Irish colonists came to Southeastern North America four times, long before Columbus

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

There was also Sami immigration from Scandinavia!

The DNA, words and petroglyphs of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern United States are telling a very different story about the peopling of North America than what you read in the mainstream science journals, which continually to try to tweak one version after another of the “Bering Strait First” theory. They increasingly resemble an invention of humorist, Rube Goldberg.

Mainstream anthropology is not talking in public about the oldest known genetic profiles being found in Florida. The Windover Pond People (c. 8120-6990 years ago) practiced a form of burial that was also being practiced in Scandinavia, Finland and northwestern Russia at the same time. Bodies were staked to the bottoms of shallow ponds. Well, there is more to the story. The Windover Pond People also had pretty much the same DNA profiles as the ancestors of the Sami, Forest Finns and Karolians. These were Asiatic peoples, but from western Asia where they mixed some with proto-Europeans. They would have looked like a mixed-blood Southeastern Indian, here in North America.

The evidence of a Pan-North Atlantic Culture goes far beyond the Windover Pond People. The oldest known known stonehenges are in Canada – c. 3500 BC. Most of the petroglyphs in the Georgia Gold Belt are identical to petroglyphs in either western Ireland or southern Sweden . . . it depends which Georgia river valley you are in. The famous Track Rock Gap petroglyphs in Union County, GA are the largest display of petroglyphs east of the Southwestern Desert. Almost all Track Rock’s symbols can be found in the Nyköping, Sweden petroglphs, which have been dated by Swedish scientists to 2000 BC. Nyköping’s petroglyphs also contain the oldest known symbols of the Maya writing system, yes . . . Maya!

That’s something else that the scientific journals are not telling the public. The Maya Migration Legend begins in a land of ice and snow, where the Maya’s ancestors were hunted by giants. They said, “enough of this ****, we are heading south.” They traveled southward along the Atlantic Coast of North America, hopped some islands, and then arrived in land where there was no snow. They apparently carried that ancient writing system from Nyköping with them.

One cannot deny the existence of DNA

Eastern Creek-Uchee families in Georgia, such as my own, are showing up with strange DNA profiles . . . no Amer-Indian DNA test markers, typical the rest of the United States, but a hefty level of Southern Meso-American (Maya, Zoque, Totonac & Toltec), Panoan (Peru), Polynesian (Maori), Sami, Finnish, Basque and Pre-Celtic Irish. Of course, we also carry the Colonial Period admixture of Celtic Scottish, Celtic Irish and in some families, Sephardic DNA from the 17th century Jewish gold miners in the Georgia Mountains.

While working in Sweden, most strangers thought I was a Sami. When I was in Lapland, the Sami spoke to me in Sami, thinking that I was a full-blooded Northern Sami. When my sister was in Finland last year, the Finns spoke to her in Finnish, thinking that she was a Forest Finn or a Finnish Sami.

Muskogee-Creeks, who don’t have as much Uchee heritage, might not have much ancient DNA from northern Europe or southern Mexico, but typically will also carry DNA markers typical of northern Mexico, such as Pima and Chichimaca. The Upper Creeks carry a lot of Toltec DNA markers. The Toltecs and the Upper Creeks are extremely tall, lanky folks.

One cannot deny the existence of words

The long, long hours of analyzing the place names on modern and Colonial Period maps are bearing far more fruit than I could imagine. What is appearing is a very different ethnic pattern in the Southeastern United States than the one which is presented in anthropology books and internet references such as Wikipedia.

First of all, most of the region was an ethnic patchwork quilt, whereas contemporary academicians define the region in the framework of a few, modern federally-recognized tribes. The much more detailed French maps, included in a book that I recently bought from a publisher in Canada, have made it possible to see a much clearer view of what North America was like prior to the devastation reeked by the French-sponsored beaver pelt trade and the British-sponsored Native American slave trade.

Within the Southeast were many, many provinces, speaking many languages from several parts of the Americas. Within the eastern half of the Southeast I have identified the following languages: Uchee, Chickasaw, Upper Creek, Itza Maya, Muskogee, Iroquoian, numerous Algonquian tongues, Siouan, Ufo, Polynesian, Kansa, Oto, Panoan from Peru, Southern Arawak from South America, Middle Arawak from the northern edge of South America, Taino (northern Arawak), Tupi from Amazonia, Toa from Cuba and Puerto Rico, plus Irish Gaelic . . . yes, Irish Gaelic!

What happened was that the Pre-Columbian immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia intermarried with the immigrants from Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, who were the majority. By the time British immigrants arrived in North America, the Mestizo descendants of this mixing just looked like “Indians of varying skin color.” There were exemptions, though. The Tokah-re of the Southern Highlands still had the freckles of the Tokah-re of Ireland. Today, the Muskogee-Creek word for “freckled” is tokahle (Tokahre).

Fourth Immigration: There was a tribe, called the Duhare (Du H’aire means Irish) on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, which spoke Early Medieval Gaelic. They raised dairy deer and made cheese from this milk. They cultivated both Native American and Irish crops. However, they lived in houses and made pottery almost identical to that of their American Indian neighbors. In the late 1600s, the surviving Duhare either blended in with British colonists or moved westward and joined one of the Creek provinces.

At the request of the Cultural Attache’ at the Irish Consulate in New York City, the Duhare words, recorded by two Spanish explorers, were examined by a professor at Trinity College in Dublin. He said that they were easily matched with the dialect of Irish, spoken in southern Ireland during the Early Medieval Period. Monastic journals in France and Ireland describe the persecution of the Osrey Tribe in Leinster by Anglo-Norman conquerors. Both they and Scandinavians on the eastern coast of Ireland fled to Whitmannsland across the Atlantic in Scandinavian sailing ships. Osrey means “Deer People.” The Irish scholar told me that dairy deer was the primary source of milk for the Irish until the Vikings introduced dairy goats and the English introduced dairy cows.

I have found a great deal of similarity between Archaic Irish and Archaic Swedish. For example, the indigenous name for Ireland is Ei-re, which means “Island Nation.” The same word in Archaic Swedish would be Eis-rik. I strongly suspect that the same people introduced the Iron Age to both regions. Strangely enough, Archaic Swedish words, such as the word “bo” – meaning a living place – also can be found in the Panoan languages of Peru . . . and ultimately in South Carolina indigenous ethnic names such as Cusabo and Westibo.

Third Immigration: The Algonquian, Shawnee, Cherokee and Muskogee languages use the same suffix for “people or tribe” as is used today in Irish Gaelic or An Ghaeilge. You also can find that same “ge” or “ke” suffix in several South American tribes. Whether written as Ke or Ge, it is pronounced the same by all of those peoples. I have also found some Gaelic words in Siouan, Muskogee and Cherokee. Now explain that without including a Pan-North Atlantic connection?

Second Immigration: The largest component of Irish DNA is from peoples who immigrated there from the Iberian Peninsula, where Spain and Portugal are today. This immigration probably occurred during the early Bronze Age. At that time, Iberians would have looked like mixed-blood American Indians and were probably also carried some Basque DNA. They were attracted to western Ireland because of the large gold deposits and to eastern Ireland because of the fertile land with plenty of rainfall. Gold is especially abundant in County Kerry on the southwest corner of Ireland.

There was a linguistic breakthrough for me, when I remembered that the Muskogean and Uchee R is rolled so hard that English and French speakers typically write it down as an L. There were many tribes in the Carolinas and Georgia, whose name ended in “re.” However, the “le” or “li” suffix is endemic in the Southeast and the Gulf Coast of Mexico!

There were at least seven tribes originating in South Carolina or the coastal plain of Georgia, which had the same exact names as Bronze Age tribes in Ireland, whose names are now counties or towns in Ireland. For example, the Kiale-gi Creek Tribal Town in Oklahoma has the same name as Kiar-re tribe that gave County Kerry, Ireland its name. In addition, the “gi” suffix at the end of the Kialegi is Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

The Early Bronze Age in Ireland and Sweden was characterized by a continued fabrication of flint swords, stone tools, plus increasing use of copper ornament, copper arrowheads, copper hatchets and some bronze hatchets. Only the elite possessed the ornate bronze art and weapons that you see in museums. The pottery of both regions was called corded beakerware. Early Bronze Age elite in both regions were buried in log tombs beneath dome-shaped burial mounds.

The collapse of the Early Bronze Age in Scandinavia and Ireland due to some type of massive natural catastrophe coincided with the appearance of the Deptford Culture, literally in Downtown Savannah, GA. The Deptford Culture was characterized by corded beakerware ceramics, flint swords, limited use of copper and log tombs beneath dome-shaped mounds. The Uchee have consistently stated that their ancestors sailed across the Atlantic from the “Home of the Sun” and landed at the mouth of the Savannah River!

I found several words in the branch of Siouans, known as Dhegiha . . . which were also Irish words or similar to Irish words. The Dhegiha Siouans originated in the Southeast, but immigrated to the Northern Plains in the 1600s and early 1700s, where they became known as the Earth Lodge people. Two of their towns with earth lodges have been excavated in Georgia . . . the King Village Site on the Coosa River and the Bullard Landing Site, on the Ocmulgee River south of Macon. Prior to the construction of the Cherokee capital of New Echota, that location was the village of Kansagi-yi, which means “Place of the Kansa People” in Cherokee. The Kansa or Kaw People are one of the best known earthlodge tribes. In the 1800s, they also called themselves the Coosa!

First Immigration: The earliest people of Ireland probably looked very similar to American Indians since the presence of stonehenges on both sides of the Atlantic suggest frequent encounters of a third kind. However, they were almost erased from the island by a flood that lasted for twenty years in the 24th century BC. This period of ethnic cleansing in Ireland and the lower elevations of England corresponds to the appearance near Savannah, Georgia of the oldest known pottery, north of Amazonia, in the Americas and of the oldest known shell rings in North America along the Georgia coast. There has to be some sort of connection.

A note on the Yamasee

All history books and Wikipedia articles tell you that the Yamassee Indians became extinct within a few decades of the Yamasee War (1715-1717). Not so. I have found the names of most of the pre-war Yamasee towns in North Georgia, mostly in the Atlanta Metro Area! The survivors of this bloody war merely moved north up the Oconee River and joined the Creek Confederacy.