Thad, There's been some recent research which raises questions whether the Chinese preceded Columbus to the Americas. I saw Menzies give a presentation of his evidence (I think it was on C-span or PBS) and was impressed...but I haven't read much else about it. josh

Here is a link that might be useful: Menzies Research

There's a whole of lot evidence that a whole lot of different people preceded Columbas to the New World

i would think that this would be an easy question for someone doing molecular systematics. with maize, potato and tobacco, i could imagine a large amount of M.S. data is there to do some field research. (man, i miss being in college!)

does anyone claim to have pre columbus varieties?

lastly, i have no doubt there was alot of ppl stepping there feet in alot of places before Columbus and i wish the USA would end that ugly holiday.

froggy

Colombus had very detailed charts plotting his way to America...I wonder where they came from....Thad

Apios Americana and Yacon are the varieties used in their diet by American Indians for many years before Columbus.In fact I have read that pioneers also used Apios Americana as food in the early days.

chiman

I also read indians were cannibales...Thad

Fossilized corn pollen supposedly dates to 80000 years BP (800 centuries) in Mexico and 4000-5000 year old corn and popcorn have been found in caves in the SW US.

Hmmm...Gavin Menzies is not a scientist, an antropologist or archaeologist. Questionable at best, no??

catalina says "There's a whole of lot evidence that a whole lot of different people preceded Columbas to the New World."
Is that evidence, as in scientific/archaeological, or research (like Gavin Menzies') into a theory someone has????

Apios americana is a root vegetable.Its roots are boiled, dried and powedered to prepare breads.Harvested Yacon roots are cured under sun and are eaten.After curing they become sweet and tastey.

chiman

Thad
I always find that question funny as Columbus saw people on his first voyage.Which led to the erroneous conclusion
that he had reached India.Therefore they must be "Indians"
Still being used today to describe the native peoples.
Obviously, people had been in the "New World "for thousands of years.
Now if you want to debate the "first" Europeans.that distinction would go to the "Norse "peoples at least 500 years before Columbus. As to the natives they probably originated in northern Asia.Migrating to N.America during the ice ages.
To me. the most interesting question to all this is why the migrations started and what stopped them.? Why did they sever their connection to the origins.? Why couldn't the Polynesians and Melanisans have reached the western hemisphere??
What Columbus should be remembered for is the change in attitude toward migration. He started the flood of migration which continues to this day. Not as a new place to live but a new source of wealth.
Supposedly the "norse" settlements were wiped out by the natives around the time of Columbus first voyage. Why wasn't the flood of immigration started by them?? After all it was a far better place to live than northern Europe.
Obviously the Asian were the first to get here but why was there attitude so different than Southern Europeans.??
I suppose these questions will never be answered but at least there is a beginning to ask the proper questions.
Columbus was definitely not first or even early in history but certainly the most important .
Gary

And this leads us the origin of man...Everybody knows he crawled out of a tide pool with thunder & lightning igniting his being...Later he crawled up a tree where he grew appendabes & sprang down on all fours & went upright & here we are today talking on computers...We have come a long way from our Frankenstein birth many moons ago....Thad

There is now evidence (sparce) it was actaully Australians who first settle the area, and the Asians who encroached.

u mean when england sent its criminals to aussie land, they were just politely sending them home?

froggy

Ha ya'll are a hoot.
I don't remember which but I know the account of Norse "discovery" of America is to be found in one of thier legend/poems. They called the place vineland (spelling?) due to the wild grapes growing all over. A "site" is being uncovered (and turned into a park I'm sure)somewhere along the east coast of Canada I believe.
Also remember something about the the peoples of Micronesia. They "discovered" the South American early on.
Sorry I could not be more precise. Amazing the trivia one remembers.
Mike

I think there is a lot of research going on in India right now and a big debate about whether some plants were supposedly introduced by the Europeans or actually pre-dated Columbus. The corn and sweetsop(anona squamosa) are reported to may have arrived in India centuries before Columbus arrived in America. There are supposedly many temples with sculptures of certain plants like corn, sweetsop, etc. that pre-dated Columbus.
The Chinese are definitely one such civilization that may had the ability to travel between Asia and the Americas. The Chinese explorer, Cheng Ho reportedly sailed all the way to the eastern Africa before deciding that there was nothing left to explore. The ships were reported to be over 400ft long, imagine the course of history if something like that arrived in medieval Europe at that time. HeÂs reported to have took a fleet of over 50 ships and over 25000 men. Others think it may be a bit over exaggerated. Years ago there was a report that fragments(an archor or something, cant remember) of a very old ship was found off the coast of California, there was some speculation that it might have came from a Chinese ship. I never heard any more about this though.

Have ya'll heard about Kennewick man? He was found by the columbia river and is said to be of european decent and died by the river from a metal spear wound. Pretty weird considering 10,000 years ago early man didn't know how to make metal objects?

Norse settlements have been found in the U.S. which predate Columbus. It is believed Columbus's maps came from the Norse, by some. I am also pretty sure that it has shown to be likely that the peoples of extreme South America were of different genetic ancestory than most of the America's. There was some evidence of war between these people and those using the land bridge from Asia. They eventually interbred, but those at the extreme Southern end of South America did so to much lesser degree. I think the last two survivors were sisters and they may or may not still be alive.

There was documentary on them not so long ago.

Alan

The scientific worldview is skewed by failure to accept the fact of a world-wide flood(s). (There were probably more than one.) At the time of the flood(s) the continents were part of one land mass, which was mostly flat. (Play zig-saw puzzle with a map of the world.) Half of the water was in the atmosphere, moderating climate to tropical/subtropical over most of the world. Lifeforms were sheltered from harmful radiation from the sun, and oxygen levels were higher, allowing gigantic lifeforms to live, like dinosaurs and gigantic dragonflies. (Test oxygen levels of air bubbles embedded in amber.) At the time of the flood, the water coming down on the earth tilted the axis of the earth (see data on the magnetic pole shifts in rock), and caused the excess water to freeze at both poles, flash-freezing wooly mammoths.
Sediment covered the gigantic forests and caused pressure on them, forming coal and oil. (Coal seams are covered with shale formations.) (Oil is associated with certain marine fossils.)

The land was brought up out of the water by mountain-building. (The highest mountain in the world, Everest, has sedimentary rock on its peak.) The animals and man were distributed on this single land mass which later broke into continents. Some animals died out on various continents because conditions on the various continents changed because of longitude, latitude, and altitude changes, as the continents drifted. Adaptive radiation may have caused some changes in various plant and animal populations, before the division of the land mass into continents, and more adaptive radiation occurred afterward, making each continent different in flora and fauna.

So, certain plants could occur in more than one continent but have died out on one or only exist in remote areas. I've been reading about Peru and the potato, with the Andes being the source of 4,000 out of 8.000 varieties of potatoes stored at the International Potato Center. The potato has been cultivated there for 8.000 years.

i dont know what to say about that hemnancy, cuz most of that flies in the face of most scientific theory.

ill will make one comment tho, i think Everest and continental drift is a bit older than the potato :)

froggy

Do bear in mind that the word 'corn' means 'grains' such as wheat and barley, especially in old-language usage/European mid-age times. Books around the late 1800's- early 1900's also use this in reference to grains.
kevin

This is an interesting string. I do agree that the extent of the "known" world in pre-columbian times was much larger than that of the European mind. It is quite possible to suggest that Asians, Polynesians, Northern Europeans and maybe others were in the Americas long before Columbus. It is probably wrong to assume that maize, tobacco and the potato have origins anywhere other than the Americas. Agriculture is the first first major human technology after that use of stone for tools. It is important to remember that domesticable plants were taken advantage of as humans spread around the world. Some societies that shifted away from so called "hunter gatherer" societies began inadvertantly (maybe knowingly) changing useful plants around them by growing them and artificialy selecting for useful traits in the plants. Through the study of plant genetics, particulary that of mitiochondrial DNA, it is possible to trace domesticated plants back to there original wild ancestors. This is how maize came from "teosinte" in modern day southern Mexico. The thousands of potato cultivars from one or more ancestors in Peru. And tobacco from several ancestors in both North and South America. There is however one twist with the potato and tobacco. There are old world cousins of each. There are yams (Dioscoria) from Africa and a tobacco from Australia. I would be willing to bet that the Chinese were growing many of these long before Europeans "discovered" them but they were probably aquired by bringing them from contact with the Americas. Some recent genetic work found that some of the potatoes cultivated by the Hawaiians are of American origin. The potatoes were brought by the polynesians in their canoes from the South Pacific. Why then are many of American origin as well as African?? There was undoubtably contactwith the Americas by Asians while Europe was still in the dark ages. An interesting read about the origins of human society and particularly the agricultural revolution that ultimately led to the domination of the globe by a few is called "Guns, Germs and Steel", by Jared Diamond. Check it out, it is pretty insightful.

The 80,000 year old maize pollen claim is a commonly repeated error. The fossilized maize pollen turned out to actually be fossilized teosinte pollen, which makes its date wholly unremarkable. Maize was domesticated between 6500 and 12,000 years ago, probably in the Balsas river valley of Mexico.

"The scientific worldview is skewed by failure to accept the fact of a world-wide flood(s)."

Well, in a thread full of dubious and questionable statements, this takes the cake. Although you're absolutely right that the scientific worldview doesn't incorporate biblical stories!

Patrick Alexander