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Maps Suggest Marco Polo May Have "Discovered" America
An anonymous reader writes in with news about maps attributed to Marco Polo that seem to show the coast of Alaska. "For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an "as told to" penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo's journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine, the maps would show that Polo recorded the shape of the Alaskan coast—and the strait separating it from Asia—four centuries before Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer long considered the first European to do so. Perhaps more important, they suggest Polo was aware of the New World two centuries before Columbus."
So the Italians win the latest round, the North American Discovery trophy moves back to Italy.
Nope that trophy still belong to the Norsemen. (If we are going to continue to insist on not counting the native Americans, that is). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Because discovery imply being unknown before. If you are already inhabiting the body (carabic, australia, americas) this is already known to you. So naturally discovery implies the perspective of somebody for which it was previously unknown. Combine that with the fact most of the history here around is seen from the european perspective at worst, eurasian at best, and it is immediately understandable why this is seen as a discovery.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's "Discovery by a civilized man", so Norsemen mustn't count.
Essentially, to discover a continent you apparently need:
1 - To be white.
2 - A cup of tea. (ideally, with biscuits)
3 - A towel.
The correct way to shape that joke is to omit the "Polo".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot, aka Giovanni Caboto;( c. 1450 – c. 1499) was an Italian navigator and explorer )
The first English monarch postdates Jesus by about 9 centuries. There was no "English King of that era".
The Knights Templar started about 11 centuries after Jesus, and they were French.
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What? "never pointed out major inventions like paper" - he pointed out specifically and meticulously the use of paper money and salt. http://www.history.com/news/ma...
"Historians before him have touched on these issues while defending Marco Polo’s honor, but Vogel also relies on another compelling body of evidence: the explorer’s meticulous descriptions of currency and salt production in the Yuan era. According to Vogel, Polo documents these aspects of Mongol Chinese civilization in greater detail than any of his Western, Arab or Persian contemporaries, a hint that the Venetian relied on his own powers of observation. Polo’s claims about the size of paper money and the value of salt, among other aspects, check out against archaeological evidence and Chinese documents maintained by Yuan officials, Vogel concluded."
One thing I find interesting - is that they teach Chinese students of Marco Polo in China. I would imagine that, if presented with "Hey, look, this dude from Europe visited you guys hundreds of years ago and did trade with the Mongols!" the first to refute and expose that would be the Chinese, as it would seem that their history would more likely be the source of truth (or closer to the source) rather than simply speculating on the contents of his verbal transcript.
> Columbus was the first to enslave the indigenous inhabitants
I believe that many of the native inhabitants practiced that well before he got here.
If you checked back, it, slavery, was even practiced though out the world. From the earliest writings, slaves were counted. It's not an European, white man thing. But mentioned in the creation of earth by the Assyrians. Later the eqyptians had slaves in their writings. Same with the Greeks and the Chinese. Don't forget the writings of the slave ships on how the people were obtained. They were bought from slave traders, from their native lands. Not excusing it, or condoning it, but its part of earths history.