Laredo Weekly Times

From Saturday's Daily,

A TEUTONIC DISCOVERY.

According to a German savant who claims he has discovered and deciphered an inscription on the rocks of Bohuslän, off the coast of Sweden, the remote ancestors of the Scandinavians and Germans 'not less than 20,000 years ago were a highly cultivated people.'

According to this veracious claim, the ancient race visited North and South America 14,000 years before Columbus, founded the Aztec and Inca empires and explored the Nile thousands of years before recorded Egyptian history. They antedated the Babylonians many centuries in the study of astronomy, were the first navigators, used ploughs and wagons thousands of years before the Garden of Eden was closed as a summer resort, and invented writing!

If all this could be discovered from some runes carved on the rocks of Scandinavia, why is it that the earliest Scandinavians and Teutons of which recorded history makes any mention had so degenerated from the culture of their primitive ancestors?

Why is it that in even comparatively modern times the Romans found no trace of culture, and recorded the skin garments and the rude weapons of the men who even a thousand years later were without the civilization that distinguished the Franks and the Iberians?

It looks like an attempt to prove that German kultur had a more remote beginning than the civilizations which were chronicled as old before the founding of the city of Romulus and the first struggles of the Greeks toward the light of art and beauty.

According to the studies of geologists, such a civilization as this ingenious decipherer of ancient inscriptions depicts would have been impossible in that day and age.

The people who explored the Nile would have left more than the few scattered relics which have been found by recent research, for even the earliest Egyptians left some mummified remains to show the world what they looked like in life.

The Neanderthal man probably dated back to the days of which this German discoverer speaks, if not further, but there is nothing about his skull to indicate culture, and in all probability the earliest races on the European continent were not any further advanced than he and his contemporaries.

Living amidst snow and ice, the greater part of the year frozen in and with no traces of any means of combustion, the people 20,000 years ago in Europe, especially the Scandinavians, could not have progressed very far in the arts of civilization. Histories show that at a period not so far back as 1,000 years ago the art of weaving was in its infancy; the art of ship building (without which no primitive race could have gotten far from its birthplace) was not as far advanced as that of the South Sea islanders of the present day; but the art of house building was on a par with that of the cliff dwellers, if even so advanced.

So that any civilization which predated that of the ancestors of our modern Scandinavians must have decayed when it has left no traces visible to the present day, for the buildings of the Mayas and the Incas are still in a state of preservation, while the piles of Egyptian masonry still stand the ravages of time and until the temple of Philae was flooded by the Assouan dam it stood a tribute to the ancient builders of the Nile valley.

The claim of this German scientist reminds one of the man who was boasting of the antiquity of his family and declaring that it was older than any other. When told that the chronicle made no mention of his ancestors among the people in Noah's ark, he said: "My people had an ark of their own!"

And evidently the ancestors of this German savant had a civilization of their own, though what they did with it when they passed on is difficult to imagine, as no trace of it now remains.