Ancient America: Olmecs and west Africa

 In 1862, the first Olmec head was unearthed in the state of Tabasco.  Almost a century later, the American archaeologist Matthew Stirling began excavations in 1942 in the ancient city of La Venta.  He discovered even more Olmec heads and found evidence of a civilization much older than the Mayan, Incan or Aztec, dating from about 1200 BC to 400 BC
  Alexander Von Wuthenau, an art historian and archaeologist at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, had unearthed many terracotta sculptures of ‘Negroid’ heads in clay, gold, copper and copal.
  Then Leo Wiener, a linguist at Harvard University, had earlier “stumbled upon a body of linguistic phenomena that indicated clearly to him the presence of an African and Arabic influence on some medieval Mexican and South American languages before the European contact period”.
  The Olmec were the first civilization in the Americas {Not the first people}. When they arrived is not known, but a guess of 8,000-4000 B.C. should do. Recent research suggests that the Olmec had their roots in early farming cultures of Tabasco, which began between 5100 BCE and 4600 BCE. These Olmec inhabited southern Mexico, and are regarded as the Mother Culture of the Americas – that is to say, the later Amerindian cultures and technology of the Americas, descend from Olmec culture and technology.
  The name Olmec means "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. It was the Aztec name for the people who once lived in this area, and extracted latex from rubber trees. Europeans mistakenly assigned the name to ancient ruins that they found there, not realizing that those ruins pre-dated the Aztec and all other civilizations in the Americas. The word "Olmec" also refers to the rubber balls, used for the ancient ball game of Olmec creation. The Olmec called themselves the Xi.
  The Olmecs used an African practice that is very common in Africa and to some extent in Melanesia. That practice is body scarification and specifically facial scarification as practiced in West Africa. Many of the facial scars seen on the Olmec terracotta faces, such as "dot" keloids and "lined" patterns are identical to Africans such as the Dinka of Sudan and the Yoruba and others of West Africa. African hairstyles such as cornroes are found on many of the Olmec terracotta found in Mexico. The Olmecs practiced a religion and astronomical sciences identical to those practiced by Africans in the Mali region and Nigeria today. The Olmecs and Washitaw, Black Californians, Jamassee, Califunami and other pre-columbian Blacks of the Americas were part of a prehistoric trade network that began in Africa and spread worldwide