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Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'?
FLY9999 writes: "According to British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies, Chinese explorers discovered America way before Columbus did. He will disclose his information to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at a conference next week."
The Vikings touched base 400 years prior to the Chinese. The Arabs had the technology and knowledge to do it. The Romans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians may have done it.
But ultimately, none of those is important as Columbus' "discovery". Why? Because what was the end result of Chinese exploration of the Americas? Or of the Vikings? Or of Saint Brendan? It cannot be denied that Columbus had an effect on the history of the world (for better or for worse). Does this lessen the accomplishment of crossing an ocean? No. But exploration is only one side of the coin. There is also what you do with it. It's the difference between pure science and applied science. You can't have the applied without the pure, but the applied has a hell of a lot more bearing on the world.
That said, I am fascinated by all things to do with geography and history. This is an unquestionably cool discovery. But it's not earth shattering.
This is a great bit of news. We have know for a long time that the history of a war is written by those winning the war. This simply extends this theory a bit.
It is very interesting that the history of the world is written by the dominant group of the time. All the European discoveries are posed as someone discovering something new. The ver fact that there were people in the USA when Columbous landed proves that he did not "discover" it at all - he simply opened the minds of the dominant group of people of the time (The Europeans)
South African history is an example of this. Up till about 15 years ago, the only known history of South Africa was that it was discovered by Europeans, liberated from the savages and made a civilised country. REcent events have shown the barbarism of the European nations in the colonisation of the country, and has started to show the positive side of the indigenous people.
I think it is great that something like this will shake some of the beliefs of the American people. It is nice to see that places outside the European nations actually did some discovery prior to the Europeans.
On a final note - it is interesting that all the histories of the oriental races I have come across, everytime there is a meeting between the europeans (or other leaders of the known world) the Chinese are seen as very shrewd, civilised people - very few of the other cultured have had this benefit. Does it really surprise me (against this background) that the chinese charted Australia and the Americas before the Europeans? No...
I dislike cries of "too US-centric" as much as the next Yankee, but come on, the story here isn't that they discovered the American continent first. The wow-that's-incredible part of the story is the idea that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe 100 years before Magellan's voyage.
As it has been pointed out, lots of people beat Columbus to the New World, (Vikings and Native Americans to name a couple.) but going all the way around the world is something of an accomplishment. Incidentally, when you sail around the world you're bound to bump into the American continent anyways.
Time Europe article titled The Amazing Vikings. It was part of a feature Time did two years ago.
In addition to going to America 500 years before Columbus, they also did trades all the way down in Irak and formed the worlds oldest parliament.
And it seems they did mushrooms to go beserk. Cool guys.
Hurra for Knark!
It would seem to me that the "Native Americans" were the ones to first "discover" America.
Moreover, they also peacefully inhabited the land and had a continental population that was close to that of Europe around 19th century. But we killed most of them, so they don't count right? At least they can live in slums and on their native casinos now.
Why do white people always think they come first?
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Piri Reis drew an accurate map of the globe way before then, if we are to believe Von Daniken's books and research previous.
We can't blame the Chinese for the bastardisation of European Culture that happened in America, we CAN blame Columbus. So give him the credit. (Flame me if you like, Americans).
We can't blame whoever it was who cultivated tobacco since time immemorial, we can blame Walter Raleigh for bringing it back to Elizabeth I and making it trendy. Did he "discover" tobacco? NO. But in British history, he gets a lot of credit for bringing stuff back, when all he was doing was trying to impress the queen.
We could go on and on.
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... and the most modern theory is that the Americas were populated originally by a group of Europeans, who were wiped out by later immigrants from Asia.
And these were then largely wiped out by a subsequent group of immigrants from Europe.
So the 15th-19th century near-genocide of the Indians is merely the latest iteration, not a slaughter without parallel.
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Where does Australia appear on that map of Eratosthenes? All I see is Taprobane, and that is the ancient name for Sri Lanka.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
An excellent book that discusses why some civilizations (particulary european) dominate others ... a good summary
is here
Piri Reis drew an accurate map of the globe way before then
This map was drawn by consulting much more ancient sources, rather than being drawn by Reis himself. Apparently it accurately mapped the coastline of Antarctica which has been completely covered in ice since before the Egyptian Pyramids were built. We know that the mapping of Antarctica's coastline is accurate thanks to seismic surveys that were carried out last century. Spooky eh?
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And by the same logic, I guess we will never discover civilisations on other planets (how can we 'discover' it when there are already aliens living there?)
How could Biham and Shamir 'discover' differential cryptoanalis when the NSA already knew about it?
How could my cat 'discover' that the computer was warm when I already knew about it?
How can I discover the joy of using Python when lots of other people already experience it?
Maybe it's time to crack open a dictionary, and 'discover' what 'discover' really means!
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This 'noble savage' theory is as intellectualy bankrupt as social darwanism. Their are no 'good' guys, the vast majority of people throughout history are mean, nasty, and brutish no matter their location or race.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
If I recall my grade 8 Canadian history correctly, the French and English found Native American allies for their wars so easily by exploiting an already existing war between the Huron and Iroquois. That doesn't sound like peacefully inhabiting the land to me. I put it to you that Native Americans are/were just as violent and warlike as any other members of the species.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Well said. That's exactly what I've thought for decades but it is obviously entirely non-PC to say (or even think) it.
We also had a land war with Mexico 150 years ago and took close to half of their land. You don't see anyone crying about how we treated the Mexicans.
Oh well, the contradictions of the "politically correct" crowd. :)
1st, it is well known that multiple cultures "discovered" what has come to be known as America before Columbus did in 1492. First and foremost by far, of course, were the ancestors of the native peoples of America, who appear to have arrived in several waves of migration via the Alaskan land bridge and possibly via maritime travel from Polynesia. There are arguments about exactly how old the earliest sites (including Monte Verdi in South America, and Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania) are, but most scholars accept them as being at least 10,000 years old and perhaps as old as 25,000 years. This beats anyone else by a long shot.
After this migration, however, the ONLY incontrovertible archaeological evidence we have for precolumbian contact comes from Viking Sites of around 1000 AD, including L'Anse Aux Meadows, which I believe is in Newfoundland.
The only other group that has any kind of solid archaeological claim to precolumbian discovery is the Chinese. Their presence seems to be attested by anchor stones found off the coast of California which closely match those from Chinese ship types which existed before the era of Columbus. There is, however, NO secure precolumbian artifactual evidence from the Chinese. This one's really a tossup, so I'd like to see what Menzies has to say.
Now when it comes to all of these other claims - Egyptians, Subsaharan Africans, Phonecians, Welsh, etc. etc., what we're seeing is a lot of bad scholarship. Most of this can be traced to 19th century racist hyperdiffusional accounts which attempted to explain how monumental architecture and such could have been produced by such "primitive" (or in some accounts sub-human) people as the Native Americans. Most of these centered around the Egyptians, mainly due to superficial similarities between Egyptian Pyramids and Mesoamerican "pyramid" platforms, which in actuality are designed and built in entirely different ways. Furthermore, neither the Egyptians, nor even the Phonecians, who are often supposed to have ferried the Egyptians across the Atlantic, possessed the kind of ship technology which would make regular oceanic voyaging possible. These were unreinforced, open-decked, square-rigged boats with no navigational instruments. We're not talking Spanish Naos or Chinese Junks (or even Viking boats) here.
The rest of the so-called evidence rests on overinterpretation of existing evidence (Olmec heads as evidence of African Contact, St. Brendan's Chronicles as an actual account - yeah, they just ran into Judas Iscariot in Massachussetts), proven hoaxes (Cuneiform tablets in Tennessee), or the psychotic ramblings of UFO cultists like Zecharia Sitchin.
Anyway, despite my little tirade, I don't want to rule out that other civilizations couldhave made it to the Americas. There is just no evidence. So here is how it stands on Precolumbian contact:
North Asians : Yes Vikings : Yes Chinese : Chances are pretty good Egyptians, Phonecians, Africans, Welsh : Highly Doubtful Everyone Else : Who the hell knows?
And in a related story, the ancestors of the people currently known by the misnomer "the Indians" (applied by Chrisopher Columbus, who didn't ever actually know where he had been), discovered the Americas approximately 15,000+ years ago, really making them not indigenous peoples, but merely the first discoverer's of the new world.
/always/ been there.
The did this so long ago, everyone else forgot about it (since there was no internet or public archive at the time) and just assumed they'd
:-)
All the intentional wartime/peacetime atrocities committed by Europeans in the Americas put together don't even add up to 1/100th the amount of Native Americans killed by foreign diseases. Not even close. It doesn't excuse them, but the Europeans were no more guilty of genocide than, say, the English in the Hundred Years' War.
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Peacefully? What a load of rubbish. There were a large number of tribes there. They fought wars with each other; they stole land from each other. What do you know... the same thing Europeans did when they came here. The Europeans simply did it more effectively. It was ugly, and I don't at all approve of many of the tactics many Europeans used, but they were not attacking the 'peaceful natives who lived in harmony and happiness until they met the big bad people from across the pond'.
Note, I also don't approve of their current treatment and status, but please, get some perspective on the situation and the real history of the tribes existing here before the European settlers.
Posted by a 100% Native American... I was born in America. So was that Peruvian over there. If you want to identify with ancestors instead of yourself, then why aren't we all African?
Chances are that greed lead the Chinese to stop their exploration. They just didn't see any profit in North America and exploration in general.
And maybe there wasn't much profit in it btw.
The difference in Europe was that people were litterally dying to leave. We can presume that things weren't so bad in China or that people weren't offered the choice to leave.
I doubt the USA were founded on greed btw. Freedom would be more like it. Yes, freedom to prosper! But freedom of religion, freedom all around.
Either the Chinese didn't care much for more freedom, or they had so little of it that they couldn't leave.
Let's think of the Internet. Who's on the it? A lot of people who had no room in the tradionnal setting. People trying to escape the so-called real world. Then, other people came, they tried to tame the Internet, unsuccesfully.
Do you get a web-life (setting up a web-page, reading news on the web and so on) because of greed? No, because of the freedom it gives you. Freedom to explore, to learn, and so on. Yes, you may end up making business on the web, and maybe even making a lot of money, but in a lot of cases, it wasn't you first goal.
Europeans, at least some of them, had a thirst for freedom.
You could say that if you want to foster exploration, the best thing you can do is make people's life miserable, while leaving them a means of escape.
Hey! Life is good in the USA and that explains why most Americans can't draw an accurate map of the world or learn another language! You'd be a lot more of an explorer if you were born in some poor African country with a visa and some money to leave.
Baseball is a derivative of an older British game - Rounders.
History
Rounders is, almost unquestionably, baseball's immediate ancestor. Primarily a boys' sport in England, it was mentioned, along with baseball, in a 1744 publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and the sport was explained in detail in the second edition of The Boy's Own Book, published in 1828.
It's quite likely that both rounders and cricket evolved from stoolball, though there's no direct evidence that they did.
Henry Chadwick, a native of England who became the first newspaper writer to cover baseball, wrote a historical piece for Spalding's Baseball Guide in 1903, in which he asserted that baseball had derive from rounders. The assertion angered his publisher, A. G. Spalding, who insisted that baseball must be a thoroughly American sport.
Spalding called for a commission to investigate the origins of "the great American pastime," and it was this commission that decided in 1907 that Abner Doubleday had invented the sport. So Chadwick's undoubtedly true statement ironically led to the creation of a total myth.
Incidentally, Spalding should have known better. He was among a group of baseball players who visited England in 1874, when English spectators and sportswriters all recognized the "American" sport as a variation on rounders. And in 1889 Spalding was on an American team that played a game against a champion English rounders team in Liverpool.
The Scottish Rounders Association was founded in 1889 and a National Rounders Association was established in England in 1943. However, rounders remains primarily a sport for schoolboys.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
moron... China wouldn't survive an attempt to invade the US. (The US probably wouldn't survive China's death throes, but that's a different question).
Any serious attempt to invade the United States would be met with full conventional retaliation. If that failed to repel the invader, a full nuclear response would begin. No nation on earth could survive a nuclear attack by the United States. Even IF China managed to complete the invasion before the US leadership knew what was happening, (extremely unlikely), there's still those nuclear submarines out there that each carry the power to turn a nation the size of China into glass.
Korea and Vietnam were different questions. The US was trying to invade another country. Not defend itself from invasion. (That's a LOT harder to do). Please note that I'm not claiming that the US could successfully invade China...
It looks too thin and elongated to be Australia.
No doubt it is Sri Lanka. I was merely trying to turn a hopeless case into a weak one.
Erasthosthenes was head of the library of Alexandria so if there had been any record of Egyptians visiting Australia, presumably he would have known about it. Even in the haphazard record keeping of the time, the Egyptians probably wouldn't have lost a whole continent. The fact that Australia isn't on the map is further evidence that Egyptians weren't aware of it.
And yes the Spanish had death camps (though the number who died in them is probably small compared to the number who died from smallpox).
We agree on this one. (And how did you know I was Canadian, eh?)Anyway, even if you don't accept that argument, it's not worth being seriously upset about. The fact that they don't have to pay taxes doesn't bother me too much, since it makes their miserable lives at least a bit brighter.