Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories

Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contacts involve the alleged interactions between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and peoples of other continents – Africa, Asia, Europe, or Oceania – before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Many such events have been proposed at various times, based on historical reports, archaeological finds, and cultural comparisons.

Models of migration to the New World

Main article: Models of migration to the New World

The Bering Land Bridge

In the late 1500s, the Jesuit scholar José de Acosta suggested that the peoples of the Americas arrived via a now-submerged land bridge from Asia as primitive hunters, later settling into sedentary communities and cities. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Thomas Jefferson theorized that the ancestors of Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, a viewpoint that came to prevail in the 20th century, as carbon dating and molecular genetics began to shed light on the origins of native populations.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the Bering Land Bridge theory came to be viewed as proven beyond any doubt. Most archaeologists came to believe that the native cultures of the Americas had been isolated from the Old World after the closing of the Bering land route, when they were still in the hunter-gatherer stage and developed without any outside influences for the next 9,000 years until the time of Columbus. It was also believed at the time that trans-oceanic travel only became possible in the 15th century, after key advances in Old World shipbuilding and navigation. This belief is supported by the lack of substantial evidence of Old World influences on American civilizations.

Other models of migration to the New World

The standard single route migration model for the population of the Americas has been increasingly challenged in recent years by claimed discoveries of human artifacts dating between 15,000 and 50,000 years, a time period in which inland routes were blocked by massive ice sheets. Human remains from 9,000 years ago such as Kennewick Man have anatomical features that differ somewhat from those of modern indigenous populations. Finds such as these raise the possibility that the Bering Land Bridge may not have been the sole route of pre-Columbian migrants to the Americas.

Pacific intercoastal migration

A growing body of recent evidence indicates that another potentially important migration route into the Americas existed along the Pacific shoreline. This theory does not suggest potentially hazardous open ocean crossings, but instead, gradual movement close to shore, probably in pursuit of favorable fishing areas. From coastal areas, people could have migrated inland, bypassing the vast northern ice sheet. This theory may account for the appearance of human activity well within the Americas during the time when inland migration routes were blocked by ice sheets as well as later migrations by Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut peoples. Unfortunately, many of the prime sites for study now lie beneath sea level on the continental shelf since sea levels were substantially lower during the ice age than they are today.

Solutrean hypothesis

Main article: Solutrean hypothesis

Proponents of the Solutrean hypothesis suggest that Upper Paleolithic settlers from Europe could have crossed the Atlantic along the ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum, bringing with them tool-making methods which may have influenced the Clovis tool complex. Paleoclimate models created by Professor Richard Peltier at the University of Toronto seem to indicate that at that time, the northern Atlantic Ocean froze every winter. Some researchers suggest that recent finds of spear points at Cactus Hill, Virginia dating to 17,000 years ago seem to indicate a transitional style between the Solutrean tool-making style and the later Clovis technology.

The presence of mitochondrial DNA Haplogroup X in the Native American gene pool might lend conditional support to such a hypothesis. However, research published in March 2008 argues that X entered the Americas along with other typical DNA markers. A team of researchers reported that "by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes [it can be shown] that all Native American haplogroups, including haplogroup X, were part of a single founding population, thereby refuting multiple-migration models."

Latest research on migration models

A current study suggests "that the initial founders of the Americas emerged from a single source ancestral population that evolved in isolation, likely in Beringia.... the isolation in Beringia might have lasted up to 15,000 years. Following this isolation, the initial founders of the Americas began to rapidly populate the New World from North to South America."

Post-migration contact

There is a variety of evidence that shows, or purports to show, contacts between the New and Old Worlds after the initial peopling of the New World. Some of this evidence, such as that showing contacts between the Norse and the New World, is incontrovertible. Other evidence, such as that for Culdee monks, is very speculative.

Feasibility of early trans-oceanic travel

Many people, including orthodox anthropologists, believe pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact was unlikely, and therefore the only cultural kin to Native Americans were other autochthonous people. Mainstream scholarship is dubious about claims of pre-Columbian transoceanic voyaging for a reason, since apart from the Norse and perhaps the Polynesians, evidence to date has been circumstantial or nonexistent. However, historical evidence may have been destroyed by human or natural causes, while other evidence may still lie buried.

Circumstantial evidence includes records of ocean voyages of comparable distance (such as in the case of the Polynesians) as well as modern attempts to retrace possible contact routes with reproductions of ancient boats. While these experiments may have fueled wide conjecture, they indicate that such voyages were technically possible.

For more on modern efforts to reconstruct prehistoric trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic travel, see Thor Heyerdahl.

Historical long-range travel

Linguistic evidence has demonstrated that Madagascar, for example, was settled by Austronesian peoples from Indonesia. Their navigators were able to cross the Indian Ocean and large sections of the Pacific by the early 1st millennium.

Centuries before Columbus, Arab merchant ships regularly traveled between East Africa, the Middle East, India, and China. This trade has been well-documented with written records and archeological finds (such as Chinese pottery in Zimbabwe).

Trans-oceanic contact

Documented trans-oceanic contact

Norse interactions in the New World

Main article: Norse colonization of the Americas

Norse, or Viking, journeys to North America are supported by both historical and archaeological evidence. A Norse presence in Greenland apparently began in the late 10th century, and lasted until the early 15th century. In 1961, archaeologists Helge and Anne Ingstad uncovered the remains of a Norse settlement at the L'Anse aux Meadows archaeological site in Newfoundland, Canada. A connection is frequently drawn between L'Anse aux Meadows and the Vinland sagas. These are written versions of older oral histories that recount the temporary settlement of an area to the west of Greenland, called Vinland, led by a Greenlandic leader, Leif Ericson. It is possible that Vinland may have been Newfoundland.

Few sources describing contact between Native Americans and Norse settlers exist. Contact between the Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, and Norse between the 12th or 13th centuries is known for certain. The Greenlanders called these incoming settlers "skraelings". Conflict between the Greenlanders and the "skraelings" is recorded in the Icelandic Annals. The Vinland sagas, recorded hundreds of years later, describe trade and conflict with Native peoples, who were also termed skraelings, but may have been an entirely different people. Archaeological evidence for contact in Greenland is limited, but seems to indicate that the Norse did not substantially affect indigenous adaptations, technologies, or cultures.

Confirmed trans-oceanic contact

Polynesians

Between 300 and 1200 CE Polynesians in canoes spread throughout the Polynesian Triangle going at least as far as Easter Island, New Zealand and Hawaii; and perhaps on to the Americas. The kumara (sweet potato), a plant native to the Americas, was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Kumara has been radiocarbon-dated in the Cook Islands to 1000 CE, and current thinking is that it was brought to central Polynesia circa 700 CE and spread across Polynesia from there, possibly by Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back. It is possible, however, that South Americans brought it to the Pacific or that this plant or its seed-bearing parts simply floated across the Pacific without human contact ever occurring.

A 2007 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of chicken bones at El Arenal near the Arauco Peninsula, Arauco Province, Chile provides "unequivocal evidence for a pre-European introduction of chickens to South America", and strongly suggests Oceania-to-America contact. Chickens originated in southern Asia and the Araucana species of Chile was thought to have been brought by the Spaniards around 1500; however, the bones found in Chile were radiocarbon-dated to between 1304 and 1424, well before the documented arrival of the Spanish. DNA sequences taken were exact matches to those of chickens from the same period in American Samoa and Tonga, both over 5,000 miles (8,000 km) away from Chile. The genetic sequences were also similar to those found in Hawaii and Easter Island, the closest island at only 2,500 miles (4,000 km), and unlike any breed of European chicken.

The chicken bone is the first solid evidence that confirmed the Polynesian trans-oceanic contact in pre-Columbus time. On the other hand, there were some earlier suggestions, such as the evidence for contacting with Mapuche and Chumash, all of which are contentious, as shown in the subsequent section.

Possible trans-oceanic contact

Other Polynesian contacts

Polynesian contact with the prehispanic Mapuche culture in central-south Chile has been suggested because of apparently similar cultural traits, including words like toki (stone axes and adzes), hands clubs similar to the Maori wahaika, the sewn-plank canoe as used on Chiloé Island, the curanto earth oven (Polynesian umu) common in southern Chile, fishing techniques such as stone wall enclosures, a hockey-like game, and other potential parallels. Some strong westerlies and El Niño winds blow directly from central-east Polynesia to the Mapuche region, between Concepcion and Chiloe. A direct connection from New Zealand is possible, sailing with the "roaring forties". In 1834, some escapees from Tasmania arrived at Chiloé Island after sailing for 43 days.

Recently, linguist Kathryn A. Klar of UC Berkeley and archaeologist Terry L. Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo have proposed contacts between Polynesians and the Chumash and Gabrielino of southern California, between 500 and 700. Their chief evidence is the advanced sewn-plank canoe design, which is used throughout the Polynesian Islands, but is unknown in North America — except by those two tribes. Moreover, the Chumash word for "sewn-plank canoe," tomolo'o, may have been derived from kumulā'au, the Polynesian word for the redwood logs used in that construction.

Over the last 20 years, the dating and analysis of anatomical features of human remains found in Mexico and South America have led some archaeologists to propose that those regions were first populated by people who crossed the Pacific several millennia before the Ice Age migrations; according to this theory, these Pre-Siberian American Aborigines would have been either eliminated or absorbed by the Siberian immigrants. However, current archaeological evidence for human migration to and settlement of remote Oceania (i.e., the Pacific Ocean east of the Solomon Islands) is dated to no earlier than approximately 3,500 BP; trans-Pacific contact with the Americas coinciding with or pre-dating the Beringia migrations of at least 11,500 BP is highly problematic, except for movement along intercoastal routes.

Australian aboriginals

The Fuegian peoples of Tierra del Fuego at the extreme tip of South America appear to be physically, culturally and linguistically distinct from other Native Americans and some proponents of this theory suggest that they may be mixed descendants of both relative newcomers from Asia, American Aborigines and indigenous Australians. Both Tehuelches and Selk'nams practiced body-painting rituals similar to those of Indigenous Australians. Unlike most other Amerindian peoples, they appeared to be taller than most Europeans (See: Patagon myth).

Africans

Several Olmec colossal heads have features that some diffusionists link to African contact.

Main article: Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories

See also: Olmec alternative origin speculations

See also: Pre-Columbian Islamic contact theories

Claims for an African presence in Mesoamerica point to the Olmec culture, the presence of African crops, certain Islamic sources, and European accounts of early sightings of black people in the New World.

The Olmec culture existed from roughly 1200 BCE to 400 BCE. The idea that the Olmecs are related to Africans was suggested by José Melgar, who discovered the first colossal head at Hueyapan (now Tres Zapotes) in 1862 and subsequently published two papers that attributed this head to a "Negro race".

Authors such as Ivan van Sertima propose that the statues depict visitors from Africa; which could have been either permanent settlers or temporary explorers. Some observers believe that the stone imagery carved on Olmec and Mayan stelae depicts interactions between Africans and Native Americans. Others point out epicanthic folds and the resemblance between the statues and Asians.

The presence of one African native plant species, the bottle gourd, in Mesoamerica has been cited as possible evidence of trans-oceanic contact. The bottle gourd could have also come to the Americas by floating, or possibly as a seed in the droppings of a bird. Islamic sources describe what some consider to be visits to the New World by a Mali fleet in 1311. According to these sources, 400 Mali Empire ships discovered a land across the ocean to the West after being swept off course by ocean currents. Only one ship returned, and the captain reported the discovery of a western current to Prince Abubakari II; the off-course Mali fleet of 400 ships is said to have conducted both trade and warfare with the peoples of the "western lands." Prince Abubakari II then abdicated his throne and set off to explore these western lands. In 1324, the Mali king Mansa Musa is said to have told the Islamic historian, Al-Umari that "his predecessors had launched two expeditions from West Africa to discover the limits of the Atlantic Ocean."

According to van Sertima, Christopher Columbus was told by natives of Hispaniola that black-skinned visitors had preceded the Europeans. Van Sertima further claims that Columbus acquired metal spearheads left behind by these black strangers and sent them to Spain, where they were found to be of a similar composition to metals forged in Guinea, West Africa. However, alloys of gold, silver, and copper had been made in South America for at least 1400 years before the arrival of Columbus. Bartolomé de las Casas quotes Columbus thus: "the Indians brought handkerchiefs of cotton, very symmetrically woven and worked in colors like those brought from Guinea, from the rivers of Sierra Leone and of no difference." Author P. V. Ramos points out in his essay "African Presence in Early America" that Christopher Columbus’ own impression of the Carib peoples was that they were "Mohammedans" (it should be noted that early European explorers often described New World peoples in terms of familiar Old World cultures and religions).

In 1498, during Christopher Columbus' third voyage to the Indies, Columbus writes in his diary: "canoes had been found which start from the coast of Guinea and navigate to the west with merchandise." Las Casas later wrote that "certain principal inhabitants of the island of Santiago came to see them and they say that to the southwest of the Island of Huego, which is one of the Cape Verdes distance 12 leagues from this, may be seen an island, and that the King Don Juan was greatly inclined to send to make discoveries to the southwest, and that canoes had been found which start from the coast of Guinea and navigate to the west with merchandise."

Fernando Colón, the son of Christopher, wrote about dark-skinned people near Punta de Caxinas (today, Punta de Castilla) seen in Honduras: "But those of the east, as far as Cape Gracias a Dios, are almost black...".

Links are claimed to have existed between the West African Mandinka people of the Mali empire and the Mandinga of Panama. In 1513, explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed Panama. Chronicler Peter Martyr d'Anghiera reports on his encounter with the Tule, a tribe related to the Kuna of present-day Panama and Colombia. The Tule tell Balboa of their war against the Mandinga ("dark men") nation, whom Balboa reportedly sighted. Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg also described the Mandinga as having "black skin" and the Tule as having "red skin".

The Dominican friar Gregorio Garcia, author of early speculative works on Native Americans, reported on "black-skinned people" sighted in present-day Colombia near where Cartagena now lies. Spanish historian López de Gomara described certain peoples as identical to Africans seen in Guinea. Although an associate of Hernan Cortes, López de Gomara never traveled to the Americas, and his account of Cortes' exploits was criticized as a hagiography full of error and exaggeration.

Early descriptions of Native Americans rarely referred to them as red. For instance, "a 1702 history of New Sweden, which did not describe Indians as red but as differing "in their colour; in some places being black, and in others, brown or yellow," and "the earliest European explorers of the Southeast, the Spanish, and described Indians as "brown of skin". This is both a possible explanation of 'blacks' seen by early European explorers and settlers and casts doubt about comments on 'red skin' referring to Native Americans.

Some accounts are unclear as to when or how the reported Africans or Blacks may have arrived in the New World. Author Michael Coe reports that Father Alonzo Ponce spoke of a boatload of "Moors" who landed near present-day Campeche, Mexico and terrorized the natives. The French naturalist Armand de Quatrefages, author of "The Human Species", writes of distinct Black tribes among Native Americans like the Yamasee of Florida, the Charrúa of southern South America, and a people in St. Vincent. The latter may refer to the Garifuna, a people descended from Carib Indians and escaped African slaves, who came to the New World well after Columbus.

The Melungeons, whose presence was first noted by European explorers in Appalachia in the mid-1600s, have been conjectured to be partial descendants of post-1492 Mediterranean and/or North African peoples in North America.

Chinese

See also: 1421 hypothesis

A group of Chinese Buddhist missionaries led by Hui Shen claimed to have visited a location called Fusang, which some think may have been part of the Americas, although it is more likely a reference to eastern Japan.

According to some Chinese reports, peanuts, a plant native to South America, were found at a 4000 year old archaeological site during the early 1970s. This claim was disputed early, and later editions of Chang no longer make the peanut claim.

Others claim that maize was cultivated in China well before 1492, even though the wild grass from which maize was domesticated, teosinte, is indigenous only to Mexico and adjacent parts of Central America, and numerous intermediate forms of the domesticated maize cobs form a continuum in the archaeological record in Mexico over thousands of years.

Others see stylistic similarities between the decorative motifs of ancient China and those of the ancient Maya, and the great value that both placed on jade. Stylistic similarities are also claimed to exist between Shang Dynasty bronzes and Totem pole carvings of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.

Zheng He

The British author Gavin Menzies popularized in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered The World the controversial hypothesis that the fleet of Zheng He arrived in America in 1421. Menzies' "1421 hypothesis" has been found to be unconvincing by professional historians. The hypothesis has led to proposals of other Chinese-American contacts, e.g. by off-course Ming Dynasty ships. Also, the possibility of Muslim trips from Asia (see Sung Document) has been discussed.

Japanese

Pottery associated with the unique Valdivia culture of coastal Ecuador dated to 3000–1500 BCE was said by Smithsonian archaeologist Betty Meggers to exhibit similarities to pottery produced during the Jomon period in Japan. However chronological and other problems have led most archaeologists to dismiss this. The suggestion has been made that the resemblances (which are not complete) are simply due to the limited number of designs possible when incising clay.

Alaskan anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis claims that the Zuni people of New Mexico exhibit linguistic and cultural similarities to the Japanese. The Zuni language is an isolated language, and the culture appears to differ from that of the surrounding natives due to blood type, endemic disease and religion. Davis speculates that Buddhist priests or restless peasants from Japan may have crossed the Pacific in the 13th Century and influenced Zuni society.

Andalusians, Arabs, and Moors

Main article: Pre-Columbian Islamic contact theories

Several medieval Arabic sources can be taken to suggest that Muslim explorers from the Al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia, comprising modern Spain and Portugal and Northwest Africa may have travelled on expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas between the 9th and 14th centuries. The earliest of these may have been the navigator Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad, from Cordoba, who in 889, is claimed to have sailed from Delba (Palos), crossed the Atlantic, and returned with fabulous treasures.

Another navigator, Ibn Farrukh, from Granada, is alleged to have sailed across the Atlantic in February 999, landed in Gando (Canary islands) where he visited the Guanche King Guanariga, and continued westward where he saw and named two islands, Capraria and Pluitana. He arrived back in the Al-Andalus in May 999.

Culdee monks

It is known that Culdee monks were persecuted by the Vikings in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The Culdee originated in Ireland and Scotland; however, there is an oral tradition, subsequently recorded in the Sagas, of a pre-Norse presence in Iceland. There is speculation of a migration of Culdee refugees to Greenland, then to Labrador and Nova Scotia to flee the Vikings. The evidence given to support this theory is the existence in the Maine and New Hampshire areas of approximately 275 beehive stone huts. These stone structures are seen by some as similar to those found in Ireland and Scotland, where they were built in the Early Middle Ages or earlier. The structures are unlike prehistoric buildings found in North America, and do not fit any of the known living use patterns of Native Americans, although some may fall into the category of ceremonial stone landscapes as described by United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. in their recent resolution on that topic. However, professional archaeologists consider these stone structures to have been built in the colonial era. There are claims that Ogham writing has been found carved into stones in the Virginias, but grave doubts about these claims have been raised and other places in the Americas, although none of these finds have ever been confirmed by credible linguists, epigraphers, or archaeologists.

Mythological trans-oceanic contact

Egyptians and Mesopotamians

The apparent similarity between the Egyptian pyramids and the temples of some New World civilizations — such as the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas — has fueled speculations that either the Egyptians had traveled to the Americas, or that the civilizations on both sides of the ocean had sprung from a common source (such as the mythical lost continent of Atlantis). Sometimes the comparison was made between the pyramids of the New World and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia to imply contact with the Sumerians or other people of the region. However, the typical American pyramid was built as a platform for a temple, and was periodically enlarged with new layers; the design apparently evolved from an artificial earth mound, which was later covered with plaster and stone. In contrast, the Egyptian pyramid was just a tomb for one pharaoh and his immediate family, with no temple proper; it was never enlarged after its completion; and its design evolved from smaller stone tomb structures. Late-period Egyptian pyramids such as the great pyramid of Cheops/Khufu were built using precisely hewn limestone or granite blocks whereas mesoamerican pyramid-temples had a brick structure and outer appearance, but used a much less sophisticated "rubble-fill" construction for the mass of the building, in order to facilitate the enlargenings. Many other cultures which engaged in monumental building projects used pyramidical forms, and while this may be seen to imply common inspiration, logic suggests that it is arguably the simplest, easiest and most natural form for such a building to take; it is quite possible that their development was entirely separate.

Other claims of contacts with Egypt were based on reports that some chemical tests run on Egyptian mummies had found traces of plant products native to the Americas, such as tobacco and coca, which some have proposed were brought to them by Carthaginian merchants. However, these results may have resulted from modern contamination or some other experimental error in the absence of verification by other scientists.

File:Tecaxic calixtlahuaca head.jpg

The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head.

Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans

Evidence of contacts with the civilizations of Classical Antiquity — chiefly the Roman Empire, but sometimes also with Greece, Carthage and other Phoenician cities, and other cultures of the age — have been based on isolated alleged archaeological finds in American sites that originated in the Old World. The disputed Bat Creek Inscription is one example.

Main article: Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head

In 1933, in the Toluca Valley, 72 kilometres southwest of Mexico City, a small terracotta head, showing a beard and European-like features, was found in a burial offering under three intact floors of a pre-colonial building dated between 1476 and 1510. The artifact has been studied by Roman art authority Bernard Andreae, director emeritus of the German Institute of Archaeology in Rome, Italy, and Austrian anthropologist Robert von Heine-Geldern, both of whom stated that that the style of the artifact was compatible with small Roman sculpture of the 2nd century. In 1999, the head was dated by thermoluminescence to 870 BCE–1270 CE. While it is often dismissed as a deliberately planted hoax, perhaps intended as a joke, if genuine and if not placed there after 1492 the find provides evidence for at least a one-time contact between the Old and New Worlds.

In 1963, what appeared to be Roman coins were discovered in New Albany, Indiana, across from Louisville, Kentucky. All but two of the coins have vanished; the remaining ones appear to depict Roman Emperors Claudius Gothicus and Maximinus. More recently, what appear to be Roman coins from the same period have been found on the other side of the Ohio River. The coins were found buried in what might have been a disintegrated leather pouch. There is no evidence that these were buried/lost before 1492.

In 1982, Brazilian newspapers reported that fragments of amphorae had been recovered by treasure hunter and underwater archaeologist Robert F. Marx, from the bottom of Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Elizabeth Lyding Will of the University of Massachusetts identified the finds as being Roman, manufactured at Kouass (Dehar Jedid) in Morocco, and dated them to the 3rd century. A bottom survey by Harold E. Edgerton, an MIT researcher, located what Marx thought to be remains of two disintegrating ships. This potential find aggravated Brazilian and Spanish government officials as Spain was in the process of planning the 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus' arrival in the New World. These claims were also disputed when Américo (Amerigo) Santarelli, an Italian diver living in Rio de Janeiro, revealed in a book that he had 18 such amphors made by a local potter, and had placed 16 of them himself at various places in the bay. He said that he intended to recover the encrusted amphors later, to decorate his house at Angra dos Reis. It should be noted, however, that Marx claimed that the Brazilian government prevented any additional research and that the Brazilian Navy dumped sand over the site in the bay to ensure that no further artifacts would ever be recovered. The Navy denied this. Robert Marx, incidentally, was prohibited from working in Brazil due to his insistence on trying to locate the alleged Roman wrecks.

Claims of contact have often been based on occurrences of similar motifs in art and decoration, or on depictions in one World of species or objects that are thought to be characteristic of the other World. Famous examples include a Maya statuette depicting a bearded man rowing, a cross in bas-relief at the Temple of the Cross in Palenque, or a pineapple in a mosaic on the wall of a house at Pompeii. Nevertheless, most of these finds can be explained as the result of mis-interpretation. The Palenque "cross", for instance, is almost certainly a stylized maize plant; and the Pompeii "pineapple" is more likely to be a pine cone.

Some contact claimants note that the Aztec word for "god", teotl, is similar to Greek theos and Latin deus. Linguists generally ascribe such similar words to coincidence and identify them as false cognates, a common linguistic fallacy.

The established presence of Romans and probably Phoenicians in the Canary Islands has led some researchers to suggest that the islands may have been used as a stepping-off point for such journeys, as the islands lie along the same favorable sea route undertaken by Columbus on his first voyages to the Americas.

Israelites

Claims have been made that King Solomon may have sent expeditions to America in search of gold and other resources based on references to Ophir, a land of gold mines, and Tarshish, a land famous for mineral wealth. It is unclear which lands either of these might have been, and some theorize that one of them or both might have been in America.

The dubious Bat Creek inscription has also led some researchers to suggest the possibility that Jewish seafarers may have come to America after fleeing the Roman Empire at the time of the Jewish Revolt. This would be during an era many centuries later than the era of King Solomon.

Indians

An image in a temple in southern India is said to depict a goddess holding maize, a crop native to the Americas; the image is more usually taken to be of a native grass like sorghum or pearl millet, which bears some resemblance to maize or that it represents an imaginary fruit bearing pearls known in Sanskrit as "Muktaphala". There is also a purported reference to Mayan civilization in the Indian epic Mahabharata. 'Mayudu' (a king known for his architectural skills) is asked by the Pandavas to build a palace for them. 'Mayadu' and his culture are said to resemble the Maya Civilization, also known for palaces and other buildings built with relatively advanced architecture. Some perceive a similarity in Mayan carvings and designs to those of early Hindu temples, including depictions of the postures of lions.

Late contact claims

There are many claims of late trans-oceanic contacts in the 15th century — just before Columbus.

Spanish

Even in Columbus' time there was much speculation that other Old Worlders had made the trip in ancient or contemporary times; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés records several in his General y natural historia de las Indias of 1526, which includes biographical information on Columbus. He discusses the then current story of a Spanish caravel that was swept off its course while on its way to England, and wound up in a foreign land populated by naked tribesmen. The crew gathered supplies and made its way back to Europe, but the trip took several months and the captain and most of the men died before reaching land. The ship's pilot, a man from somewhere in the Iberian peninsula (Oviedo says different versions have him as Portuguese, Basque, or Andalusian), and very few others finally made it to Portugal, but all were very ill. Columbus was a good friend of the pilot, and took him to be treated in his own house, and the pilot described the land they had seen and marked it on a map before dying. People in Oviedo's time knew this story in several versions, but Oviedo disregarded it as myth.

Portuguese

Douglas Owsley from the Smithsonian Institution says that he examined what are alleged to be the skeletal remains of Portuguese fisherman who reached Canada before Columbus reached the West Indies.

There were at least two and possibly three Portuguese expeditions which colonized the Azores in the years 1432 to 1453.

In 1472, the Portuguese navigator João Vaz Corte-Real was granted the title "discoverer of the Land of the Codfish". It is conjectured that he visited Newfoundland.

In the first half of the 16th century, the Tupinambá people in the Rio de Janeiro region cut their hair in a monk-like fashion. According to Hans Staden, a sixteenth-century German sailor who was their prisoner for several years, they attributed the style to a European monk who had visited them some time before the official Portuguese discovery of Brazil in 1500.

Basque

The presence of Basque cod fishermen and whalers in North America, just a few years after Columbus, has also been cited. Several Basque whaling stations existed in Red Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador from 1550 to 1600. Others have conjectured that Columbus was able to convince the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon to support his planned voyage only because they were aware of some earlier voyage. Some suggest that Columbus himself visited Canada or Greenland before 1492, because according to Bartholomew Las Casas he wrote he had sailed 100 leagues past an island he called Thule in 1477. Whether he actually did this and what island he visited, if any, is uncertain.

English

There are records of expeditions from Bristol to find the "isle of Brazil" in 1480 and 1481. It appears that the expeditions were to build on earlier knowledge of fishing grounds in the north west Atlantic, which could have included reaching land. The knowledge would have been commercially sensitive, and may have been kept secret for that reason. Trade between Bristol and Iceland is well documented from the mid 15th century.

Christopher Columbus is thought to have visited Bristol in 1476. Bristol was also the port from which John Cabot sailed in 1497, crewed mostly by Bristol sailors. In a letter of late 1497 or early 1498 the English merchant John Day wrote to Columbus about Cabot's discoveries, saying that land found by Cabot was "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found 'Brasil' as your lordship knows".

Danish-German-Portuguese

German captains Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst are said to have landed on the coast of Labrador in 1473 at the head of a joint Danish-German-Portuguese expedition, possibly with a semi-mythical John Scolvus as navigator. Pining made two voyages to Greenland. The second one returned in 1478 via Iceland to Scandinavia where Pining was appointed governor for the Danish King Christian I, by then King of Norway as well as Denmark. For three years Pining was the Danish King's governor in Iceland. In 1480 he and his co-captain Pothurst who had been sailing with Pining on both voyages to Greenland, resumed their pirate activities south of the Greenlandic waters. It seems as if Pining was what one could call a Crown-pirate since he later signed documents as a member of the King's Council.

During one of the voyages João Vaz Corte-Real the older and one of his sons participated as navigators on one of the ships. The documents on this topic can easily be read in the controversial "Larsen Soren, the Pining voyage, The Discovery of North America Twenty Years Before Columbus, 1925".

According to Soren 1476/77 during the voyage in Greenlandic waters, Pothorst, Pining and Corte-Real allegedly were driven southward by the wind and had to stay the winter on the American mainland. Scandinavian and Portuguese scholars tend to accept Soren's work, German scholars doubt that an expedition reached Labrador but accept that one might have gone as far as Greenland, according to a symposium at the German Historical Institute in 2003 on "The German Discovery Of America: A Review Of The Controversy Over Didrik Pining’s Voyage Of Exploration In 1473 In The North Atlantic".

Diseases

One issue not often discussed is that of disease. We know that Europeans who came over after 1492 brought smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough) which killed a very large number of native Americans. This is part of what is sometimes called the Columbian Exchange. That the Norse did not is probably due to the small number of Norse in Greenland and who came to North America and the sparse population in the area that we know they did visit. With some of the other postulated scenarios it is not as easy to see why European diseases wouldn't have been part of the equation.

New Worlders contacting the outside world

Caecilius Metellus

Pomponius Mela writes, and is copied by Pliny the Elder, that Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer (died 59 BCE), proconsul in Gaul received "several Indians" (Indi) as a present from a Germanic king. The Indians were driven by a storm to the coasts of Germania (in tempestatem ex Indicis aequoribus).

Metellus Celer recalls the following: when he was proconsul in Gaul, he was given people from "India" by the king of the Sueves; upon requesting why they were in this land, he learnt that they were caught in a storm away from India, that they became castaways, and finally landed on the coast of Germany. They thus resisted the sea, but suffered from the cold for the rest of their travel, and that is the reason why they left.

It is unclear whether these castaways may have been people from India or Eastern Asia, or possibly American Indians. Edward Herbert Bunbury suggested that they were Finns. This account is open to some question, since Metellus Celer died just after his consulship, before he ever got to Gaul.

António Galvão

According to the Portuguese seafarer Antonio Galvão, "certain Indians" (certos Indios) were picked up at sea in 1153 and sent to Lübeck. Galvão said they were probably from Bacalao, a mythical island often believed to be Newfoundland.

Bartolomé de las Casas

According to Bartolomé de las Casas two dead bodies that looked like those of Indians were found on the Portuguese Flores Island in the Azores. He said he found that fact in Columbus' notes, and it was one of the reasons why Columbus assumed that India was on the other side of the ocean.

Ferdinand Columbus

In Ferdinand Columbus' biography of his father Christopher, he says that in 1477 his father saw in Galway, Ireland two dead bodies which had washed ashore in their boat. The bodies and boat were of exotic experience, and could have been Inuit who had drifted off course.

Túpac Inca Yupanqui

Túpac Inca Yupanqui, the tenth Inca emperor, is said to have led an expedition lasting around nine months to a year into the Pacific Ocean around 1480. It has been suggested that the islands he visited are the Galapagos. The Polynesian islands have also been suggested but the story says that he brought back gold, brass and the skin and jaw of a horse, none of which would have been found in Polynesia.

Chili peppers in Europe

In 1995, Professor Hakon Hjelmqvist published an article in Svensk Botanisk Tidskrift on pre-Columbian chili peppers in Europe. According to him, archaeologists at a dig in St Botulf in Lund found a Capsicum frutechens in a layer from the 13th century. Hjelmqvist thought it came from Asia. Hjelmqvist also claims that Capsicum was described by the Greek Theophrastus (370-286 BCE) in his Historia Plantarum, and in other sources. Around the first century CE, the Roman poet Martialis described "Piperve crudum" (raw pepper) in Liber XI, XVIII, but describes them as long and containing seeds, a description which seems to fit chili peppers.

Religious accounts

A number of diffusionist theories involving ancient visitors are inspired on religious beliefs. The Book of Mormon, for instance, mentions three groups that travelled from the Old World to the New. The first left from the Tower of Babel and eventually sailed to the Americas (see Jaredites); the second and third groups consisted of Israelites that migrated from the Middle East to ancient America around 600 BCE (see Lehites and Mulekites). Others have speculated that one of the lost tribes of Israel may have ended up in America.

According to Mormon archaeologists, some evidence exists for Book of Mormon accounts of trans-oceanic migration, such as Izapa Stela 5. However, the majority of archaeologists are doubtful.

References

• Ashe, Geoffrey, The Quest for America (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971);
• Fagan, Brian M. The Great Journey. Thames and Hudson. 1987);
• Feder, Kenneth L. (1999) "Frauds, myths, and mysteries: science and pseudoscience in archaeology" (3rd ed., Mountain View, Calif. : Mayfield Pub. Co., 1999)
• Fell, Barry (1984) America B.C. : Ancient Settlers in the New World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984)
• William J. Hamblim Archaeology and the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: Maxwell Institute, 1993), Volume 5, Issue 1, pp. 250–272, Text ;
• Gerol, E. Harry Dioses, Templos y Ruinas.
• Guernsey, Julia (2006) Ritual and Power in Stone: The Performance of Rulership in Mesoamerican Izapan Style Art, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, ISBN 978-0292713239.
• Hey, J. (2005). "On the number of New World founders: A population genetic portrait of the peopling of the Americas" Public Library of Science Biology, 3, e193.
• Holst, Sanford (2005) Phoenicians - Lebanon's Epic Heritage, Cambridge & Boston Press, Los Angeles, California.
• Howgaard, William (1971) The Voyages of the Norsemen to America (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1914, Kraus Reprint Co., 1971);
• Hristov, Romeo H. and Santiago Genovés T. (2001) "The Roman Head from Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca, Mexico: A Review of the evidence", Paper prepared for the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans (2001).
• Hristov, Romeo H. and Santiago Genovés (1999) "Mesoamerican Evidence of Pre-Columbian Contacts", Ancient Mesoamerica, Vol 10, pp. 207-213 ( abstract here).
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• Storey, Alice A.;Ramırez, Jose Miguel; Quiroz, Daniel; Burley, David V.; Addison, David J.; Walter, Richard; Anderson, Atholl J.; Hunt, Terry L.; Athens, J. Stephen; Huynen, Leon; Matisoo-Smith, Elizabeth A. (2007) "Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile", in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 19, 2007, v. 104, n. 25, pp. 10335–10339.
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See also

• Timeline of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
• Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories
• Olmec alternative origin speculations
• Kensington Runestone
• Models of migration to the New World
• Newport Tower
• Viking colonization of the Americas
• Vinland map
• Westford Knight
• Diffusion (anthropology)
• Institute for the Study of American Cultures

External links

• India on Pacific Waves
• Carthaginians in the New World
• Interpreting the Clovis Artifacts from the Gault Site by Michael B. Collins and Thomas R. Hester, at the University of Texas.
• Olmec head photo at Michigan State University.
• Paper given at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (2001) on The Calixtlahuaca Head
• The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies (Transcript of television broadcast)
• A look at the Evidence for Cocaine in Mummies by British Biochemist Duncan Edlin
• Thomas Hughes: "The German Discovery of America: A Review of the Controversy over Didrik Pining’s Voyage of Exploration in 1473 in the North Atlantic", in: GHI Bulletin, Nr. 33 (Fall 2003)
• Anthropologist Offers Surprising Theory of Zuni Past
• [1]&[2]&[3]& [4]&[5] related texts by Clyde A. Winters
• Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs, an article from Current Anthropology
• Plant Evidence for Contact between Africa and the New World by Professor Bernard Ortiz de Montellano
• Native American Indians
• Goodbye Columbus? The Pseudohistory of Who Discovered America