The Gamla Folk: Aboriginal people of the north
There are, in fact, strong similarities between several contemporary archaeological sites in Denmark & Southern Sweden and New England-the Great Lakes-Eastern Canada Region. The Early and Middle Bronze Age gravshög (burial mound) sites in the southern Swedish province of Skåne are virtually identical, and from the same time period, as the Adena earthworks in the Ohio River Valley. Scandinavian Bronze Age [ )( - shaped] copper ingots are identical those found in the Eastern United States. These unusually shaped ingots were known to have been traded among American Indians. Scandinavian Bronze Age people mostly used stone tools and spear points just like their contemporaries in North America.
There are Bronze Age rock carvings on Ven Island in the Oresund Channel in the heart of the Old Scandinavian Bronze civilization that are almost identical to the Track Rock carvings in the Georgia Mountains. Rectangular, raw copper blocks have been found in ancient mines of the Great Lakes era that weigh over a ton – too large for a birch bark canoe to haul. The Early Bronze Age in Scandinavia was really a transitional Neolithic-Copper Age. Most tools and weapons were made from stone. There were some copper tools and ornaments, but most copper was traded to Indo-European (Germanic) peoples to the south, who knew how to make bronze. The majority of people in Scandinavia at this time were Gamla Folk hunters.
Nevertheless, even these similarities are not “proof” that Bronze Age Scandinavians traveled to the New World. Two advanced cultures may have developed in parallel, without contemporary contact. What may be the case is that an ancient ethnic group indigenous to the North Atlantic coastal regions, acted as an intermediate to both groups to facilitate long distance copper mining and exchange of cultural traditions.
The earthworks in southern Scandinavia that resemble Adena mound sites in the Ohio Valley were not built by either Celts or modern Scandinavians (i.e. Vikings.) They date from 1600 BC to 800 BC. Analysis of surviving skeletal fragments of the oldest graves genetically linked these mound builders to the Gamla Folk, whose descendants still live in the high mountains between Sweden and Norway, plus far northern Norway. Both the Gamla Folk and some of the Native American tribes around the Great Lakes, have members of their population with the “X-gene.” It is a material DNA that geneticists have yet to trace back to Africa.
The advanced Late Bronze Age Civilization of Scandinavia seems to have been limited to the islands and coastal regions. These people were Germanic (Indo-European) farmers and traders. The interior and the north of Scandinavia remained essentially a Neolithic society occupied by Gamla Folk. The Gamla folk hunters had very few metal tools or ornaments.
The Gamla Folk (Old People) have distinct physical features that are different than Germanic Scandinavians, most noticeably their broad heads, dark hair, long noses, elfish ears and olive complexions. In other words they look like elves. The ancient racial prejudice toward them by Scandinavians is the source of the Scandinavian fairytales about trolls. Some people with these features also still live in the most remote parts of Wales and Cornwall.
The advanced Bronze Age civilization of Skåne was concentrated on the islands of Denmark and in southern Sweden. The civilization’s wealth seems to have been based on trade from distant copper and tin mines. Obviously, these people knew how to build seagoing boats. Some catastrophic, natural disaster instantaneously wiped out the civilization and swept away most of the trees of northern Denmark.
A forensic anthropologist has raised an interesting hypothesis. He prefers to remain anonymous because of the danger of being labeled a “Cult Archaeologist.” What if the aboriginal people of both northeastern North America and Scandinavia were the same ethnic group? Their broad-headed skulls could be easily mistaken for American Indians. In fact, they could have been merely been hybrid people of the Arctic region, created by the mixing of AmerIndian and archaic European genes. It is already known that the Sammi (Lapps) of northern Scandinavia are such a racially mixed people. This writer who is of mixed Creek Indian and Scottish heritage was repeatedly mistaken for being a Norwegian Sammi while working in southern Sweden. This theoretical cultural bridge (if his theory is true) evidently collapsed when a massive natural cataclysm struck Scandinavia around 500 BC.
In my friend’s theory, the earliest people to cross into North America were the ancestors of the Ainu of Hokkaido Island, the 9300 year old Kennewick man, whose skeleton was found in Washington State, and the Gamla Folk. He suspects that wandering bands came from both Asia and Europe, then mixed to form a hybrid race. They also would have been the aboriginal people of Ireland, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. During the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, Indo-Europeans (i.e. Celts) only occupied the coastal areas of this entire section of Europe.
There is one other bit of evidence that suggest that there was once another ethnic group in Eastern North America. The founding groups of what is now known as the Seminole Indian tribe were branches of the Creek Indians living in North Carolina and South Carolina, who were pushed out by the British in 1763. France gave eastern North America to the English, and the English took away most of the Cherokee and Creek lands in the Carolina Mountains. Both the Creeks and the Cherokees are really the result of many indigenous peoples assimilating. There is still today a distinct physiological type among some Seminoles and a few North Carolina Cherokee families. They look almost identical to the Gamla Folk of Scandinavia!
Thus, the implication of the forensic anthropologist’s theory is that the stone architecture of both northeastern North America and northwestern Europe were built by the same ethnic group, an aboriginal race that has been almost forgotten. In other words, Stonehenge in England and the stone architecture of New England were built by peoples, who looked about the same.
The Stonehenges of Canada
Dr. Gordon Freeman, a retired chemistry & physics professor from the University of Alberta, has recently published a book entitled, The Stonehenge of Canada. It has instantly become a controversy in the anthropology community. However, this book is of an entirely different genre than Dr, Barry Fell’s books of the 1970’s and 1980s. For many decades, Canadian archaeologists have known about the hundreds or thousands of stoneworks in their nation. They just didn’t think these sites were, well . . . THAT important. However, the Majorsville, Alberta Sun Cairns, the site at which Dr. Freeman devoted 12 years of intense study, had already been dated to 3000 BC by a professional archaeological study in 1971. There is no argument about it being an authentic archaeological site.
To the archaeologists who studied the site, however, it was “just another stone medicine wheel.” To them there was nothing remarkable about aboriginal peoples creating a complex geometric form with large stones that covered several acres . . . 5000 years ago. There are many of them in Canada. Although the label seems to associate these sites with the historical Lakota-Sioux Indians, they have not been linked to any modern Indian tribe.
What Dr. Freeman did differently was to intimately know the site throughout the year; to watch how the shadows of the sun changed: to see if there were relationships with the moon and other objects in the sky. This is essentially what this author did at Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, GA between 2001 and 2005 . . . with the same results. It was an astronomical observatory. Being a physicist, he was able to carry out sophisticated mathematical analysis of the site to correlate it to the known positions of heavenly bodies, 5000 years ago. After years of rising before dawn, in all seasons and weather, to carefully photograph the positions of the sun, Mr. Freeman found the rocks once thought to be simply strewn across the prairie instead mark the progression of the year with uncanny accuracy. Below are some of his findings.
- The central cairn is surrounded by 28 radiating stone lines, four of which align with the cardinal points of the compass. Those lines are encircled by another ring of stones.
- A few meters away lies a stone semicircle, with a large stone between it and the central cairn. The left edge of the semicircle lines up with both the central stone and the right edge of the cairn, and vice versa.
- To Dr.. Freeman, those features represent the sun, the crescent moon and the morning star. There are secondary cairns on nearby hills and rock assemblages that seem to correspond to constellations.
- The rising and setting sun on both the longest and shortest days of the year lines up precisely with V-shaped sights in the temple's rocks. The spring and autumn equinoxes, when day and night are equal, are similarly marked. They are not the equinoxes of the Gregorian calendar currently used, however, but the true astronomical equinoxes.
Dr. Freeman is convinced the temple contains a lunar calendar as well, because the 28 rays radiating from the central cairn correspond to the length of the lunar cycle. Of course, the path of the moon across the night time sky changes constantly throughout the year, so Dr. Freeman’s calculations for 5000 years ago required the assistance of astronomers.
The current status of the many fieldstone sites in Canada is still in the realm of theory, as are the stoneworks of New England. Perhaps the biggest difference between these archaeological treasures of the two regions, is that at least some Canadian archaeologists are taking them seriously now and trying to find evidence that would link these structures to specific ethnic groups or cultures.
In the science of Anthropology, there is a very broad gap between theory and fact. Many more studies of the ancient stone architecture sites must be done before text books will state with authority, who actually built them.
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