If the source of the ideas of the elephants is Hindu in origin, then a matching religious yoni would have surrounded the giant Huastecan phallus, as it usually does in India. The phalli found in Mexico and Central America were much more intricate than are regularly found lingams in India, but if sculptors from India were employed the phallus (Shiva) would have been standing erect and inside at the center of a yoni. The Shiva image would have been in the most holy place in a temple. Therefore, we really need to go back to the place of discovery of the phalli, including those in Chichen Itza and Uxmal, and hunt for the large, round circle or square stone with a hole in its center that would be the size to contain this intricately sculptured phallus. If this stone sculptured yoni is used for some other purpose now, which is likely the case, the disc still might be possible to recognize. Of course, the disc of the yoni may have been split into little pieces for construction of a building. At least we should hunt for a 2-3+ meter diameter circular “fountain or bath” of hard rock, standing at least a meter high. We believe there was likely contact between the Huastecans and the Hindu in India, since there are about 50 species of plants from America that had been taken to India before 1,500 C.E. (Sorenson and Johannessen, 2009). The contact may have occurred many timeswith India in the distant past between the two regions long before Columbus and Cortez arrived. Though the female “deities of maize” in the Aztec section of the National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology of Mexico occasionally show bare breasts and hold two ears of maize in their hands, they do it without the mudra or sacred hand positions you find in India. Sub-continent Indian sculptures of women holding maize are arranged in somewhat similar manner, but with single ears of maize, in more than a hundred 11th to 13th century temples of Hoysala Dynasty age in Karnataka Pradesh, India. In India they used a chloritic schist rock that allowed extremely fine textures representations the human and the vegetal material present in Indian temples.

DIFFUSION OF OTHER CROPS Aside from corn, the other crops from pre-Columbian America that are shown in India in these temples back to the 5th century are: sweet potato, lagenaria gourd, ceiba, peanut, beans, squash, chili pepper, sunflower, annonas or custard apple, among others. In the case of maize the names are strikingly similar across the Atlantic in the Amazon Valley and across the Pacific to South China and Vietnam. (Maps) The western Indian terms for Maize (maka or makka or makai) and for peanut (mani) are the same as those used in the lower Amazon Basin among the Arawak, Tupi or Guarani tribes in the distant past. Also, the transfer of the chicken from its Southeast Asian origin to America, even the black-boned, black–meated chicken (BB-BMC), is called a Karnatak by Hindus in India and the Arawaks of the lower Amazon according to George Carter. In Belize, the archaeological site Caracol, in the Maya Mountains, we have found a record of archaeological chicken bones at a site that has been dated earlier than 650 C.E. (Teeter 2004, 182). This is obviously further indication of contact with Southeast Asia. In both Asia and America the chicken is used in highly similar medicinal curing rituals. Historically, in general, the traditional Amerinds kept chickens and even their eggs, and use them ritually instead of eating them, but the Maya currently may sell both products to the Ladinos. (Ladinos are South and Central Americans of European stock, and they rarely use chickens for rituals as the Maya do.) “On both sides of the oceans the BB-BMC is thought to absorb any and all evils and hexes that might have been cast on the house, family persons, tools, or ships.”  (Johannessen, 1981 and 1982)  The Hindu and Southeast Asian sailors naturally would have taken the BB-BMC on sailing trips to calm the “spirits,” and travel safely. Spanish or Portuguese sailors had their own totems and icons, rooted in Catholicism. Someone bringing a “magical” chicken aboard a Manila galleon would be risking his life. The New World similarities in the names from the region of Karnataka Pradesh, India are of interest because Karnataka Pradesh has the ports close to the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic route to Brazil or the Antilles and Central America. This would make it very easy and logical for the exchange of names. Perhaps this is enough background; let us return to the search for the idea of the elephant.

RAIN GOD AND TEMPLE ART NEAR THE PYRAMIDS AT UXMAL Uxmal, in Mexico’s Yucatan state, is a ruined Mayan city, and the name is said to mean “built three times.” The Mexican government, mindful of tourist dollars, is trying to top that, and they have constructed two hotels and a museum there. Some of the decaying architecture has been restored. And it is possible to look at a slice of Mayan life throughout the ancient site. The Mayan rain god, Chac, or the Aztec rain God, Tloloc, is illustrated by an elephant-shaped God-Head in the east wall of what is now called, the Nunnery. The similar Chacs are found on the front of the Governor’s Palace and elsewhere. “At Uxmal, the image of Chac, with its curved nasal appendage – which the … European visitors took to be the trunk of elephant – is treated in a schematic way.” (Stierlin, 2001 140-141, 172, 175, 200). This location is just north of the largest Pyramid, called the Magician, at Uxmal. The defining features of these sculptures are the elephantine noses. The giant faces of Tloloc/Chac with their long, recurving trunks, their broad face and deep set eyes illustrate the elephant. Essentially, the nose of the elephant is proposed as the indication of the image representing the “long-nosed” rain-god, as it is labeled by the anthropologists/archaeologists. Examples of the Chac’s nose curve up as if the elephant had raised its trunk to near verticality. In other examples, the trunk hangs down and then curves up as if begging for fruit. Essentially, the same set of elephantine faces are found at all the major Mayan archaeological sites at Chichen Itza (Figures 7 & 8), Uxmal, (Figure 9), etc. in the Yucatan or Xunantunich in Belize, and other locations. The Rain-Gods of the Maya all have recurving and, potentially, water-giving trunks (as if the elephant has just filled his nose with water). It may curve up and then down or down and then up with the tip sometimes curling under at the end of the trunk. No macaw’s bills have all those shapes, though some archaeologists have assigned that giant parrot’s head and its beak to these sculptural interpretations. I see these noses as elephant’s trunks and sometimes they also have a point or coil of the elephant’s tusks represented. If there were any doubt about the fixation of the Maya on the Long Nosed Rain God you can see it in their temple architecture in the Yucatan area. Henri Stierlin, Mayan specialist, said that you can see it “on the façade of the Place of Masks, or ‘Codz Poop of Kabah’ (Yucatan), the stylized masks of the rain god has an obsessive quality. Its protruding eyes, long shaped nose and rigorous frontal symmetry cover the whole building” all indicate elephant (Stierlin, 2002:31). Most of the trunks begin by descending toward the ground. (Unfortunately, most of the trunks have been broken so that only stubs frequently remain.) The elephant was not considered to be the model of these giant sculptures because that elephant would have illustrated contact with South Asia (or Africa), and the Spaniards would not have wanted ever to accept this pre-Columbian contact across the oceans. They desired the glory, monetary value, and religious power of discovery of the Americas for themselves. Elephants, to the anthropologists studying in these highly religious countries, could not have been used in the construction of an ethnology that would have had to admit contact at that time in academic history, either. The Church held great power over what was published or even proposed to be studied. The general public is not as firmly indoctrinated as academics are (who tend to be in charge of even the modern tour groups). In our experience, the random tourist identifies the facial shapes as elephantoid instead of being similar to the macaws of the academicians. I know this; I asked them nothing more than, “What does this image look like?” They would invariably respond, “Elephants” when they see the disfigured Huasteca gomcola. Ganesha? The “Long-nosed God” is more easily accepted as the homologue representing the elephant than some of the social scientists claim. In Honduras at the Ruins of Copan, the ball court had six relatively small (33 cm tall) vertical, sculpted stones marking boundaries in the court for the Mayan ball game. Several of these original marker-stone sculptures are inside the Copan City Museum, now, in the town of Santa Rosa de Copan. Cast concrete images have been placed on the actual, open-air, original Ball Court and are exposed to the weather on the ruins of the ball court. The statues in the museum have to be analyzed very carefully for some of them are sculptures made with the idea of the elephant. The length of noses and other proportions are significantly different from the Macaw’s bill when the front half of the marker is considered on the down slope side of the boundary markers. Geographer, Dr Luis Ferrate’, who was with me at the time, considered that the sculpture of the entire marker – as a whole – might be claimed to be a macaw. Since macaws are abundant in the neighborhood, I granted that one or two of the ball-game-markers (but not all) of the heads could have been of modeled on macaws. Nothing can be considered totally a priori any more for the observing scientists. Giant curves of the elephant trunks are found at the front of Temple 21 of the Copan Ruins, just above the ball court. These elephant trunks of the front of the temple are the largest that I have seen in America.

STELA B AT COPAN RUINS The most certain feature of the elephant images in Middle America are on the two upper front corners of Stela B at the Ruins of Copan, Honduras (Figure 10). G. Elliot Smith in his 1924 book caught the wrath of archaeologists over 86 years ago by pointing out this similarity to elephants. Not only was there an elephant on the two front corners at the top of Stela B (Figure 11), but on top of the elephant necks were the two turban-wearing mahouts. (The mahout images have since been smashed off. Maybe harvested is the better verb.)  The mahouts were the kind of evidence that was just too much for certain people, who could not stand for such beautiful examples of diffusion to exist in their native state (See Figure 10b). When you see the photo taken in the 1890s then there is much less doubt. Harry Persaud, Curator, Library Collections, The British Museum, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, kindly scanned and sent me the photos and plates that were available in their collection. The thieves had not counted upon the fact that plaster casts had been made of the originals by Maudslay and those casts had been shipped back to the British Museum, London at the times of their discoveries. When I checked on the plaster cast ten years ago, they had been lost by the British Museum. We need a deeper and more complete search. The late Anthropologist/Librarian, Dr. John Barr Tompkins, at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley studied at the British Museum in London in the late 1930s and was assigned office space where he could look at these plaster casts of Stela B. I was a graduate student and had a desk at Bancroft in the 1950s and had long talks with Tompkins. He had seen the Indian mahouts, on these plaster casts. The mahouts had ear-plugs, pendants, bracelets, anklets, etc. as do the mahouts in India. The returning British military officers, who had served the Raj in India, could even identify the exact source location of the mahouts on basis of the turbans and garb worn by the mahouts. It was easy for them to recognize the significance from the imagery of Stela B. An approach to the shape of this Stela has been recreated in Tegucigalpa, Honduras for those who cannot get to the ruins at Copan. It can give one a significant impression of what the original must have been like. Even the Chinese-appearing face with its Chinese type goatee of the central figure of the Stela B (below the elephant portion of the Stela), has his fingers pressed together in an Asian gesture of meditation, can cast a spell on the ethnologist who claims that no contact with Asia ever had occurred in Copan. The fact that two riders on the middle of the elephants above the “Chinese Ruler” are seated in a side saddle position (Figures 12 & 10b) and the mounted humans give a scale to the elephant part of the sculpture was pointed out to me by the Guatemalan artist, Lucy Drimany. The humans are small by comparison to the elephant, which is itself small (and totally out of scale) in relation to the “Chinese Ruler” below. The elephant’s trunks are properly scaled by these little humans at the top of the two elephants on Stela B, each headed in the opposite direction. It should also be pointed out that the two corn (maize) plants that rise along side of our “Chinese Ruler”, in the central position of the sculpture, reach up to the height of the “finger” at the bottom end of the elephant’s trunk on both sides of the front of the Stela and both elephants “can” touch their own maize leaf. Was this food for elephants? In addition under the two small human riders there is a typical rectangular saddle blanket under their saddle that the anthropologists have missed, simply because they were not familiar with reality of riding elephants in India. These saddle blankets are sculpted on models of miniature elephants, carved and covered with sheet bronze long ago designed to be sold to tourists and the old British military visitors in India. It was relatively easy to capture the visitor; I bought an old model elephant that would have served in the scenario I am proposing. In fact that was the reason I spotted the elephant saddle blanket and recognized on it the rectilinear lines on the Stela B as reasonable. As we look at the Stela B photograph and illustration we see a number of important details that are worth examining closely. Starting with the central figure we will look at each of the important figures, both human and animal, to see the evidence of the idea of the elephant as it is represented on this Stela. The central figure, the large human that dominates the center of the Stela, appears to have Asian or Indian features and the turban the figure is wearing is typical of Sikh turbans in India even today. There are nine (once ten) smaller human figures around the perimeter of the Stela, blue in the illustration. Four are wearing nearly identical turbans; two on either side. Below the figures on the top of the Stela we can see (in pink in the illustration) two elephant heads and the elephant’s saddle. The three figures are easily identified as Mahouts, or elephant handlers. In fact, during early studies of the Stela, experts on Indian culture stated that they could identify the regions in India from which that type of turban came. The trunks of the elephants carved on the Stela are proportionally accurate to the Mahouts on the Stela. This shows that the artists were aware of the size of the elephant in relation to the human body. The two figures located at the upper center are sitting directly on the saddle. There is a head carved onto the plant stalk under the right elephant that represents the Mayan Corn God. Other carvings of the Corn God, also present in Copan, depict the deity with the same hair and headdress (Fig. ??) (British Museum Guide to the Maudslay Collection of Mayan Sculptures (casts and Originals) From Central America, 1928, Fig. 19, p. 71). Just looking at Stela B in Copan leaves little doubt that the Mayan artists were aware of the idea of the elephant before 1492. Stela M, another important work at Copan, has apparently had its entire, long elephantine-nose broken off. It might simply have been broken by a souvenir hunter, but the thief left the two giant elephant ears in place along with the two tusks that were carved as a curl beside the stump of the trunk on the elephant face (Patrick Ferryn, 1977:33-44, NEARA). Patrick Ferryn, a photographer, author, editor of the journal (Kadath, Croniques des civilizations disparues, among others, studied this and wrote a piece for New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA). His article further validates the hypothesis that the idea of the elephant as a religious symbol was known in America and put in place in Copan. Add paragraph of Sanchi and paragraph on Tikal Stela Glyph OTHER KINDS OF EVIDENCE Decorations of elephants were sculpted on the ends of the roof tiles in Mexico in the best of tradition have been found by Neil Steede, but I have not seen them. Decorative impressions, bas relief/etchings, on the ceramic platter in Ecuador suggest evidence for the diffusionary activity between people who knew of the “long nosed god” and the priesthood of Ecuador.  There was surely enough trade and other modes of contact between Maya population and the mainland of South America that this kind of sailing contact was likely with the Ecuador region’s people and can be entertained without having to sharpen Occam’s razor excessively. However, my co-author John L. Sorenson in our book: World Trade and Biological Exchanges before 1492, feels that the dating of the platter may not be sufficiently valid as pre-Columbian. Once one starts to look critically at cultural traits of the Amerinds in Mexico and Central America and the Andes, in comparison to those of the Old World, one is motivated to consider many more traits than just elephants. We humbly submit that university students can gain a great enthusiasm for their studies of ethnology if they are allowed to be scientific and look at alternative hypotheses such as transoceanic sailing and trade to explain the presence of these other cultural traits. If we look at Smith’s (1916) list of traits in America, we get some marvelously stimulating research topics. All of the ancient, pre-Colombian behavior and rituals listed below have been found in the New and the Old Worlds: mummification as a cult, megalithic monuments, worship of the sun, circumcision, tattooing, massage, piercing and distending of the earlobes, skull deformation, trepanning, dental mutilation, the use of ocean shellfish as a source for the purple dye for thread and cloth dying, conch-shell trumpets, pearl worship, most metallurgical techniques, phallic worship, agricultural terracing, the boomerang, divine origin of God-king and incestuous union of the kings and their sisters, and Ikat dyeing and weaving. The weight of the concept of coincidence of these esoteric traits require less necessity for anguish when we have shown that the plants taken by sail to Asia could not have been transported without sailing contact across the ocean and with highly complex traits. When these items are not necessary for subsistence, the odds on the spread of traits by contact diffusion increase. The actual transfer may not have come from the farthest cultural existence, but the odds are very high that the ideas were exchanged with intermediaries along the routes of the sailors to and from their home ports. We should stimulate research by students, and citizens in general, that will expand our horizons of knowledge and provide the fun of discovery to more people. We may then spread credit to the tropical sailors of the ancient world, Africa as well as Asia, who traveled, discovered, traded, and even missionized the entire tropical world long before the Europeans began to colonize. One can argue that sailors carried many and all kinds of traits for the ultimate civilizing of the world’s peoples, starting as long ago as 50,000 years. If this sounds crazy, remember that we have proven that Homo sapiens traveled to Australia from Indonesia and New Guinea before that. They knew the art of sailing, early. Humans on the water between islands in the ocean are not normally able to paddle across the open sea between the islands because, according to maritime experts such as Prof. Ed Doran and Dr. Mike Doran, the currents are too strong in many locations. There is hard evidence for contact over 7,000 years in South America by sailors who had had contact with Southeast Asia and had been parasitized by the whipworm and two species of hookworm. They left their disease in Peru where it was found in the dated Peruvian mummies. This discovery included the eggs and their tiny worm-bodies in the intestines in Peruvian mummies and coprolites of the more general population of the Furtada Caves in interior Brazil, dated at 5350 B.C.E. It is likely that the Ascaris round worm was present at 8,000 years ago at the Furtada Caves. (Sorenson and Johannessen 2009). Sailors traveled to these locations very early, apparently, the parasites cannot swim or travel by other animals and they were not present in North America at the time of contact with the Spaniards. They were and are still in South American people who live in close contact with the soil because an integral part of the life cycle of the worm is in the warm, moist soil. In those same soils the whipworm and the Ascaris sp. parasites infected those ancient Brazilians 7 – 8,000 years ago.

SUMMARY The oldest elephant image in America is a sculpture created by artists who may not have known the elephant from personal experience and was found in the Olmec/Maya language culture of Huasteca, Mexico. It looked like an elephant-headed human. However the stone sculptors or religious people, priests, traveling with the transoceanic sailors may have sailed between the two hemispheres of the world and been present exactly for the purpose of teaching the visited culture what was needed to carry out the religious needs of the visiting sailors. The dating of this strange sculpture of the Olmec period is between approximately 1,000 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. (de la Fuentes, Beatriz, et al., 1996). A cautionary note is needed, because some claim that Ganesha was only started in Asia in the fifth century C.E. In the original archaeological site the Olmec Ganesha-like statue has not been actually, specifically, dated to my knowledge. However, it seems reasonable that if any statue of a god were going to be imported from the Hindu realm to the Americas that it would have been Ganesha, the Elephant-headed “God of Compassion and wealth”, which is the most abundant sculptured and painted figure in South Asia (India). The sailors were probably sailing for love of discovery and wealth, but surely needed compassion while at sea. The idea of the giant elephant is certainly represented in the Stela B and Stela M and in the archaeological sites of Copan ruins, Honduras, where you get to view the two passengers on the side of the two elephants on their saddle blanket. The representation of the Mahoots used in India for guiding the elephants (used to be present before they were broken off of both heads of the elephants) had turbans, earrings, rings on their fingers and bracelets on their wrists. Especially the turbans allowed knowledgeable observers on the customs in India to know from where the mahouts had come in India. This means that the net evidence indicates that the idea of the elephant had been introduced into the Mayan culture centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards after 1492 C.E. If scientifically-minded observers ever see these little mahoots displayed on a fireplace mantel please inform science. This is a cultural phenomenon instead of our usual efforts to document living plants and animals on the other side of the oceans, even when their evidences were proven by archaeological and double examples of evidence in the receptor country of the new biota. The case of the idea of the elephant has the significant evidence of many sculptures and cultural artifacts and religious utility of the long nosed God that brings rain to crops if treated with Indian beliefs. We find no doubt that knowledge of elephants had been introduced. In my view elephant should exist as another animal in our estimation of animals “transported” (likely in an example of a model only with this species) across the oceans. The corollary of pre-Columbian maize and other American crops to their recording in sculptures in temples of South Asia (India) is dated from the fifth to 13th century, especially in the Hoysala Dynasty sculptures in Karnataka, India. The large ear maize was introduced to India with their appropriate names from the Amazon Arawak peoples into the same area in India from which the bare-headed, Olmec “Ganesha” could have come. The type of pot bellied Ganesha, with its elephant head found in the Olmec setting has the same type of ‘V’ crease at the back-ridge of the bare elephant head that is typical for sculpted deities by the priests and royalty in India, China and Polynesia, too. Even the Ganesha sculptures in India sometimes hold maize; instead of the normally holding balls of sweets in a bowl. Some ethno-biologists have doubted the evidence of the identity of the crop plants correlated with this same region of India and Asia. They have not understood the historical facts. When the common names are the similar for maize, peanut, sweet potatoes, squash and chickens and are found in India as well as in the cultures of the Amazon Basin and adjacent Central America, the intellectual opposition to this view has increasing difficulty in claiming the plants were improperly identified at the time of their transportation and naming. Cultural use of the rain-god by the Aztecs (Tlaloc), and Mayan’s (Chac), which is translated by the Archaeological/Anthropological community as Long-nosed God of the Aztecs and Maya. The rain-god looks much like the long nosed Elephant Rain-God of India, Egypt and Carthage. It, therefore, becomes difficult to imagine that the two images are not related as a diffused, religious, cultural trait. The Amerinds had to be very carefully taught that this figure of an elephant would supply rain if they but prayed to it as they had not seen the elephant in the flesh and chance to see the spraying of water from its trunk. It may have been difficult to conduct such training. Since we find these images of the “elephant” again in Mexico over 6-8 thousand years after the last possible recognition of the mastodon and mammoth in the North American paleontology, there is slim chance that these New World animals were what is represented in Mexico and Honduras. This elephant statuary in America could not have had anything to do with the extinct wild, elephant-like mammoth from the New World. Even though the Amerinds of the Pacific Northwest have claimed later remembrances of these mammoths, they were not in southern Mexico. When we have the images of elephants on ceramics and gold plates of Cuenca, Ecuador, it is more certain that they were not wild American animals   This appearance of elephants factors into the sculptural mix of evidence of elephant shapes of Nauatl and Maya speaking Indians, it becomes most likely influence from India. Given the abundance of statue and bas-relief evidence as well as the religious symbolism of the elephant to the natives of Southern Americas we must conclude that the Olmec and Mayan specifically had at least the idea of the existence of elephants. Since the religious significance of these creatures in the South Asia region and in the Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec cultures are nearly identical, it is difficult to continue to deny that there was regular contact between the tropical cultures on both hemispheres, likely through transoceanic voyaging as these images do not appear in the northern American region with nearly as much frequency. Further, with the numerous bas-reliefs of American origin plants in the temples of the Hoysala Dynasty in Southern India (950 C.E. – 1268 C.E.) we must conclude that there was regular and sustained interaction between these regions long before Columbus sailed from Europe. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amrhein, Laura M. 2003. An Iconographic and Historic Analysis of Terminal Classic Maya Phallic Imagery. http://www.famsi.org/reports/20001/ British Museum, Library Collection. 1890’s. Plate 35.jpg. Stela B at Copan, Honduras (3/4 right angle front view) A.P. Maudslay. British Museum, Library Collection. 1890’s. Cd119 lge.jpg. Stela B at Copan, Honduras (front view) A.P. Maudslay. British Museum, Library Collection. 1890’s Cd110.jpg. Stela B at Copan, Honduras (3/4 left angle front view) A.P. Maudslay. British Museum, Library Collection. Plate34.jpg. Stela B at Copan, Honduras (side view sketches of Stela B). British Museum, Library Collection. Plate37.jpg. Stela B at Copan, Honduras (front view sketch of Stela B). de la Fuentes, Beatriz, et al. 1996. Olmec art of Ancient Mexico, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art. Errazuriz, Jaime. 2002 (in press). Pacific Basin: 4,000 years of cultural contacts. New World Editions, Ferryn, Patrick. 1977. “Enquete sur les contacts transpacifiques (2eme partie)” Kadath. Chroniques des Civilizations Disaparues, 25, Nov. - Dec.:33-44. Ferryn, Patrick. 1977. ___________NEARA Gupta, Shakti. 1996. Plants in Indian Temple Art. M.B.R. Publishing Corporation (A division of D.K. Publishers Distribution Ltd. Delhi Johannessen, Carl L. and Anne Parker. 1989. “American crop plants in Asia prior to European contact.” CLAG 1989 Johannessen, Carl L., 1981.  Folk Medicine Uses of Melanotic Asiatic Chickens as Evidence of Early Diffusion in the New World.  Social Science and Medicine, 15D(4):427-34. Johannessen, Carl L. 1982.  Melanotic Chicken Use and Chinese Traits in Guatemala. Revista de Historia de America  93:73-89. Smith, G. Elliot. 1924.  Elephants and Ethnologists: Asiatic Origin of the Maya Ruins Sorenson, John and Carl L. Johannessen. 2006.  “Biological Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages.”  In Contact  and Exchange in the Ancient World. ed. Victor H. Mair. University of Hawaii Press. 238 - 297. Sorenson, John L. and Carl L. Johannessen. 2009. World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492. iUniverse, Bloomington, IN. Stierlin, Henri. 2001. The Maya, Palaces and Pyramids of the Rainforest, Taschen GmbH, Hohenzoliernring, Cologne. Teeter, Wendy G. 2004. “Animal utilization in a growing city: vertebrate exploitation at Caracol, Belize.” Maya zooarchaeology: new directions in method and theory. Monograph 51. Ed. Kitty F. Emery, Los Angeles, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. pp. 177-191. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the great help I received from Professor John L. Sorenson, Dr. Betty Meggers, Luis Ferraté, and the many other people in Mexico and Central America who helped me compile my data, led me to various ruins, and willingly debated the subject with me. I would also like to thank Dr. Harry Persaud of the British Museum for his efforts finding A.P. Maudslay’s photos and several related drawings of Stela B. I would further like to thank Jerrid Wolflick for his help in editing, researching, and rewriting the text of this article.