Science: The Fat Boys

A pre-Columbian mystery

They are big and roly-poly, with human heads and torsos but no sexual markings. Standing majestically in the town plaza of La Democracia (pop. 2,000) in southern Guatemala, the dozen pre-Columbian statues were excavated from a nearby ceremonial site and are a favorite target of tourist cameras. Now the "Fat Boys," as they are called, are becoming objects of scientific curiosity as well.

Examining them with a hand compass earlier this year, Dartmouth Geographer Vincent H. Malmstrom found that its needle was sharply attracted whenever he held it to the navel of some of the statues, the right temple of others. Reason: these parts of their anatomy were themselves magnets. More astonishing, the rotund figures are about 4,000 years old, 2,000 years older than the first evidence of Chinese experiments with magnetism.

The Fat Boys are apparently of pre-Olmec origin, sculptured by predecessors of the earliest known civilization in Mesoamerica, who dwelt in a region around Izapa, an ancient priestly center just across the border in Mexico. The gifted artisans did not insert magnetic rocks into the figures, but apparently carved them around natural magnetic poles in the original basaltic boulders. But how did they discover this magnetism? Mesoamerica's oldest known lodestone, or primitive compass, a 2.5-cm (1-in.) bar made of magnetic rock, dates back only to 1000 B.C., a millennium younger than the Fat Boys and some 2,000 years before the Europeans first began using magnetized needles in navigation. Apparently the Fat Boy sculptors did know how to use lodestones as a means of locating other magnetic rock, to say nothing of pointing north.

Such natural pointers would explain how the Olmecs sculptured a 3,500-year-old figure of a turtle with a magnetic snout. To the Olmecs, Malmstrom speculates the magnetism may have been the magical power by which sea turtles found their way across great expanses of ocean. (He also suggests that the magnetic turtle may hint of Olmec contacts with the Chinese, since they also made their early compasses in the shape of turtles.) As for the Fat Boys, Malmstrom says, their magnetism may represent the life force, with the navel symbolizing birth, and the temple consciousness or knowledge.