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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."
I hope this doesn't mean that they are going to claim us as a "renegade state" now...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
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.
Henry Sinclair beat the Chinese by another 30 years. When he got there he found people in Nova Scotia speaking a Celtic dialect, He, in turn, was directed there by a couple of Venetians. The Vikings beat him by a few hundred years, and there is plenty of evidence that European fishermen had been sailing across the Atlantic pretty much all through history.
The only thing that makes Columbus different is that by the time he got there the mechanisms and motivation to publicise the discovery and start the process of conquest and colonisation were in place.
Great! Now we are just waiting for (north) americans to discover the rest of the world!
On nine sails?
The freakin' Titanic was only 900 feet long and needed 31,000 steam-driven shaft horsepower just to get halfway across.
Thousand foot wooden ships with a single sail every hundred feet or so were either a remarkable engineering accomplishment or a mariner's nightmare.
peacefully inhabited the land!?
Perhaps you should base your ideas about Native Americans on more than Disney's Pocohontas.
I'll give you a hint. There were a lot of different tribes. Some farmed, some hunted, some made human sacrifices, some raided other tribes, murdering, raping, etc. Just like most humans.
I am not arguing that what happened to the Native Americans was not tragic. But to claim that the Native Americans were pacifists to make your point is sheer idiocy.
A good book exploring some of the reasons the Europeans annihilated the Native Americans is, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", by Jared Diamond. It contains some very interesting theories about the availability of domesticable animals and crops and what a profound influence it had on the development of societies.
Here is one quote relevant to your question:
Even 163 metres is only 530 feet, of course, but it shows that 1000 feet isn't that unbelieveable.Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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?