The History Scrutineer

One of the most captivating historical theories one could possibly come across is that of whether or not the Vikings (heralding from Scandinavia) made their way as far as Paraguay. Could these feared and legendary norse warrior-seamen have managed to somehow sail in their famous, narrow longboats constructed from (commonly) planks split out of old-oak trees – the vessels made watertight by all gaps being filled with moss, wool and animal hairs – mixed with tar/tallow, from the North Sea, all the way down the Atlantic to central South America? 

A member of the forum eupedia.com by the name of ‘Walloon’ posed the question: https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/white-aboriginals-in-paraguay-guayakis-and-vikings-in-america.44533/#:~:text=In%20the%20first%20book%20he,america%20in%20the%20Xth%20century.

Title: White aboriginals in Paraguay and Vikings in America.

Question: I’m curious if anyone here has read the work of Jacques de Mahieu––a franco-argentinian thinker who wrote extensively on the subject of the Pre-Columbian colonisation of the Americas. Some of his books are: Le Grand voyage du dieu-soleil; L’Agonie du Dieu Soleil. Les Vikings en Amérique du Sud, Drakkars sur l’Amazone.

In the first book he mentions the Guayaki peoples of Paraguay (also known as the Aché peoples). Apparently they were distinctively white and indo-european-like. De Mahieu argues that they were the remnants of Viking groups that colonised South America in the Xth century. Has anyone found genetic studies done on these peoples?

‘Walloon’ only received two responses – a Wikipedia link – and then this:

These old times European explorers and colonists made up “white” lost tribes all around the globe, even in sub saharan africa. Just a bunch of fairy tales, it is anyway interesting how these rumours were fuel that drove upper class european narcissists into suicidal missions in the tropical jungle. 

‘Viramund’.

So, looking at the article on Wikipedia concerning ‘white Paraguayans’/South Americans…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Amazonian_Indians

White Amazonian Indians or White Indians is a term first applied to sightings or encounters with mysterious white skinned natives of the Amazon rainforest from the 16th century by Spanish missionaries. These encounters and tales sparked Percy Fawcett’s journey into the uncharted jungle of the Amazonian Mato Grosso region. Various theories since the early 20th century have been proposed regarding the documented sightings or encounters.

The Spanish Dominican missionary Gaspar De Carvajal first claimed meeting a white tribe of Amazons, he wrote in his Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River (1542) of a tribe of Amazonian women who were “very white and tall” who had “long hair, braided and wound about their heads”. British Journalist Harold T. Wilkins in his Mysteries of Ancient South America (1945) compiled further accounts of similar sightings of “White Indians” in the Amazon Rainforest from the 16th to 19th century by explorers and Jesuits.

Percy Fawcett in the 1920s searched for the ‘Lost City of Z’ in the Amazon which he believed was inhabited by a race of “White Indians”.

Alexander H. Rice Jr.‘s 1924-1925 expedition into the unmapped Amazonian regions adjacent to the Parima River was publicised in The New York Times in July 1925. The article contains the following physical description of the “White Indians”:

Then two Indians who were bleached white by the sun, but of pure Indian blood, came out from the forest to greet the party. Dr. Rice described them as being undersized and undernourished. Their faces were streaked with pigments so that it was difficult to discern the features, but they were undeniably white. They wore no clothing, and carried bows and arrows which were tipped with poison, so the Indians in the expedition said. When the two received presents of beads and handkerchiefs they yelled to their companions and others soon emerged and joined the group, making in all twenty men and two women.

One group of Indians who may be the source of some of these tales are the Brazilian Parakanã. Although some are light skinned, “Parakanã” have skin colours that are not much different from those of other Amerindian groups”. Another journal article states “there is no evidence of miscegenation with Caucasians”.

The Ache Indians are a traditional hunter-gatherer tribe living in Paraguay. They are called “Guayakí” by Guarani speaking neighbours and in early anthropological accounts. Early descriptions of the Aché emphasised their white skin, light eye and hair colour, heavy beards, Asiatic features, and practice of cannibalism as identifying characteristics. Some writers have suggested that they are the descendants of Norsemen or shipwrecked European sailors, although neighbouring groups have said that they look Japanese, not European. A 1996 study reported that “recent genetic studies have in fact concluded that the Ache are physically and genetically dissimilar to most other South American Indians studied but they show no evidence of any European or African admixture.”

The Guna people of Panama and Colombia have a high incidence rate of albinism, which led Westerners to nickname them “white Indians” in the early 1900s.

The next extract comes from Ancient Origins.Net: https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/vikings-south-america-0013694

Here is presented the widely dismissed account that probably sometime in the mid-11th century, Danish Vikings from Schleswig and the Danelaw (as ascertained from runic rock inscriptions) arrived at Santos in Brazil and proceeded inland to Paraguay. From a fortified hill near the Brazilian border, they occupied a defensive position for some part of two centuries, keeping watch on a nearby small mountain. It has been reported that in the 20th century, beneath the mountain under observation, was discovered a large area whose walls and roof are built of concrete unknown to science and cannot be opened but are believed to conceal a network of tunnels. The following unravels the story presented by just a few advocates of Vikings in South America. Like so many of these tales, it needs further investigation to enable verification, but nonetheless, it provides food for thought.

Academic historians generally do not admit the presence of European visitors to South America until after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Therefore for them, all talk of Vikings travelling anywhere south of Nova Scotia before 1492 AD is not even hypothetical but pure fiction. In order to maintain this pretence, historians have found it necessary to discard what might be to others common sense and replace it with a preposterous theory. The best example of this is: The Case of the Bundsö Sheepdogs. 

It was the custom of the pre-conquest Incas to be mummified with their dogs. A variety of dogs found in graves at Ancon, Chile, by Professor Nehring in 1885 was analysed by two French zoologists in the 1950s who determined that this variety could not be descended from the wild dogs of South America. They matched them to Canis familiaris L.patustris Rut of which numerous skeletal remains have been discovered, all at Bundsö on the Danish island of Als/Jutland.

The anatomical coincidence being deemed perfect, the difficulty then lay in accounting for how these Danish dogs got to South America before the Spanish Conquest. The French scientists got their heads together and decided that: “the Danish Vikings must have given some of their Bundsö sheepdogs to Norwegian Vikings who took them to Vinland. When the Norwegians were ejected from Vinland by the natives, the dogs must have been carried from Vinland to modern Canada where they must have been passed from hand to hand ever southwards by tribes which did not want them, involving travel by land and sea and then climbing mountains into Peru where they were adopted by the Incas.”

This nonsensical explanation was the only scientific theory available, that is, that would fit with the accepted history of the finding of the Americas. But if that account were wrong, a more common sense explanation might be that the Danish Vikings brought the dogs with them when they sailed to South America from Europe in the eleventh century.

In 1085 AD, King Knut II had 1700 ships for the “western expansion”. For the greater distances involved, a special type of woollen sail, which had been developed for greater speed and sailing much closer to the wind, as proved in experiments by Amy Lightfoot with the Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde. Strangely for Europeans so far from home in the 11th century, the Danish-Schleswig Vikings in this account seemed to know exactly where they were heading.

They came ashore at Santos, Brazil, found the path which had been long previously prepared, and made their way on foot to uplands located at Amambay, 25 kilometres (16 mi) south-east of the modern town of Pedro Juan Caballero in Paraguay.

The Cerro Corá is a ring of three small mountains five kilometres (3 mi) across. Three kilometres (1.9 mi) north of this ring is the mountain Itaguambype, which means ‘fortress’. Long before the supposed arrival of the Vikings, it had been hollowed out to make one, hence its name.

The anthropologist who investigated the area in the 1970s, Jacques de Mahieu, was a French – Argentinian anthropologist and leader of the Spanish neo-Nazi group CEDADE, who has proposed various Pre-Columbian contact theories, and claimed that certain indigenous groups in South America are descended from Vikings. Through his observations, he decided that, at some indefinite time in the past, the construction’s purpose must have been some kind of military observation post large enough for a settlement or a refuge.

The low mountain Itaguambype lies on a north-south axis. It is two kilometres (1.2 mi) in length and one hundred metres (328 ft) high. The ex-fortress is a section cut off at the south end, 300 metres (984 ft) long with a 20-metre-wide (66-ft) opening for access. The sides are of natural rock, a quarter of the way up above from the ground with blocks of unequal-size, stone tailored to fit together perfectly smoothly in the manner similar to anti-earthquake walls in Peru and Bolivia.

Along the crest a 3-metre-wide (10-ft) flat path runs; at the southern extremity is a platform with the ruins of a round lookout tower raised 5 metres (16 ft) above the crest for a panorama of the entire territory but particularly Cerro Corá. The fortress would have been abandoned either in about 1250 AD, when a native rebellion succeeded in expelling the Vikings, or earlier, once it had served its true purpose.

Of additional interest in the area is the Norse temple at Tacuati excavated in the 1970s, and the fact that the total of engraved runic inscriptions in Paraguay runs in the thousands and exceeds that of all Scandinavia: 71 have been translated from the South American Futhorc dialect. One 5-letter runic inscription was found inside Itaguambype but has defied translation.

End of extract. 

At this point, a video to break up the text might be a good idea. And an excellent video at that – from the dedicated California-based anthropologist Robert Sepehr. Please watch, to learn all about the Germanic explorer Fritz Berger and his Nazi-funded, Paraguayan military-supported excursion into the ‘Bald Mountain’ whereupon they came across an “impenetrable slab”… 

In conclusion, we scrutinizers say that if the Vikings were such expert and able seamen with their fearless warrior spirit who were (as is accepted and established) able to reach North America, Greenland, head up and down the Mediterranean, successfully siege Frankish Paris after having come up through the river Seine, traverse the great and terribly complicated river systems of Eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea in order to reach the Black Sea and trade with Persians, Byzantines and Arabs… then why not South America? 

Why not?

Why would Nazi Germany send U-Boats across the Atlantic during wartime to assist a half-baked archeology-enthusiast in a Paraguayan jungle just for ‘kicks and giggles’? 

To be pondered…