The Olmecs: 55-Ton Colossal Heads, Ancient Rubber and a Glyph for Zero

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In the 1850s a farm worker clearing land in Veracruz struck a carved stone head the size of a small car, the first known Olmec colossal head. Radiocarbon dating in the 1930s and 1940s showed the culture, which flourished roughly from 1200 to 400 BC in the swampy Coatzacoalcos basin of Veracruz and Tabasco, was centuries older than the Maya. Its name is a mix-up: Olmec is an Aztec Nahuatl word for the rubber people of the Gulf lowlands, who mixed Castilla elastica latex with morning glory juice in an early form of vulcanization. San Lorenzo rose around 1400 BC and was ritually decommissioned around 900 BC as power moved to La Venta.

Seventeen helmeted heads carved from Tuxtlas Mountains basalt have been found, and moving one could take 1,500 people three or four months by sledge, roller and raft. A 2018 mitochondrial DNA study placed two Olmec individuals in Native American haplogroup A, closing the door on 1970s theories of African origins. Their legacy includes were-jaguar imagery, stingray spine bloodletting, rubber balls from El Manatí dated to 1600 BC, the Cascajal block with 62 symbols and Long Count mathematics with a shell glyph for zero. Between 400 and 350 BC rivers silted and shifted, volcanoes erupted and the heartland emptied.

• At La Venta the Olmecs buried a thousand tons of serpentine blocks and jaguar mask mosaics where no human would ever see them.
• The Great Pyramid at La Venta still stands 34 meters high.
• Jade came from eastern Guatemala and obsidian from highlands hundreds of kilometers away, all carried without wheels or pack animals.
• Midden finds at San Lorenzo show domesticated dog was the leading source of animal protein.
• In 1942 Alfonso Caso called the Olmecs the mother culture of Mesoamerica, but evidence such as Zapotec irrigation now favors a sister culture model.