I was ready to give up on this Olmecs topic,

I was ready to give up on this Olmecs topic,

I was ready to give up on this Olmecs topic, then came this while looking for something else: Egypt was the receiver still more than the giver … Ancient Egypt was essentially an African colonization.”
– Basil Davidson, The African Past

“Remember that, just like in Egypt, a great (Olmec) civilization flourished and then died. And then people forgot about it. The pyramids lay under the sand, the sphinx lay under the sand, something stood there like enigmatic witnesses of a glorious past, but many people continued to live for centuries without recovering the majesty of that civilization, without being able to go back to their roots.”
– Ivan Van Sertima, historian, 1976

Then this : The Olmecs were black Africans descended from Egyptian civilization who crossed the Atlantic and arrived in America prior to the Chinese.

The evidence of this can be seen clearly by their black African facial features, cornrow braids, megalithic portrait heads, pyramids, cosmology, and thousands of Egyptian mummy samples that have tested positive for American tobacco and cocaine.
The Carthaginians had colonies as far as Linxus (Mogador), and they had many varieties of ships with sails. They didnt always rely upon oar power. That may have been useful for the warships. But when we read the voyages of Hanno the Navigator…I see sails used in this. And so, I would have to suspect that West Africans not only knew about sails, but were sailing on Phoenecian ships as mariners and traders long before the Classical period of the Olmecs.

And when we study the Olmecs, we do see a difference in the periods of time. Something seems to have changed suddenly around 200 BC. What exactly cause this, we dont know. But study of the Olmecs and Zapotecs does entice us with the clues that something caused some changes in that society.
The Zapotec were initially being one of the advanced civilisations in the Oaxaca valley an important trading partner of the Olmecs and in many ways their rise was helped by this trade.

The Olmec demise was caused by two things. First unlike many later Meso-American cultures they were non militarist, they traded and developed trading dependencies but never militarily conquered them or turned into an empire. Often regions they traded with became self sufficient and had no more need of trade with the Olmec, so the Olmec just pulled out and sought alternative trading partners. This meant the Olmec had to go longer and longer distance to find trade, however initially this was no problem as they invented the Tortilla at that time so a way for their merchant trains to be self sufficient on the move.

The most advanced civilisations at the time were in the Oaxaca valley and it is where the Olmecs got their best trade. When the Zapotecs came to dominate the valley and later outside, they closed it to the Olmecs, who lost most of their advance civilisation trading partners.

The Olmec wēre then in the predicament of travelling over huge distances to trade with primitives. This didn’t lead to a catastrophic end like many meso-america civilisations, rather a slow and teminal declinē… 👏 🖤