but didn’t know it until last night!

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

One Summer in Mexico – Part 46

I made an astonishing discovery on the internet last night.  The coneheads arrived in Sweden and Peru about the same time as the mysterious Nyköping petroglyphs (2400-2000 BC) . . . which are identical to most of the Track Rock Petroglyphs in Georgia, USA.  The famous archaeologists Robert Wauchope (1939) and Joseph Caldwell (1947) excavated over 1000 conehead skeletons at a large town site in the Allatoona Mountains, north of Atlanta.  Wauchope did not publish his report until 1966, while Caldwell was afraid to mention his bizarre discovery to his peers in the Archaeology profession. Back during the Bronze Age, the coneheads spread across the Earth!

In the just-released video on Oaxaca and the seven French girls, I provided an overview of the four days, I spent with seven jeune femmes, who pretended to be hard core hippies.  In the video, I state that I remembered almost nothing of the night time events because of the heavy doses of psychedelic drugs that they sneaked into my body.  That was true at the time. However, after we parted, the multiple poisons began to leave my system and some vivid memories did reappear.

The memories came back just before I was to fly back to Atlanta.  The video was already inappropriate for children, so I decided just to leave them out, since they didn’t really contribute to the main focus of the program . . . the indigenous civilizations of Oaxaca.

Two things really puzzled me at the time.   Why did four out of the seven gals from Burgundy have BEAUTIFUL reddish blonde hair?  Their hair was not really blond, but not red either. Yvette and Claire also had faces, skulls and bodies that really did not look “French.”  They were both about 5”-10” –  much taller than most French women and even many French men back then.  Secondly,  why did Yvette and I almost instantly feel like we had known each other for eons, when in fact, we were just sitting together on a Mexican bus?

Yvette’s best friend, Claire, told me that Yvette was frequently asked out for dates, but had never been in a relationship, while in college.   To put it discretely . . . I was the first.   Yvette told me that she did not share common interests with the French men she met.   Claire put it more bluntly.  The men she dated complained that she did not act like a French girl. She seemed to be from another planet.  Yet . . . while sitting beside each other on a bus, we almost instantly bonded emotionally and intellectually.

Tragically,  Yvette decided that her problem was being a brilliant intellectual, who grew up in a mountain village, milking goats and tending sheep.  She spent most of the money that her parents had given her for her 21^st birthday gift to re-brand her persona into a fun-loving coquette from Paris, who had adopted the hippie lifestyle. There was little money left to visit the Mesoamerican cities that she had always dreamed of seeing. I think that this might have been the love of our lives, but her misjudgment changed the courses of our lives.

Yvette was especially exotic looking because her “strawberry blond” hair grew in a spiral pattern around a cone shaped head.  Both of us had just turned 21. Being most interested in old buildings, when not driven by hormones, neither one of us discussed the ethnological and genetic implications of her unusual skull. Well, to be honest, genes and chromosomes had just been discovered back then in the Stone Age, when we had our four days in dreamland.

Because she never wrote me, I almost forgot about Yvette until two years later, when I flew to southern Sweden to work at the Town Architect’s Office in Landskrona, Skåne.  Skåne is in the southern tip of Sweden and is the origin of the word, Scandinavia.  On a few occasions, I encountered women, who resembled Yvette in rural villages along the southern tips of Skåne and Sjæland (across the Oresund Channel in Denmark).   The backs of their skulls were higher than the fronts, plus they had that beautiful copper-colored hair.

The Burgundians

The seven French hippies were from Burgundy.  I looked up the old Province of Burgundy and its Late Roman Period colonists, the Burgundians. For much of the Medieval Period, southeastern France was a separate country, Burgundium.  The region was known for being religiously independent and thorn in the flesh for the Roman Catholic Church.  The Burgundians, particularly in Lyonaise, Languedoc and Comte-Frânche were Christians, but associated with more simplistic forms of Christianity such as Waldensians, Arianists,  Albigensian and Cathars.  After perhaps 50,000 of those “heretics” were burned alive, the bull-headedness of the region was thought to be broken. 

In the 1500s much of the region converted to the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin.  Calvin’s followers became known as Huguenots.  Lyon became a major center of Protestantism, until a joint French Catholic-Spanish army captured it in 1574 and killed many of its Protestant inhabitants.  Most of the survivors fled to either Geneva, Switzerland or the remote mountains of Languedoc.   BUT . . . that did not explain why Yvette and Claire looked “different.”

An article on the Burgundians referenced other, more specific sources.  The Burgundians first appeared in Roman history, while living in Germany and intermarrying some with Allemanni – cousins of the Alekmanni, who became the English.  Scandinavian anthropological sources said that during the early Iron Age, the Burgundians lived on the island of Bornholm, where they had taken refuge.

Following that trail, I was shocked to discover that the Burgundians and Goths were descendants of a sea-faring people from the southern Indus River Valley and southern Iran.  They introduced the red hair gene to the Baltic Region and southern Scandinavia.  It was really a copper colored hair gene, like the hair of Yvette and Claire, which mutated into blond and red hair genes seen in Scandinavia and Scotland today.  For many centuries they lived along the coasts of Sweden and Finland, and intermarried with the locals. Hence, they carried lots of Sami, Germanic and Finnish genes, when migrating southward. Another article from the University of Copenhagen stated that genetic studies have determined that the elite of the Huns were also descended from the red haired coneheads from the Crimean Region and southern Iran.

There was more astonishment.  In recent, years anthropologists, who specialize in forensic studies, have reconstructed the skulls of the original Burgundians, Goths and Huns.  They were coneheads like the Paracusa People of the Nazca Plain in Peru . . . even into the Middle Ages.  The elite of the Creeks and several other tribes in the Southeast were extremely tall coneheads.  George Washington even unearthed a cemetery of seven feet tall coneheads, while supervising the construction of Fort Loudon in Winchester, Virginia. 

The conehead skulls quickly disappeared from the skeletal record, once these people adopted agricultural lifestyles.  European anthropologists are puzzled by this radical change in their skulls.  I am not.  Remember, Yvette grew up in a village, where she thrived on a diet high in animal proteins, milk and cheese.

We know from Creek tradition that the super-tall elite were fed a special high protein diet.  The Great Sun always got the choicest cuts of meats from deer, elk and buffalos.   The Sati-uriwa of the Satile People on the coast of Georgia was fed the firstborn babies of all his tribe!   He was also at least seven feet tall.  The elite of the Toltecas in central Mexico were also fed the flesh of sacrificial  victims.  

Pregnant conehead mothers required diets extremely high in vitamins, iron and protein or else they often had miscarriages.  Their babies required super-high protein diets or else they became mentally retarded.  Thus,  when the Burgundians, Goths and Huns began shifting to diets based primarily on grains, the tallest and the brainiest were quickly erased from the gene pool.  Only in remote mountainous regions of Lyonnaise, Languedoc and Alsace plus Hungary, Skåne and Sjæland, where farm families lived on cheese, goat milk, lamb and pork  did the genes survive in a modified form. 

I just remembered . . . When Yvette and I ate at the restaurant in Downtown Oaxaca, she ordered a big steak and wolfed it down . . . like a wolf.  As you can see in the dancing scenes in the video, she was slim and gracile, but was constantly munching on cheese at the campsite.  Now you know!