America Discovered Before Christopher Columbus!!

Hm... the article mentions the Chinese discovering the Americas in 1421 but didn't the vikings discover it about 300-400 years before that? Leif Ericson, anyone? There were already viking colonies that settled in the upper north of the Americas but they never ventured very far south.

But the Spanish, Nordics, and Chinese really don't deserve any credit. The natives were already here and new all about it. Western civilizations were simply the late comers.

reply to post by AshleyD

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So true, no ones gives the natives credit for already being here...

My ranting isn't self righteous. I don't even care. I think that you have assumed it to be that because what I have said struck a chord with you. It is interesting to understand that the Spanish did mistreat SOME American Indians and didn't mistreat others. It really depended on a variety of issues. Who was governing, hostile actions by the natives toward the Spaniards, the personality of the colonist in the same area. It isn't as if the King and Queen of Spain had a genocidal answer for the people in the Americas. They did require that they become Christians but that was sort of the way every country was governing back in those days. Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox, and the fledgling Protestants all required allegiance to their religion.

If you want to read up on some really cruel forms of governance, try reading about the Aztec civilization with some vigor and you will see that the Spaniards looked like novices in the area of cruel governance.

Were the Mongols not horrible to the Persian?

Were the Barbarians not horrible to the Romans?

You have a skewed version of history. You have the one that has been sold over the last 50 years or so for whatever reason to diminish the accomplishments of the "western" cultures.

It comes from the general self loathing academics acquired when even all of their knowledge of how to build a "better" world wasn't working no matter how they tried. The Utopian dreams of the first half of the 20th century led only to devastation on a scale never before imagined. But academics being who they are cannot see that their plans are the cause will instead blame the entire civilization. It couldn't possibly have been their theories put into action that caused so much destruction! It must be the culture itself! It is too corrupt to understand genius and salvation!

And so on.

I think I fear the lack of historical insight in western culture now more than I do anything else. If there is anything to bring about the end of the "west" it will be this problem. It isn't that big of a deal in the big picture though, it has happened before and I am sure it will happen again.


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[edit on 4-1-2008 by Jbird]

The fact that natives were here before Europeans is accepted as a given. The fact that Europeans were here before Columbus is something that, while theres a whole lot of proof for it, not a lot of people know.

Well duh!

Also, Columbus was a European, too. You mean Nordics. Just thought I'd state the obviousness of your comment like you did to us.

I just thought it was prudent to point out why 'nobody gives them credit', when in actuality everybody does.

the big ballyhoo is given to Columbus because his was the first organized and chronicled 'expedition' (funded by a nations' monarch)
so therefore all the acclaim the the Queen and her paid explorer,
a very modest price she paid for fame and a place in history.


mojo4sale had a link to the Phonecian component in pre-Columbian
Americas....
i can't possibly find the link now, but awhile back i ran across a page which
covered many items & angles of the ancients knowing about and having sea-trading routs on a continual basis in the BC era.

there was (as legend has it) a west African coastal stop which learned from the Sea-People (could be the Phoenecians) that the lands of whats now Brazil & Venezeula had a steady trade established,
and those trade products such as cocoa, tobacco, and that unprocessed cocaine leaf found their way to the various ancient Egypt dynasties.


however the norh american continent was another subject, the Norsemen/Vikings established colonies here as physical evidence abounds


what's the difference,
give Christopher and the Queen credit for the eventual genocide of the new world, instead of just the publicized news of their self-acclaimed 'discovery' of a new world

reply to post by Monger

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I know. I just giving you a hard time and being a pain in the neck.

There is dna evidence that polynesians visited and probably traded long before the chinese or the vikings.

Just getting around to that are you...good that your seeing things past what is taught in school. - like how many planets are in the solar system...we just saw how the scientific community yanked out pluto as new discoveries would had added quite a few more planets to the solar system and made it harder for school children to memorize. So instead of upping the ante they take away a planet...

What does it mean discover, I guess its in the eye of the beholder.
School text books will tell you about the Vikings being here before old Columbus, yet they stick with him being the one to discover it, etc.

Not much that they teach in school is worth anything...you have to forget all you were taught and start seeking with an open mind if you want to get anywhere.

Columbus didnt discover anything.

Peace

dAlen

Actually it was the Barbarians that became Rome...typically how this works you see.

Barbarian takes over and becomes civilized (i.e. stealing everything from the Greeks) and then at a certain stage...falls. At least this seems to be what happened in the past...who knows how and if history will repeat itself in the future.

peace

dAlen

James Cook had to have been one of the LAST individuals to discover Australia...why is credit always given to him?

Hey, you've heard that "History is written by the victors", right?

Well guess what, no-one cares what you discover, they care what you settle and/or exploit. The Dutch and Portuguese knew all about Australia, but they thought it was a barren, arid wasteland (which shows they actually knew something) and the only useful service it could provide was as a navigational point on your way to Batavia or Dili.

Whereas the Brits thought terra australis was a lush, green paradise, suitable for housing the dregs of society (which shows they had odd notions of punishment).

Could have something to do with making landfall in Botany Bay instead of Port Headland...

No-one knows (or really cares) about Leif Erikson or Zhang He because their discoveries led to precisely squat. The world didn't change one iota as a result of their voyages.

The world changed massively because Columbus had a mania for the W on his compass...and a little because James Cook preferred the E on his compass...

As Robbie Coltrane says, the Brits invented the jet, but the Yanks gave it sex appeal...

reply to post by berbalang

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You don't care... yet here you are Your initial post was basically you bitching that we're all "conditioned" to think that only Europeans are capable of doing bad things, and further that we're all convincing ourselves that the moral black and white of Robert E. Howard's stories (to name my own preference of "Barbarian good, civilization evil" writers) is how it actually is.

For one who "the lack of historical insight in western culture" you certainly do display a wide ignorant streak on that topic. Where, by the way, are the borders of this "Western culture"? You seem to be incorporating Khwarezmia (The "Persia" the Mongols conquered) as well as Rome, neither of which have terribly much in common with what's usually considered "the west" nowadays (the horrifyingly inaccurate attempts to reinvent Rome during the 18th and 19th centuries notwithstanding). I would estimate that despite your inclusion of a patriarchal pagan slave society and a semi-nomadic Islamic semi-empire, you would not consider any of the nations of the Eastern Bloc or the Middle East to be part of "Western culture," would you?

Columbus was a brutal asshole to the Taino and Arawak. He documented his brutality in logs and diaries. I'm sure it was all perfectly normal for the time, but if we can condemn the Mongols for their slaughter at Urgench eight hundred years after the fact, we can certainly condemn the Spanish for the systematic enslavement and depopulation of the West Indies and Caribbean islands five hundred years after the fact.

You may want to take a finer lens to your study of history. You're at about the 7th grade stage where you can pick "Rome" and "Barbarian" out of a textbook, but you don't really seem to get what they mean. You could further narrow this down into the relations between the Huns, the Alans, and Rome in Dacia. Or perhaps one could examine the back and forth between Gaius Julius Caesar and Vercingetorix of the Arverni. While you weep for the sacking of Rome, why not take a look at the sacking of Avaricum?

And how wrong they were, btw you forgot to add that bit coz it aint just a "barren, arid wasteland", just ask the aborigines that lived here for 40000 years. In fact it was once a fertile paradise full of megafauna, forest and water.

And now,

One of the largest exporter's of Uranium, a continent with unique positioning ...strategically, mineral wealth beyond imagining, a land of extreme beauty and terror and just lately (lets say the past 50 years or so) a country of unequalled sporting excellence per capita of any place in the world.

Plus i live here which makes the place extra special.

reply to post by mojo4sale

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Sorry, I lived on the Anangu-Pitjanjatjara lands for four years and stand wholly behind my words. It's arid. It's barren and it's a wasteland. And the fact that George Miller was inspired to make three post-collapse and post-apocalyptic movies out there just proves it.

Of course it is also the single most beautiful landscape on earth.

But I think that's just the weird conditioning of growing up in a place. Those who find the dead heart to be outstandingly beautiful are definitely ina minority on this earth.

As for mineral exports...in the words of Jared Diamond, we are mining our continent to death. Maybe we can melt down all the silverware in the national trophy cabinet and recycle it after we've exhausted the Pilbara.

4 years, thats funny in so many ways, you obviously know what your talking about then.


How would the Dutch and Portuguese sailors have known that inland Australia is an arid, barren, wasteland?

I think you'll find the Portuguese sailed down the East Coast of Australia, they would not have thought that what they were seeing was an arid, barren, wasteland!

Sorry OP for drifting off topic.

[edit on 3/1/08 by mojo4sale]

walking fox is brilliant feline....

Could you add more than that eh?

Anyway. Part of the reason cultural diffusion is yet to be a seriously discussed theory is because people are really hesitant about naming words written on stone, coins, ect as altogether inconclusive proof that yes, everybody and their brother traveled to America and then left the Natives to their land. (By which I mena the Natives land, not the other folks) There have been hoaxes and instances where people have jumped to a conclusion and later been found out or proven wrong. Columbus had the first well documented exploration and settlement or the Americas that occurred in Europe, which is where most of the folks in America now come from. As we find more proof and evidence the yes, there is a very definite link here that shows for absolute certain that there was a prescense here from another culture from the other part of the world.

Leifr Eiríksson (or Leiv Eiriksson, 973 – 1020) discovered America around year 1000, as the first person from the "civilized" world (Norwegian Viking). If you consider the Vikings as "civilized"...

There is evidence, albeit a tad week, that the greeks travelled to South America around 3500-5000 BC. I have another thread about the Poseiden Project somewhere here with the links.