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This article is from
Creation 1(1):10–11, June 1978

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New observations on North American origins

A book America B.C. published in 1975 by Barry Fell, a Harvard marine biologist, is shattering previously held views and presuppositions about North American anthropology and cultural origins. Fell offers overwhelming evidence that men and women from Europe were living and working in North America as early as 800 BC. He has further demonstrated that the Celtic sun god Bel and the Carthaginian/Phoenician god Baal are identical and has found a dedication to the Phoenician Baal in New Hampshire. Dozens of inscriptions were found on remote sites in central Vermont, and it soon became apparent that ancient Celts built the stone chambers as religious shrines, and that Carthaginian mariners visited them and were allowed to worship at them and make dedications in their own language to their own god. He also translated inscriptions found on Rhode Island written in Punic which read 'Voyagers from Tarshish this stone proclaims'.

Tarshish was a Biblical city off the southern coast of Spain and was destroyed by the Cartheginians in 533 BC. This is probably how the partnership between the Celts and Carthaginians began. Also off the coast of Maine was an inscription reading 'Cargo platforms for ships from Phoenicia'.

There is extensive evidence of early mining of copper fields in Minnesota and a thriving fur trade. There is also firm evidence of Egyptians, Libyans and Celtic Iberians living together in a colony in Iowa in 900 BC.

Further evidence is given that the Micmac Indian hieroglyphs are at least half Egyptian. The family of tribes to which the Micmacs belong, the Algonquians, were found to have hundreds of Egyptian words in their dialect.

The implications are overwhelming. It demonstrates that one should always be open to new facts and challenges the traditional evolutionary/anthropological beliefs about North American Indian cultural and linguistic origins. Fell of course suggests that pre-existing Indians were influenced by these early sea-farers, but there is no reason to suppose that the American Indians (as with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world) are not the descendants of previously 'higher' levels of civilization as we would expect in the Biblical flood/dispersion framework. It is certainly challenging and stimulating to creationist anthropologists to see Biblically familiar nations and languages merging into North American history. Further work and discovery is under way and we await this with interest.