DNA analysis affirms that these were the same people.

Part Three of the Mesolithic Period in Eastern North America

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

It’s a fact, not a theory . . . but neither anthropologists in Northern Europe nor North America seem to be aware of it.  In eastern Scandinavia, Finland, Karelia and in Florida, USA, a proto-Sami Eurasian people staked woven fabric bags, containing their deceased loved ones, to the bottoms of shallow ponds. 

The pond burials are probably much more extensive along the eastern coastal plain of North America, but just have not been discovered.  Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia do not allow developers to fill in wetlands in the Coastal Plain. Florida does . . . plus Florida allows far more intensive real estate development in its coastal regions. The rest of the nation picks up the tab for the State of Florida’s development policies every time it receives a direct hit from a hurricane.

I first became aware that old ponds were prime locations for archaeological investigations, while working on the design of a pedestrian village for Ven Island, Sweden.  The residents of Ven Island and the City of Landskrona had consecutively voted down designs by architectural firms in Stockholm and London, which placed mid-rise apartments next to one of Scandinavia’s oldest churches. The city’s leaders and planners, hoped that a young Amerikanska architect would be inclined to design a village that was more visually compatible with the island’s historic villages.

My first site selection was along a narrow gravel road that connected the village of Backviken with Uraniborg . . . the estate and observatory of 16^th century astronomer, Tycho Brahe. The road continued on to the island’s largest village, Tunaby.   The vast fields of wheat at this location were slightly sloped, thus insuring adequate drainage for the village .  Unlike other parts of the island, there were no historical or new structures visible. 

That site was nixed by the two archaeologists, employed by the City of Landskrona.  What looked like a prime location for a residential development was actually an extremely important archaeological zone of national significance. The archaeologists explained to me that what looked like dry, cultivated land was underlain by bog soil, which until the 1800s had been shallow ponds, fed by an artesian spring near Uraniborg. 

The peat was a treasure trove of artifacts going back at least 10,000 years. At the lower levels were the burials of ancient peoples.  At that time, the archaeologists didn’t know the exact time period of the burials, but they were definitely from the Stone Age.  No metal artifacts accompanied the human remains at what had been the bottom of the ponds at that time.

Deja vu

When the original archaeological reports from the Windover Pond People were publicized in National Geographic Magazine in 1991, I was extremely busy with my architecture practice and cheese creamery in Virginia, plus had just met a sweet mademoiselle at a Smithsonian-National Geographic Christmas Party, who I thought would be the love of my life. I did not have much time to give it deep thought. However, the drawing at top of this page above intrigued me. It was exactly like the Mesolithic burials at an ancient ponds in southern Sweden, Finland and Karelia, which was stolen from Finland by the Soviet Union during World War II.  

On that same island were petroglyphs that in the Southeastern United States would be labeled “Uchee and Creek sacred symbols.” How could that be? However, in that period of my life,  I thought of myself solely as an architect-planner and gourmet cheesemaker.

Academicians could have argued that the same burials and same petroglyphs on both sides of the Atlantic were examples of parallel cultural evolution.  Then, a re-examination of the Windover Pond human remains revealed brain matter, from which complete strands of DNA could be extracted.  The oldest burials contained exactly the same combination of DNA markers as found in Proto-Sami burials in Sweden, Finland and Karelia – 8,000 years ago.  Some of the younger burials were products of mixing with peoples from eastern Siberia.

Nevertheless, it is absolutely clear.  Eastern Creek and Uchee descendants in the Southeastern United States are told that they are part Sami and Finnish . . . even though very few, if any, know of any Sami ancestors, who arrived during the Colonial Period.  North America was peopled by both immigrants from eastern Asia and Eurasians, who crossed either the Arctic Ice Cap or the Atlantic Ocean. 

It’s a New World out there!

VIDEOS

This is the excerpt of the original Windover Pond TV documentary.

Since then, burials have been found elsewhere in Florida, which are similar to the Windover Pond burials. The journalists in this film made the same mistake that we often see. They said that the burials in Florida could not be the ancestors of Native Americans. No one seems aware that there are no DNA test markers for the indigenous tribes in the Southeastern United States. Individual Southeastern descendants DO carry the DNA found in Florida!