Point Lay Alaska is located at 69°44’28” North, 163°0’31” West (69.741023, -163.008613)GR1. According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 89.3 km2 (34.5 mi2). 78.9 km² (30.5 mi²) is land and 10.4 km² (4.0 mi²) is water. The total surface is 11.66% water.
I was sitting in a small US Mail cargo plane and we landed quickly and quietly at Point Lay Alaska; we had picked up the mail from Barrow, Alaska, it was June 1996 and the weather was beautiful for this rugged country; as I was saying we landed and maybe the whole town showed up about twenty feet in front of our plane, there couldn’t be more than two hundred in the whole town, if only a few more and they all seemed to be here, standing right by our plane to see the new passenger, me (I know that in 2000 there were 247 inhabitants in Point Lay, and as I say, I doubt it is that many now).
The American Indian race made up about 85% of the population, some white, some other races I couldn’t tell, maybe related to Russia, because my pilot was, and they looked a bit like my pilot; and a family or two of Hispanics. So here was an intercultural agenda. The weather was cloudy, isolated snow showers in the forecast for the night, it was 15-20 degrees (colder than Barrow), some northeasterly winds.
My Russian pilot, whom I paid to take me on his route, that is, to Point Lay, was taking the cargo out now. Barrow was to the north, and Kotzebue to my south, the sea to my west. I was talking to an archaeologist on the plane to Barrow a few days ago, he and his companions made a discovery in the area: the Point Lay area, he told me the whereabouts of his discovery, but he was reluctant to pin it down . . They had found a mummy, took a few hundred pictures of her in her abode, a cave like abode, and near an underground cave also with old whale bones supporting the tundra in place of her. Maybe it was a dwelling, or a tomb, he didn’t tell me at the time, he just showed me some photos of the mummy, more like a frozen body wrapped in old skins.
When I got off the plane and entered the town, there was a family that helped me on my journey, or they call it feats. His wife had an older son (perhaps three), and she had a baby in her amaaq, she was small and very cut, a young Eskimo, or as they are called in this area, the Inuit.
I had come on a whim, I was going to stay in Barrow, but this story intrigued me so much that I had to see this through to the end. I had traveled a lot and archeology was a hobby of mine. I quickly learned Toornag, a kind of evil spirit to watch out for, as they are sensitive to certain things. They believe that there was some kind of local flood that took place; therefore, here some principles of Christianity were superimposed on the oldest ancestral beliefs.
I paid the family what they wanted, room and board, for me to live in their home shack, acclimatize and revitalize myself for my journey. I had stayed at the Top of the World Hotel in Barrow for a few days before walking to the airstrip by the Chukchi Sea and venturing to make a deal with the pilot.
(Let me insert this before I continue my journey: It’s amazing to stand at the end of Point Barrow, and you see the Beaufort Sea frozen solid on one side, and the Chukchi Sea, thawed, for at least six weeks a year on the other side. year anyway, and I was within that time period.)
I didn’t really mind launching into this new adventure, it just took root, at a slow pace, while seeking attention: one thing leads to another, doesn’t it?
The family went bear hunting with the elders, and I went once in my six week stay with them, and found that they felt the bears like to smoke, yes I said smoke, it bothered me at first, but I had learned a lot things about the people with whom I lived those weeks; I tipped the people I was with believed the bear assumed human form, or could, was capable of. In the same way, the bear believed in a kind of hospitality, I think, that is, a generosity that they had towards the captured animals, they believed that the animals allowed themselves to be killed for the good of their human brothers, to help them. A kindness that was hard for me to digest.
I don’t remember how to spell my host’s name, but I’ll try to keep it that way for this story: Umanaq and her husband, I’ll call him since I can only remember the sounds of his name, Qaviangaq.
The midnight sun rose every night and other than that life was great, no igloos, just cabins. Completely different from Barrow which had a population of about 3000, a metropolis one might say, in the barren arctic; a pear at the store was $4.00, here in Point Lay, you ate what was available.
I found out that they even had a high school, some people with bachelor’s degrees, and maybe I was the highest at the graduate level, but no one paid much attention. In Barrow they wanted to hire me as Director of Chemical Dependency of a clinic, I had to reject it, but it was calling my attention. Employment seemed to be good during my stay, some drunks didn’t work, and I remember it being a dry area for alcohol during those days. It also seemed to me that almost half of the people were not married, some divorced.
Assut was the name of the boy, deep dark eyes, and a face that always had a sticky smile. He was always looking for little holes, it seems, to see if any creatures would come out, I think. The weather came to be in the late 30’s to 40’s late in the month, and it was warm compared to my first few days there, I guess summer was coming to the land.
the finding
I had drawn a map of the conversation with the young assistant archaeologist (in my mind at first, and in Barrow’s hotel later). Now it was July, and I knew he and his team would be leaving, he had told me, it was just a matter of days, he said, and so I had given him 25 days, I knew he would find something. , but not what I found; in fact, now I understand why he wanted to hide the site from me. But Qaviangaq and Umanaq would be the most gifted hunters, the guides he had ever known, and his two sons, of course, came with them.
The journey was hard and long, and I was able to, and possibly at a later date, dig into that, but I want to get to the premise of this story, and it’s a story that’s really worth it. I have shared many of my travels and exploits with people, and I have found many things, such as stone footprints on islands off the coast of Brazil, human footprints, with animal footprints next to them, and stones carved into bulls in other places, and I never told a person it will be for them to find (once in New Hampshire), but this was even more of a find.
We had found the place that the team had excavated, I guess the team was made up of American and Venezuelan scientists, it was a primitive site indeed. I’m not sure what to call them, but ape-men might do the trick; It is not the mummy the young man showed me a photo of, the mummy was returned to its original place inside the cave (I saw it), and the bones of the whales were sticking out a foot when I got to the site, under the cava. This was a different site, I’m not sure if they saw it or not, but it wasn’t far from theirs: ‘perhaps’ I thought ‘they were so engrossed in their find, and covering it up, they didn’t see this one; everything seemed to be still for centuries. If they did find this site, I wasn’t as careful as they were, I moved a lot of it here and there, I didn’t take anything, but I did move it, I touched it, I examined it.
I told myself: I found a bone Galapagos, of strange creatures in a cave; artwork on the walls; one species was of a frog, the bones were small, one carving was of it on the wall; perhaps some of these bones date from when South America, North America and Alaska were solidly integrated with Asia/Europe and Africa, also on the other side fused as one continent. Look at any map, it shows a division of the continents on the Atlantic side anyway.
I didn’t have any scientific data on anything, but there was volcanic dust in the cave, maybe from Ordovician times, when life arose from the sea as they say, to gradually become amphibians, as they say.
These bones were old, as others were perhaps around five million years old. I find most anthropologists to be narrow-minded (I’ve met some, and then some too many), or fixated on their own concepts, or too deep in a book, with no room for compromise, but whatever. . However, the question arises: ‘…when did the ape and human lineages split?’
As a Christian, I have no difficulty with that, I just read my story about pre-humans (“Before Eve” ((an epic poem))); but here I was faced with a fact in front of me; not an evolutionary fact (I don’t I think a banana would ever turn a monkey into a larger primate and then humanity), but the species is a given. It wasn’t like a lot of scientists trying to fit a piece of jaw bone into a skull, and call it Peking Man., or Java Man, and linking it to humanity in particular, therefore my guess is as good as theirs: though with this find and the hundreds of bones I saw, and skulls, and bones of bear, and so on, etc. and carvings on the wall, it would not be difficult to do.
Consequently, I have to take the belief of modern scientists that species eventually evolved in whatever they want to theorize in 5 to 10 million years, and break it down into a more sensible concept. These bones were real, some looked like fossils, ancient sediments, very primitive; but I didn’t see anything in the world that tells me that people become fossils, not even buried by landslides. So I have to assume that these species were from a time before humanity existed. Perhaps a pre-human stage developed, and in the process was eaten by superhuman beings, with a lesser species surviving to age somehow.
Here I found mysterious ear holes in the skulls, small nostrils in the skull. I couldn’t do any scientific dating, so I’ll never know. Whatever the bones, and from what age, they were not of the human creation of my God, I assure you, they were perhaps of some earlier creation than that against which man seems to have such prophetic deep negative concepts.
Written at home, Lima, Peru May 8, 2006
