'Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact' refers to interactions between the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and peoples of other continents—
Europe,
Africa,
Asia, or
Oceania—
before the arrival of
Christopher Columbus in
1492. Many such events have been proposed at various times, based on historical reports, archaeological finds, and cultural comparisons.
Overview
Diffusionist view
Theories of pre-Columbian contact have been fairly popular in the
Western world since the 16th century. Several reasons may account for the spread of these
diffusionist theories, including political
propaganda, justification for
colonialism, the backing of
priority claims, or simply a naive tendency to explain the origins of
New World civilizations in the context of Biblical tradition or other known civilizations.
Proponents of such contacts often stated or implied the
ethnocentric premise that indigenous people such as Native Americans and the
Rapanui of
Easter Island were "savages" who could not have developed the sophisticated technical and scientific knowledge of some
New World civilizations without outside help. These theories were influenced by certain
dogmatic
religious beliefs, and by the scarcity of knowledge about the origins and history of the indigenous peoples, which lacked a coherent scientific model until the mid-
20th century.
Isolationist view
In the late
1500s, the Jesuit scholar
José de Acosta suggested peoples of the Americas arrived via a now-submerged land bridge from Asia as primitive hunters, later settling into sedentary communities and cities. In
Notes on the State of Virginia (
1781),
Thomas Jefferson theorized that ancestors of Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait from Asia.
Over time, traveler reports (such as the books by
John Lloyd Stephens on
Mesoamerica), documented research (such as
William H. Prescott's accounts of the
Spanish conquests of
Mexico and
Peru), and extensive archaeological discoveries revealed more about the history of pre-Columbian society. These data eventually led many historians to embrace isolationist views: namely, that the pre-Columbian civilizations had evolved gradually over several millennia, and that their culture and knowledge at the time of European contact had developed in isolation from peoples and cultures outside the Americas.
The isolationist view came to prevail in the 20th century, as carbon dating and molecular genetics began to shed light on the origins of native populations. While the human presence in
Eurasia is attested by
fossil finds spanning several hundred thousand years, human remains older than 13,000 years in the Americas seemed to be scarce to nonexistent. This time frame roughly coincides with the most recent
ice age, a time when the sea level was substantially lower than it is today. This coincidence, and genetic similarities between the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and certain
Siberian and
East Asian populations, led scientists to believe that the Americas were populated by
migrations across the
Bering Strait, which would have been mostly dry land at the time.
Linguistic and genetic studies suggest no fewer than three distinct migration waves. On the other hand, if the ice age made land migrations possible, the route must have been closed again when it ended and the sea level rose again some 9,000 years ago. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the
Bering Land Bridge theory came to be viewed as proved beyond any doubt. It was also believed at the time that trans-oceanic travel only became possible in the 15th century, after key advances in Old World shipbuilding and navigation. Most
archeologists came to believe that the native cultures of the Americas had been isolated from the Old World after the closing of the Bering land route, when they were still in the
hunter-gatherer stage; and had developed without any outside influences for the next 9,000 years until the time of Columbus. This belief is supported by the lack of substantial evidence of Old World influences on the American civilizations.
Questioning the isolationist view
The standard single route migration model for the population of the Americas has been increasingly challenged in recent years by claims of human artifacts dating between 15,000 and 50,000 years, a time period in which inland routes were blocked by massive ice sheets. Human remains from 9,000 years ago such as the
Kennewick Man have anatomical features that differ somewhat from those of modern indigenous populations. Finds such as these raise the possibility that the Bering Land Bridge may not have been the sole route of pre-Columbian migrants to the Americas. For instance, intercoastal navigation along the Pacific shores of Siberia and Alaska may have provided an alternate route, independent of sea level or ice sheets. However, there is no dispute that the Bering Land Bridge was an important migration route into the Americas.
Proponents of the
Solutrean hypothesis suggest that
Upper Paleolithic settlers from Europe could have crossed the Atlantic along the ice sheets during the
Last Glacial Maximum, bringing with them tool-making methods which may have influenced the
Clovis tool complex.
Paleoclimate models created by Professor Richard Peltier at the
University of Toronto seem to indicate that at that time, the Atlantic Ocean froze every winter. The model suggests that a 10-meter thick sheet of ice stretched from western Europe to the eastern coast of North America. Some researchers suggest that recent finds of spear points at
Cactus Hill, Virginia dating to 17,000 years ago seem to indicate a transitional style between the Solutrean tool-making style and the later Clovis technology. DNA analysis of the central Ontario
Ojibwa Native Americans by Dr. Michael Brown of
Mercer University, in
Macon, Georgia has indicated that their DNA markers are similar to those found in early stone age peoples of Europe.
[1]
Pacific intercoastal migration
A growing body of recent evidence indicates that besides the
Bering land bridge, another possibly equally important migration route into the Americas existed along the Pacific shoreline. This theory does not suggest potentially hazardous open ocean crossings, but instead, gradual movement close to shore, probably in pursuit of favorable fishing areas.
From coastal areas, people could have migrated inland, bypassing the vast northern ice sheet. This theory may account for the appearance of human activity well within the Americas during the time when inland migration routes were blocked by ice sheets as well as later migrations by
Na-Dene and
Eskimo-Aleut peoples. Unfortunately, many of the prime sites for study now lie beneath sea level on the continental shelf since
sea levels were substantially lower during the
ice age than today.
A 2006 article in the ''
Los Angeles Times'' reports findings (to be published in ''Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology'') that new
DNA-based research uniquely links the DNA retrieved from a 10,000-year-old
fossilized tooth from an
Alaska island, with specific coastal tribes in
Tierra del Fuego,
Ecuador,
Mexico and
California.
[2] Unique
DNA markers found in the tooth were connected only with these specific coastal tribes, and were not found in any of the other indigenous peoples in the Americas. This finding lends substantial credence to a migration theory that at least one set of early peoples moved south along the west coast of the Americas in boats.
Norse interactions in the New World
Main articles: Norse colonization of the Americas
Norse journeys to North America are supported by both historical and archaeological evidence. Norse presence in
Greenland apparently began in the late 10th century. In 1961, archaeologists
Helge and
Anne Ingstad uncovered remains of a Norse settlement at the
L'Anse aux Meadows site in
Newfoundland,
Canada, proving some truth to the main claims of
Vinland sagas.
It is possible that
Vinland may have been North America. Since the 19th century, it was accepted as fact in some countries. Speculations and disputes about the authenticity of the
Vinland map made people further question Norse settlement in America, since Norse contact with natives had little (if any) effect on indigenous culture.
Indigenous peoples and the Norse
Few sources for contact between Natives [Americans] and Norse settlers exist. Contact between the
Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, and Norse between the 12th or 13th centuries is known for certain. The Greenlanders called these incoming settlers "
skraelings", meaning "wretches" in
Old Norse. Conflict between the Greenlanders and "skraelings" is recorded in the ''Icelandic Annals'', as one of the few sources mentioning contact. Previous contact between native peoples and the Norse in Vinland, however, probably occurred from the outset. Major sources for this are the Vinland sagas, recorded hundreds of years later. The sagas record fights with natives referred to as "skraelings", unrelated to the Thule of Greenland.
Agriculture
Major
cradles of civilization emerged on the basis of the domestication and development of wild plants. In the Americas, the principal domesticated plant was
maize, a domesticate of the Mexican wild grass
teosinte. Indigenous agriculture developed over thousands of years. Established native American civilizations tended to arise when the productivity of domesticated agriculture attained a certain level whereby larger populations could be sustained and organized into more sophisticated societies. Major agricultural development occurred well before any verified external cultural contacts did. The relatively early appearance (c. 7,000 BC) of the African
gourd (with its inherent ability to float, even across the ocean), is the exception. There is no clear evidence of any other non-indigenous domesticated plant in the Americas before this.
In 1995, professor Hakon Hjelmqvist published an article in ''
Svensk Botanisk Tidskrift'' on pre-Columbian
chili peppers in Europe.
[3] According to him, archaeologists at a dig in
St Botulf in
Lund found a ''Capsicum frutechens'' in a layer from the 13th century. Hjelmqvist also claims that ''Capsicum'' was described by the Greek
Theophrastus (370-286 BC) in his ''
Historia Plantarum'', and in other sources. Around the first century AD, the Roman poet
Martialis described "Pipervee crudum" (raw pepper), but describes them as long and containing seeds, a description which seems to fit
chili peppers.
Circumstantial evidence
Feasibility of early trans-oceanic travel
Many people, including orthodox anthropologists, believe pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact was unlikely, and therefore the only cultural kin to Native Americans were other autochthonous people. Mainstream scholarship is dubious about claims of pre-Columbian transoceanic voyaging for a reason, since apart from the Norse and perhaps Polynesians, evidence to date has been circumstantial or nonexistent. However, historical evidence may have been destroyed by human or natural causes, while other evidence may still lie buried.
Circumstantial evidence includes records of ocean voyages of comparable distance (such as in the case of the Polynesians) as well as modern attempts to retrace possible contact routes with reproductions of ancient boats. While these experiments may have fueled wide conjecture, they indicate that such voyages were technically possible.
''For more on modern efforts to reconstruct prehistoric trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic travel, see
Thor Heyerdahl.
Historical long-range travel
Linguistic evidence has demonstrated that
Madagascar, for example, was settled by
Austronesian peoples from
Indonesia. Their navigators were able to cross the
Indian Ocean and large sections of the
Pacific by the early
1st millennium.
Centuries before Columbus,
Arab (considered African and not Middle Eastern at the time) and merchant ships regularly traveled between
East Africa, the
Middle East,
India, and
China. This trade has been well-documented with written records and archeological finds (such as Chinese pottery in
Zimbabwe).
In the
19th century, a
Japanese
junk lost its
mast and
rudder in a
typhoon on its way to
Edo, was carried by sea currents across the
Northern Pacific, and reached the coast of
Washington State 14 months later. One of the survivors,
Otokichi, became a famous interpreter.
Possible cultural and biological similarities
Polynesians
Between 300 and 1200
CE Polynesians in canoes, spread throughout the
Polynesian Triangle going at least as far as far as
Easter Island,
New Zealand and
Hawaii; and perhaps on to the Americas. The ''kumara'' (
sweet potato), a plant native to the Americas was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Kumara has been radiocarbon-dated in the
Cook Islands to 1000 AD, and current thinking is that it was brought to central Polynesia circa 700 AD and spread across
Polynesia from there, most likely by Polynesians who had travelled to South America and back
[4]. It is possible, however, that South Americans brought it to the Pacific or that this plant or its seed-bearing parts simply floated across the Pacific without human contact ever occurring.
A 2007 study published in the ''
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' of
chicken bones at
El Arenal near the
Arauco Peninsula,
Arauco Province,
Chile strongly suggests Oceania-to-America contact. Chickens originated in southern Asia and the ''Araucana'' species of Chile was thought to have been brought by Spaniards around 1500; however, the bones found in Chile were radiocarbon-dated to between
1304 and
1424, well before the documented arrival of the Spanish. DNA sequences taken were exact matches to those of chickens from the same period in
American Samoa and
Tonga, both over 5000 miles away from Chile. The genetic sequences were also similar to those found in Hawaii and Easter Island, the closest island at only 2500 miles, and unlike any breed of European chicken.
[5]["Polynesians beat Spaniards to South America, study shows" by Thomas H. Maugh II, ''Los Angeles Times'', 5 June 2007][6]
Polynesian contact with the prehispanic
Mapuche culture in central-south Chile has been suggested because of apparently similar cultural traits, including words like ''toki'' (stone axes and adzes), hands clubs similar to the
Maori ''wahaika'', the sewn-plank canoe as used on Chiloe island, the ''curanto'' earth oven (Polynesian ''umu'') common in southern Chile, fishing techniques such as stone wall enclosures, a hockey-like game, and other potential parallels. Some strong westerlies and El Niño wind blow directly from central-east Polynesia to the Mapuche region, between Concepcion and Chiloe. A direct connection from New Zealand is possible, sailing with the "roaring forties". In 1834, some escapees from Tasmania arrived at Chiloe Island after sailing for 43 days.
[7]
Recently, linguist
Kathryn A. Klar of
UC Berkeley and
archaeologist Terry L. Jones of
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo have proposed contacts between Polynesians and the
Chumash and
Gabrielino of southern
California, between
500 and
700. Their chief evidence is the advanced sewn-plank canoe design, which is used throughout the Polynesian Islands, but is unknown in North America — except for those two tribes. Moreover, the Chumash word for "sewn-plank canoe," ''
tomolo'o'', may have been derived from ''kumulaa'au'', the Polynesian word for the
Redwood logs used in that construction.
Over the last 20 years, the dates and anatomical features of human remains found in Mexico and South America have led some archaeologists to propose that those regions were first populated by people who crossed the Pacific several millennia before the
Ice Age migrations; according to this theory, these
Pre-Siberian American Aborigines would have been either eliminated or absorbed by the Siberian immigrants. However, current archaeological evidence for human migration to and settlement of remote Oceania (i.e., the
Pacific Ocean eastwards of the
Solomon Islands) is dated to no earlier than approximately 3,500
BP;
[8] trans-Pacific contact with the Americas coinciding with or pre-dating the Beringia migrations of at least 11,500 BP is highly problematic, except for movement along intercoastal routes.
Aboriginals
The
Fuegian peoples of
Tierra del Fuego at the extreme tip of South America appear to be physically, culturally and linguistically distinct from other Native Americans and some proponents of this theory suggest they may be mixed descendants of both relative newcomers from Asia, American Aborigines and indigenous Australians.
[9] Both
Tehuelches and
Selk'nams practiced body-painting rituals similar that of
Indigenous Australians. Unlike most other Amerindian peoples, they appeared taller than most Europeans (See:
Patagon myth).
Africans
Main articles: Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories
Evidence for an African presence in
Mesoamerica point to
Olmec culture, the presence of African crops, certain Islamic sources, and European accounts of early sightings of blacks in the New World.
The Olmec culture extended from roughly 1200 BC to 400 BC. Cited evidence for an African presence include statues, stone carvings, religious beliefs, crops and figurines showing African influence. Some facial features of the ancient
Olmecs, as seen on their statues, resemble African physical attributes. Research by authors such as
Ivan van Sertima and
James W. Loewen,
[10] propose that the statues depict visitors from Africa; which could have been either permanent (i.e. settlers), or temporary (explorers, military, traders, etc.) The origin of those visitors has been conjectured to be the
Phoenician colonies in northern Africa, or the ancient peoples who lived in the
Sahara before it became a desert. Some observers have noted stone imagery carved on Olmec and
Mayan stelae seem to depict interactions between Africans and Native Americans.
The presence of one African native plant species, the bottle gourd, in
Mesoamerica has been cited as possible evidence of trans-oceanic contact. The bottle gourd could have also came to the Americas by floating, or possibly as a seed in the droppings of a bird. Islamic sources describe what some consider to be visits to the New World by a Mali fleet in 1311.
[11] According to these sources, 400
Mali Empire ships discovered a land across the ocean to the West after being swept off course by ocean currents. Only one ship returned, and the captain reported the discovery of a western current to Prince
Abubakari II; the off-course Mali fleet of 400 ships is said to have conducted both trade and warfare with peoples of the "western lands." Prince Abubakari II then abdicated his throne and set off to explore these western lands. In 1324, the Mali king
Mansa Musa is said to have told the Islamic historian,
Al-Umari that "his predecessors had launched two expeditions from West Africa to discover the limits of the Atlantic Ocean."
According to Ivan van Sertima,
Christopher Columbus was told by natives of Hispaniola that black-skinned visitors had preceded the Europeans. Van Sertima claims Columbus acquired metal spearheads left behind by these black strangers and sent them to Spain, where they were found to be of similar composition to metals forged in Guinea, West Africa.
Bartolomé de las Casas quotes Columbus thus: "the Indians brought handkerchiefs of cotton, very symmetrically woven and worked in colors like those brought from Guinea, from the rivers of Sierra Leone and of no difference." Author P. V. Ramos points out in his essay "African Presence in Early America" that
Christopher Columbus’ own impression of the Carib peoples was that they were "Mohemmedans" (it should be noted that early European explorers often described
New World peoples in terms of familiar
Old World cultures and religions).
In
1498, during
Christopher Columbus' third voyage to the Indies, Columbus writes in his diary: "canoes had been found which start from the coast of Guinea and navigate to the west with merchandise." Las Casas later wrote: "certain principal inhabitants of the island of Santiago came to see them and they say that to the southwest of the Island of Huego, which is one of the Cape Verdes distance 12 leagues from this, may be seen an island, and that the King Don Juan was greatly inclined to send to make discoveries to the southwest, and that canoes had been found which start from the coast of Guinea and navigate to the west with merchandise." In
1499, Columbus writes about West African traders found in present-day
Panama.
[12]
Fernando Colón, the son of Christopher, wrote about dark-skinned people near Punta de Caxinas (today, Punta de Castilla) seen in Honduras: "But those of the east, as far as
Cape Gracias a Dios, are almost black...".
[13]
African contact shows links to the West African
Mandinka people of the Mali empire to the Mandinga of Panama. In 1513, explorer
Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed
Panama. Chronicler
Peter Martyr d'Anghiera reports his encounter with the Tule, a tribe related to the
Kuna of present-day Panama and
Colombia. The Tule tell Balboa of their war against the Mandinga ("dark men") nation, whom Balboa reportedly sighted.
[14] Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg also described the Mandinga as having "black skin" and the Tule as having "red skin".
The
Dominican friar Gregorio Garcia, author of early speculative works on Native Americans, reported on "black-skinned people" sighted in present-day Colombia near where
Cartagena now lies. Spanish historian
López de Gomara described certain peoples as identical to Africans seen in Guinea.
[15] Although an associate of Hernan Cortes, López de Gomara never traveled to the Americas, and his account of Cortes' exploits was criticized as a hagiography full of error and exaggeration
[16]
Some accounts are unclear as to when or how the reported Africans or Blacks may have arrived in the New World. Author Michael Coe reports that Father Alonzo Ponce spoke of a
boatload of "
Moors" who landed off near present-day
Campeche,
Mexico and terrorized the natives. The French naturalist
Armand de Quatrefages, author of "The Human Species", writes of distinct Black tribes among Native Americans like the
Yamasee of Florida, the
Charrúa of southern
South America, and a people in
St. Vincent. The latter may refer to the
Garifuna, a people descended from
Carib Indians and escaped
African slaves, who came to the New World well after Columbus.
The
Melungeons, whose presence was first noted by European explorers in
Appalachia in the mid-
1600s, are conjectured to be partial descendants of Mediterranean and/or North African peoples in
North America.
[17]
Egyptians and Mesopotamians
The similarity between the
Egyptian pyramids and the temples of some New World civilizations — such as the
Mayas,
Aztecs, and
Incas — has fueled speculations that either the Egyptians had traveled to the Americas, or that the civilizations on both sides of the ocean had sprung from a common source (such as the mythical lost continent of
Atlantis). Sometimes the comparison was made between the
pyramids of the New World and the
ziggurats of
Mesopotamia, which would imply contact with the
Sumerians or other people of the region. The typical American pyramid was built as a platform for a
temple, and was periodically enlarged with new layers; the design apparently evolved from an artificial earth mound, which was later covered with plaster and stone. In contrast, the Egyptian pyramid was just a tomb for one
pharaoh and his immediate family, with no temple proper; it was never enlarged after its completion; and its design evolved from smaller stone tomb structures.
Other claims of contacts with Egypt were based on reports that some chemical tests run on Egyptian
mummies had found traces of plant products native to the Americas,
such as
tobacco and
coca, which some have proposed were brought to them by
Carthaginian merchants. These results may have resulted from modern contamination or some other experimental error in the absence of verification by other scientists.
Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans
Evidence of contacts with the civilizations of
Classical Antiquity — chiefly the
Roman Empire, but sometimes also with
Greece,
Carthage and other
Phoenician cities, and other cultures of the age — have been based on isolated archaeological finds in American sites that were supposedly manufactured in
the Old World. None of the finds have been sufficiently well-documented to dispel the possibility of the objects having been misidentified, misdated, or placed at the site at a more recent date — either accidentally, or as a fraud.
In 1933, at
Toluca Valley (72 kilometres west of
Mexico City), a
small terracotta head, showing a beard and European-like features, was found embedded in the pavement of a building that had been abandoned in 1510, nine years before the Spaniards arrived. In 1961, Austrian anthropologist
Robert von Heine-Geldern studied the head, declaring that it fit Roman schools of art from the
2nd century. In
1999, the head was dated by
thermoluminescence to
870 BC – AD
1270.
[18] Nonetheless, as pointed out by archaeologist
Michael E. Smith, the fieldwork documentation is so poor that it is not clear whether this object was indeed excavated at Calixtlahuaca or not.
In
1963, what appeared to be
Roman coins were discovered in
New Albany, Indiana, across from
Louisville, Kentucky [3]. All but two of the coins have vanished; the remaining ones appear to depict
Roman Emperors
Claudius Gothicus and
Maximinus. More recently, what appear to be Roman coins from the same period have been found on the other side of the
Ohio River. The coins were found buried in what might have been a disintegrated leather pouch.
In
1982, Brazilian newspapers reported that fragments of
amphorae had been recovered by treasure hunter and underwater archaeologist
Robert Frank Marx, from the bottom of
Guanabara Bay, in
Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil.
Elizabeth Lyding Mill of the University of Massachusetts identified the finds as being Roman, manufactured at
Kouass (Dehar Jedid) in Morocco, and dated them to the
3rd century. A bottom survey by
Harold E. Edgerton, an MIT researcher, located what seemed to be remains of two disintegrating ships. This potential find aggravated Brazilian and Spanish government officials as Spain was in the process of planning the 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus' arrival in the New World. These claims were also disputed when
Américo (Amerigo) Santarelli, an Italian diver living in Rio de Janeiro, revealed in a book that he had 18 such amphors made by a local potter, and had placed 16 of them himself at various places in the bay. He said that his intent was to recover the encrusted amphors later, to decorate his house at
Angra dos Reis. It should be noted, however, that the Brazilian government prevented any additional research and dumped sand over the site in the bay to ensure no further artifacts would ever be recovered. Robert Marx, incidentally, was prohibited to work in Brazil due to his insistence on trying to locate the alleged Roman wrecks.
Claims of contact have often been based on occurrences of similar motifs in art and decoration, or on depictions in one World of species or objects that are thought to be characteristic of the other World. Famous examples include a Maya statuette depicting a bearded man rowing, a cross in
bas-relief at the
Temple of the Cross in
Palenque, or a
pineapple in a
mosaic on the wall of a house at
Pompeii. Nevertheless, most of these finds can be explained as the result of mis-interpretation. The Palenque "cross", for instance, is almost certainly a stylized
maize plant; and the Pompeii "pineapple" is more likely to be a pine
cone.
Some contact claimants note that the
Aztec word for "god", ''teotl'', is similar to Greek ''theos'' and
Latin ''deus''. Linguists generally ascribe such similar words to coincidence and identify them as
false cognates, a common linguistic fallacy.
The established presence of Romans and probably Phoenicians in the
Canary Islands has led some researchers to suggest that the islands may have been used as a stepping-off point for such journeys, as the islands lie along the same favorable sea route undertaken by Columbus on his first voyages to the Americas. Additionally, the dubious
Bat Creek inscription has led to possibility of
Jewish seafarers may have come to America after fleeing the
Roman Empire at the time of the
Jewish Revolt.
[19]
Chinese
According to some Chinese reports,
peanuts, a plant native to South America, were found at a 4,000 year old archaeological site during the early 1970s. Others claim that
maize was cultivated in China well before
1492, even though the wild grass from which maize was domesticated,
teosinte, is indigenous only to Mexico and adjacent parts of Central America, and numerous intermediate forms of the domesticated maize cobs form a continuum in the archaeological record in Mexico over thousands of years. While this information is evident, archaeological claims are debated and questioned
[4], few argue against the fact that it was only after the
Columbian Exchange that these plants, in their New world versions, became significant in Chinese agriculture.
Others have pointed out stylistic similarities between the decorative motifs of ancient China and of the ancient Maya, and the great value that both placed on
jade. Stylistic similarities also exist between
Shang Dynasty bronzes and
Totem pole carvings of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.
[5]
Japanese
Pottery associated with the unique
Valdivia culture of coastal Ecuador dated to
3000 BC-
1500 BC is said to exhibit similarities to pottery produced during the
Jomon period of Japan.
Alaskan anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis claims that the
Zuni people of
New Mexico exhibit linguistic and cultural similarities to the Japanese. The
Zuni language is an
isolate, and the culture appears to differ more from any other surrounding natives through blood type, endemic
disease and religion. Davis speculates that
Buddhist priests or restless peasants from Japan may have crossed the Pacific by the
13th Century and influenced Zuni society.
Indians
An image in a temple in
southern India is said to depict a goddess holding maize, a crop native to the Americas; the image is more usually taken to be of a native grass like
sorghum or
pearl millet, which bear some resemblance to maize. . There is also a purported reference to
Mayan civilization in the
Indian epic ''
Mahabharata''. 'Mayudu' (a king known for his architectural skills) is asked by the Pandavas to build a palace for them. 'Mayadu' and his culture are said to resemble the Maya Civilization, also known for palaces and other buildings built with relatively advanced architecture. Some perceive similarity between Mayan carvings and designs to those of early Hindu temples, including depictions of the postures of lions.
Andalusians, Arabs, and Moors
Main articles: Pre-Columbian Islamic contact theories
Several medieval
Arabic sources suggest that
Muslim explorers from
Islamic Spain and
Northwest Africa may have travelled in
expeditions across the
Atlantic Ocean to the
Americas between the 9th and 14th centuries. The earliest of these was the navigator Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad, from
Cordoba,
Islamic Spain, who in 889, sailed from Delba (
Palos), crossed the Atlantic, reached the Americas, and returned with fabulous treasures.
[20][Dr. Youssef Mroueh (2003). ]
Pre-Columbian Muslims in the Americas. Media Monitors Network.[21] Another Muslim navigator, Ibn Farrukh, from
Granada, sailed into the Atlantic on February 999, landed in Gando (
Canary islands) visiting King Guanariga, and continued westward where he saw and named two islands, Capraria and Pluitana. He arrived back in Spain in May 999.
[[22]]
Culdee monks
It is known that Culdee monks were persecuted by the Vikings in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The Culdee originated in Ireland and Scotland; however, there is an oral tradition, subsequently recorded in the Sagas, of a pre-Norse presence in Iceland. There is speculation of a migration of Culdee refugees to Greenland, then to Labrador and Nova Scotia to flee the Vikings. The evidence given to support this theory is the existence in the Maine and New Hampshire areas of approximately 275 beehive stone huts. These stone structures are seen by some as similar to those found in Ireland and Scotland, where they were built in the Early Middle Ages or earlier. The structures are unlike prehistoric buildings found in North America, and do not fit any of the known living use patterns of Native Americans,[23] although some may fall into the category of ceremonial stone landscapes as described by United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc.[6], in their recent resolution on that topic. However, most professional archaeologists still consider such stone structures to have been built in the colonial era. There are claims that Ogham writing has been found carved into stones in the Virginias[24], but grave doubts about these claims have been raised [25]
and other places in the Americas, although none of these finds have ever been confirmed by credible linguists, epigraphers, or archaeologists.
Late contact claims
There are many historically-based claims of late trans-oceanic contacts in the 14th century — right before Columbus.
Zheng He
Main articles: 1421 hypothesis
The British author Gavin Menzies popularized in his book '' the controversial hypothesis that the fleet of Zheng He arrived at America in 1421.[26] Menzies' "1421 hypothesis" has been found unconvincing by many professional historians. The hypothesis has led to proposals of other Chinese-American contacts, e.g. by off-course Ming Dynasty ships. Also, the possibility of Muslim trips from Asia (see Sung Document) has been discussed.
Spanish
Even in Columbus' time there was much speculation that other Old Worlders had made the trip in ancient or contemporary times; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés records
several in his ''General y natural historia de las Indias'' of 1526, which includes biographical information on Columbus. He discusses the then current story of a Spanish caravel that was swept off its course while on its way to England, and wound up in a foreign land populated by naked tribesmen. The crew gathered supplies and made its way back to Europe, but the trip took several months and the captain and most of the men died before reaching land. The ship's pilot, a man from somewhere in the Iberian peninsula (Oviedo says different versions have him as Portuguese, Basque, or Andalusian), and very few others finally made it to Portugal, but all were very ill. Columbus was a good friend of the pilot, and took him to be treated in his own house, and the pilot described the land they had seen and marked it on a map before dying. People in Oviedo's time knew this story in several versions, but Oviedo disregarded it as myth. [27]
Portuguese and Basque
Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution have examined the bones of Portuguese fisherman who reached Canada before Columbus reached the West Indies[28] dating back to approximately 1424.
There were at least two and possibly three Portuguese expeditions which colonized the Azores in the years 1432 to 1453.[29]
In 1472, the Portuguese navigator João Vaz Corte-Real was granted the title "discoverer of the Land of the Codfish". It is conjectured that he visited Newfoundland.
The presence of Basque cod fishermen and whalers in North America, just a few years after Columbus, has also been cited. A Basque whaling station in Red Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador operated from 1530 to 1600 [30]. Others have conjectured that Columbus was able to convince the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon to support his planned voyage only because they were aware of some earlier voyage. Some suggest that Columbus himself visited Canada or Greenland before 1492, because he wrote he had visited Thule once.
In the first half of the 16th century, the Tupinambá people in the Rio de Janeiro region cut their hair in a monk-like fashion. According to Hans Staden, a sixteenth-century German sailor who was their prisoner for several years, they attributed the style to a European monk who had visited them some time before the official Portuguese discovery of Brazil in 1500.
Danish-German-Portuguese
German captains Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst are said to have landed on the coast of Labrador in 1473 at the head of a joint Danish-German-Portuguese expedition, possibly with a semi-mythical John Scolvus as navigator. Pining made two voyages to Greenland. The second one returned in 1478 via Iceland to Scandinavia where Pining was appointed governor for the Danish King Christian I, by then King of Norway as well as of Denmark. For three years Pining was the Danish King's governor in Iceland.[7] In 1480 he and his co-captain Pothurst who had been sailing with Pining on both voyages to Greenland, resumed their pirate activities south of the Greenlandic waters. It seems as if Pining was what one could call a Crown-pirate since he later signed documents as member of the King's Council.[31]
During one of the voyages João Vaz Corte-Real the older and one of his sons participated as navigators on one of the ships. The documents on this topic can easiest be read in "Larsen Soren, the Pining voyage, The Discovery of North America Twenty Years Before Columbus, 1925".[32]
In 1476/77 during the voyage in Greenlandic water, Pothurst, Pining and Corte-Real were driven southward by the wind and had to stay the winter on the American mainland, as shown in the above-mentioned work.
New Worlders contacting the outside world
Caecilius Metellus
Pomponius Mela writes, [33] and is copied by Pliny the Elder, [34] that Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer (died 59 BC), proconsul in Gaul received "several Indians" (''Indi'') as a present from a Germanic king. The Indians were driven by a storm to the coasts of Germania (''in tempestatem ex Indicis aequoribus'').
Metellus Celer recalls the following: when he was proconsul in Gaul, he was given people from "India" by the king of the Sueves; upon requesting why they were in this land, he learnt that they were caught in a storm away from India, that they became castaways, and finally landed on the coast of Germany. They thus resisted the sea, but suffered from the cold for the rest of their travel, and that is the reason why they left.
It is unclear whether these castaways may have been people from India or Eastern Asia, or possibly American Indians. Edward Herbert Bunbury suggested they were Finns. This account is open to some question, since Metellus Celer died just after his consulship, before he ever got to Gaul.
António Galvão
According to the Portuguese seafarer Antonio Galvão, "certain Indians" (''certos Indios'') were picked out of sea in 1153 and sent to Lübeck. Galvão said they were probably from Bacalao, a mythical island often believed to be Newfoundland.
Bartolomé de las Casas
According to Bartolomé de las Casas there were two dead bodies that looked like Indians found on Flores in the Azores. He said he found that fact in Columbus' notes, and it was one of the reasons for Columbus to assume India was on the other side of the ocean.[35]
Tupac Inca Yupanqui
Tupac Inca Yupanqui, the tenth Inca emperor, is said to have led a ten-month expedition into the Pacific Ocean around 1480. The islands he visited are sometimes identified with the Galapagos, but more usually with eastern Polynesia, possibly the Tuamotus, Marquesas, or Easter Island. Being a seafaring people the Polynesians would not have been surprised by visitors from far across the sea, and oral traditions from Mangareva in the Tuamotus mention a light-skinned visitor from the east. Additionally Easter Island genealogies mention a king Tupa who reigned briefly before leaving by boat, and South American microorganisms have been identified there from a date comparable to Tupac's reign.
Religious accounts
A number of diffusionist theories involving ancient visitors are mandated by or inspired on religious beliefs. The ''Book of Mormon'', for instance, mentions three groups that travelled from the Old World to the New. The first left from the Tower of Babel and eventually sailed to the Americas (see Jaredites); the second and third groups consisted of Israelites that migrated from the Middle East to ancient America around 600 BC (see Lehites and Mulekites). Others have speculated that one of the lost tribes of Israel may have ended up in America.
Notes
1. "The First Canadians", aired on Jan. 8, 2007 on the National Geographic Channel.
2. Chawkins, Steve (September 11, 2006). "DNA Ties Together Scattered Peoples", ''Los Angeles Times''. Retrieved Sept. 11, 2006). (hosted by nathpo.org)
3. Cayennepeppar från Lunds medeltid Hakon Hjelmqvist
4. VAN TILBURG, Jo Anne. 1994. Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology and Culture. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press
5. Chicken Bones Suggest Polynesians Found Americas Before Columbus, , Heather, Whipps, Live Science,
6. Storey ''et al'', " Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile" (abstract, full article available through subscription), ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' 10.1073/pnas.0703993104, 7 June 2007
7. Rapa Nui
8. Kirch, Patrick V. ''Background to Pacific Archaeology and Prehistory'', Oceanic Archaeology Laboratory, Univ. California, Berkeley.
9. First Americans were Australian
10. Loewen, James W. ''Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong''. ISBN 1-56584-100-X.
11. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1068950.stm
12. BBC's The Story of Africa: The Kingdoms of Mali and Songhay
13. [1]
14. http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/panama.html
15. Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus, p. 23-24.
16. [2].
17. Kolhoff, Michael (2001)."Fugitive Communities in Colonial America". ''The Early America Review'', III (4).
18. http://www.unm.edu/~rhristov/Romanhead.html
19. Biblical Archaeology Review, July-August, 1993.
20. Tabish Khair
(2006). ''Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing'', p. 12. Signal Books. ISBN 1904955118.
21. Ali al-Masudi (940). ''Muruj Adh-Dhahab'' (''The Book of Golden Meadows''), Vol. 1, p. 138.
22. Abu Bakr Ibn Umar Al-Gutiyya.
23. Olsen, 2003. bibliographic information missing
24. Sisson, David (September 1984). "Did the Irish discover America?". ''The Saturday Evening Post''. Retrieved July 23, 2006.
25.
26. Menzies (2003).
27. Columbus, Christopher; Cohen, J. M. (translator) (May 5, 1992). ''The Four Voyages'', pp. 27–37. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-044217-0.
28. Benedict, Jeff. ''No Bone Unturned: The Adventures of a Top Smithsonian Forensic Scientits and the Legal Battle for America's Oldest Skeletons.'' New York: HarperCollins (2003) at 250.
29. "From Cabot to Cartier: The Early Exploration of Eastern North America, 1497-1543"], by John L. Allen.
''Annals of the Association of American Geographers'' (1992)at 504, 509 ff. Accessed via JSTOR August 8, 2007.
30. Basque whalers in Labrador in 1530
31. Diplomatarium Norvegicum bind 2 nr 955 from 1489
32. Larsen Soren, the Pining voyage, The Discovery of North America Twenty Years Before Columbus, 1925"
33. Pomponius Mela. ''De situ orbis libri III'', chapter 5.
34. In Pliny's ''Natural History''.
35. De Las Casas, Bartolomé; Pagden, Anthony (September 8, 1999). ''A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indis''. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-044562-5.
References
★ Sorenson, John L. and Johannessen, Carl L. (2006) "Biological Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages." In: ''Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World''. Ed. Victor H.
★ Mair. University of Hawai'i Press. Pp. 238-297. ISBN-13: ISBN 978-0-8248-2884-4; ISBN-10: ISBN 0-8248-2884-4
★ Barry Fell, ''America B.C. : Ancient Settlers in the New World'' (New York: Simon & Schuster , 1984);
★ Gavin Menzies, '' ( ? , 2003);
★ Geoffrey Ashe, ''The Quest for America'' (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971);
★ Fagan, Brian M. ''The Great Journey''. Thames and Hudson. 1987);
★ Jones, Peter N. ''American Indian mtDNA, Y Chromosome Genetic Data, and the Peopling of North America''. Boulder: Bauu Press. 2004;
★ E. Harry Gerol, ''Dioses, Templos y Ruinas'';
★ William Howgaard, ''The Voyages of the Norsemen to America'' (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1914, Kraus Reprint Co., 1971);
★ Patrick Huyghe, '' (New York: Hyperion, 1992)
★ Helge Ingstad, ''Westward to Vinland'' (New York: St. Martins, 1969);
★ R.A. Jairazbhoy, ''Ancient Egyptians and Chinese in America'' (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974);
★ Adrian Johnson, ''America Explored'' (New York: The Viking Press, 1974);
★ Arlington Mallery and Mary Roberts Harrison, ''The Rediscovery of Lost America'' (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979);
★ Farley Mowat, ''The Farfarers'' (Toronto, Key Porter Books, 1998) ISBN 1-55013-989-4;
★ Kenneth L. Feder, "Frauds, myths, and mysteries : science and pseudoscience in archaeology" (3rd ed., Mountain View, Calif. : Mayfield Pub. Co., 1999)
★ Brad Olsen, ''Sacred Places North America'', CCC Publishing, Santa Cruz, California (2003)
★ Frederick J. Pohl, ''The Lost Discovery'' (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1952);
★ Frederick J. Pohl, ''The Viking Explorers'' (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966);
★ Zoltan A. Simon, ''Atlantis: The Seven Seals'' (Vancouver, 1984);
★ Michael E. Smith, ''The 'Roman Figurine' Supposedly Excavated at Calixtlahuaca.'' http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/tval/RomanFigurine.html
★ John L. Sorenson & Martin H. Raish, ''Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas Across the Oceans: An Annotated Bibliography.'' 2v. 2d ed., rev. (Provo, Utah: Research Press, 1996) ISBN 0-934893-21-7;
★ Robert Wauchope, ''Lost Tribes & Sunken Continents''. (University of Chicago Press. 1962);
★ ''Man across the sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian contacts'' (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1971).
★ Hey, J. (2005). On the number of New World founders: A population genetic portrait of the peopling of the Americas. ''Public Library of Science Biology, 3'', e193.
★ Brazilian newspaper ''O Globo'', September 23, 1982.
★ Article on Robert Marx in the online agazine Naufrágios (in Portuguese).
★ African Explorers of the New World, Lawrence, Harold G., , , John Henry and Mary Louisa Dunn Bryant Foundation, 1962, ISBN B0007HV7US
★ They Came Before Columbus, Van Sertima, Ivan, , , Random House, 1976, ISBN 0-394-40245-6
★ Unexpected Faces in Ancient America: The Historical Testimony of Pre-Columbian Artists, Von Wuthenau, Alexander, , , Crown Publishers, 1975, ISBN 0-517-51657-8
★ Stephen Williams, "Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory" (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) ISBN 0-8122-8238-8/0-8122-1312-2
★ Report of Severin's trip in the ''National Geographic Magazine'', Volume 152, Number 6 (December 1977).
See also
★ Timeline of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
★ Diffusion (anthropology)
★ Institute for the Study of American Cultures
★ Kensington Runestone
★ Models of migration to the New World
★ Newport Tower
★ Viking colonization of the Americas
★ Vinland map
★ Westford Knight
External links
★ India on Pacific Waves
★ http://members.aol.com/carltred/AfricanPresence.htm African Presence in the Americas Before Columbus]
★ Carthaginians in the New World
★ ''Interpreting the Clovis Artifacts from the Gault Site'' by Michael B. Collins and Thomas R. Hester, at the University of Texas.
★ Olmec head photo at Michigan State University.
★ Paper given at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (2001) on The Calixtlahuaca Head
★ The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies (Transcript of television broadcast)
★ Thomas Hughes: "The German Discovery of America: A Review of the Controversy over Didrik Pining’s Voyage of Exploration in 1473 in the North Atlantic", in: ''GHI Bulletin'', Nr. 33 (Fall 2003)
★ Anthropologist Offers Surprising Theory of Zuni Past
★ [8]&[9]&[10]& [11]&[12] related texts by Clyde A. Winters
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