Black Before Columbus Came: The African Discovery of America | Odd Salon DISCOVERY 5/7

all right another lock the doors because what I'm about to say this is going to upset some people right next here okay Christopher Columbus did not discover America anxiety I mean never mind the question of like like how you can discover a place where the inhabitants are watching you arrive from the shore they weren't there weren't wearing pants is that what somebody said I like that so anyway there were met there are actually many other Mariners before Columbus that discovered America as well decades earlier even eons earlier there were so many people that were coming across these islands and this continent but it's only been in the last century that evidence has surfaced and continually grown to indicate that many of these pre-columbian explorers might have come from Africa so the first scientist to promote this possibility was leão V nur born in Russia v nur emigrated to the United States in the late 19th century on his way to British Honduras where he planned to open a vegetarian commune well when that turned out not to be the dream job he expected he moved back to the United States and he became a professor at Harvard University as one does and but in his time in Mesoamerica he started noticing things there are lots of things that led him to encounter certain discoveries that made him consider that possibly if the origins of American civilization might actually be in Africa so he observed so many linguistic and botanical and other similarities that between 1920 and 1922 he published an extensive three volume piece called Africa and the discovery of America now unfortunately this is 1920s so as yet no serious archaeological evidence had been done - or work had been done to support his botanical theories because everyone knows over raiding tombs in Egypt and things like that not a Howard Carter so he didn't have a whole lot of other stuff than than the names to support them however he knew that other clues must exist for example he pointed out that Columbus himself was aware that African Mariners had preceded him in his diary of his second voyage Columbus tells us how the natives of Hispaniola actually had given him gold tipped metal spear heads that they said were brought by black skinned people who had come in large boats from the south and southeast hmm coincidence I think not no so what's interesting about that so upon returning to Spain is that he actually took the spear heads and he he sent them away and they had them assayed and it turned out to be that they the these spear heads were covering this metal that this alloy that the inhabitants called guan in' and the metallurgist actually found out that this was an alloy of 32 parts i was like eighteen of gold six is silver eight of copper which dunt dunt um matched the metal used in spear heads made in western africa for thousands of years as carried by medieval african warriors including the Mallee and the moors the west africans even called this metal guanine the same name used by the natives of Hispaniola but nothing more was said about that conspiracy well probably because you know they in the interests of Spain it was it was in their best interest that they didn't want to have any challenges to the discovery and it claims the islands of the West Indies well as the poem goes or it should anyway in 1493 Columbus told all he could see yeah so on his second voyage which was ten times larger than the first Columbus went on a frantic but an unsuccessful island hopping trip to find gold and spices he carried along several natives from his newly discovered San Salvador which the inhabitants called Guana Hanvey another island that the natives pointed out was really large and was called so a metro so Ahmet Oh now Columbus continued going around whimsically renaming every island he could find but you know leggo V nur being the being the curious person in the linguists that he was and the etymologist he he couldn't help noticing that the origin of these many place names and botanical names in Mesoamerica actually sounded distinctly like other languages in Africa particularly Bantu and even Arabic v nur and numerous other botanist have also puzzled over the presence of certain plants that predated Columbus but originated in Africa for example the calabash bottle gourds now this is a species originally from West Africa where they were well cultivated in America before Europeans arrived no even long before they existed in Indonesia or Polynesia so in fact the Pacific was the last place that bottle gourds actually reached and expanded part of my coffee fame well if it were not for transatlantic trade pre-columbian times it would be very difficult to explain to explain how certain plants such as the yam the sweet potato domesticated cotton peanuts and tobacco reached both West Africa and the Americas the spread of the plantain is particularly noteworthy because it could not remain viable if it was carried in salt water well in the 1640s brazilian botanist named george mark rave speaking of botany Ricola no there we go so the Brazilian botanist Jorge mark rave look that the establishment of a particular varieties of plantains in this region stands as a strong argument for an ancient maritime contact between the Americas and Africa that's bananas beep ba-ba-ba yes all right yeah ok so how did these plants and languages that's going to be good for the video all right fixing bug all right use a coffee rub okay so how do these plants and languages and other cultural elements get to the Americas well you know some believe so what's it well you're cheating well you know some people believe that over thousands of years Africans migrated Out of Africa and then over the Bering Strait then down into South America and and things like that well another explanation exists and so get ready go let it out of your system awesome Africans had ships in fact they had four kinds of unbelievable they had they had a shipload of vessels and they had they had a way the anchors anchors aweigh anchors Wayne so in fact they had four kinds of vessels and noopy and pottery this is an example of a nubian pottery with a painting on it that shows a long hold pottery art that that shows either long hold bald boat or a papyrus raft or a hauled out canoe and then this other painting beside it is from that the first one was from 3000 BC and this is the bird's-eye view of a Nord riverboat and Chad and it dates from a 3500 BCE now the Africans of Guinea also had dugout canoes hewn from these monumental trees on the coast there in 1500 1500 that's just a few years after Columbus's boys the Portuguese captain Pacheco Pereira wrote in this country he can be found the largest canoes made of a single trunk some are so large that they hold 80 men then now the West Africans were known to lash to dugout canoes together side by side and no one questions the sea worthiness of a similar type of Polynesian catamarans well here's a 15th century Portuguese painting of sailing canoes on the Congo estuary the Portuguese like Captain Pereira had heard that African traders were visiting Brazil in the mid 40 so to demonstrate that Mariners from West Africa dove sailed to the Americas using papyrus vessels as early as 2000 BCE when their region adventure tour high at all actually used ancient shipbuilding techniques in order to construct and sail to raw one and the raw two in 1969 and 70 and generally some type of sailing vessel will average about 100 miles per day even without sails and in an ocean current something like a raft or reed boat can Canaveral my lad a now Islamic historian Amir ajeeb reported that voyages west from Mali were happening in the year thirteen eleven and just a 150 years before Columbus now when he asked the Mallee Emperor shown here incidentally holding holding a globe of the world made of solid gold asked him well tell me about this rumor about Atlantic travel and he said that his predecessor had commissioned an expedition with 200 ships filled with men and a similar number with gold and and water and enough provisions for two years and he said you know come go go and go out and find something and if you don't come back so you find something or you run out of food and unfortunately only one ship returned and the captain's hold the Emperor that we sailed for a very long time and we'll until we met with what what seemed like a river with a strong current flowing in the open sea it was I was the last ship and I turned where I was and did not enter the current the others disappeared I do not know what became of them so while this story seems to describe the trade wind driven equatorial current or the canary current now I apologize if anyone has any cats on their lap at the moment but so we've we basically have a of two two rivers two circles circular rivers in the ocean here and it's you can see it's very easy for for Africans from the south and then Gallagher region and then gola regions to come up towards the equator going with westwards or from the western coast of Africa north of the Equator to go eastwards along that same current so but you know that the Mercator this Mercator projection doesn't really in terms of car talk abou Mercator the so it really doesn't do it justice so let me just I did this little animation for you to just show that they could have taken the canary current up and around and then up they go over the they fall off the edge of the earth and then they come back and they and they they make landfall back again in in Cape Verde so it is definitely possible so he definitely I do that now at least a dozen explorers including Constantine ravenous reported seeing blacks upon reaching the new world in fact in 1513 Spanish explorer Vasco núñez de Balboa we might know because people named very popular dance after him the anyway so when Balboa was there he said he met members of a tribe of Ethiopians in Panama and according to Balboa's log these men came from a totally black village that was two days journey away and he figured that these blacks had come from Ethiopia at a much earlier date so there are also examples of physical evidence including pre-columbian Africans skeletons which have been found throughout the Americas now dating between 800 BCE and 300 seee these murals are from the temple of the Warriors at chichen itza now they clearly feature the color version is easier to see but they clearly feature three races and there are it's depicting black and Indian allies and a battle against white invaders now because of their long blonde hair hair jewelry skin hold boat that we have here right there and also the fact that they're fighting naked which was common for warriors from Ireland they believe that these are Celtic warriors and because this mural shows that blacks are fighting on the side of the Mayans that they must have been integrated in society much longer before this this painting was was done in order to form that form of Alliance now there are numerous pre-columbian figurines with striking similarities to ancient African artwork and they've been found in Central and South America and South Eastern Mexico there are 18 rock statues that of heads up to 11 feet tall that are facing the ocean looking east now archaeologists call them the Olmec colossal heads after the people that carved them and they were produced for 50 to 200 years and date from at least 900 BCE when they were mysteriously buried for some reason so it should now think about it it took an enormous effort to quarry these the smallest one was six tons so six 250 10 blocks to quarry them and carry them 75 miles away from the quarry and then carve them and then erect them these people that they that they modeled them after must have been important whoever they were they must have been important to be we've remembered or obeyed or worshipped well Jose Meg Lyra Serrano the archaeologists who first uncovered them he said he pointed out that facial features look amazingly like African blacks and they all display distinctive headgear or protective helmets now however some people think that these are actually the facial figures of overweight babies yeah I think I think they needed to wear helmets when they are babies if they think that so and then still others find it easier to believe that instead of Africans those depicted are responsible for these sculptures and as well as the Mesoamerican pyramids were not african-americans but so why is it that so many people have never heard of this alternative of American discovery by the continents nearest neighbors so I mean look now the thing exactly whoa there's where'd all the continence go so this is a look at how close this is I mean UKIP Pathet you could go this is closer compared to more than twice the distance that Columbus sailed here's this will win a drink for you in a bar game sometime which which state is closest to Africa Maine yeah look see you there and you've got to need a globe for this look at that University is it so yeah geometry science there you go yes so anyway so and and so very few Americans know this and why is it so how they examined having examined textbooks throughout for years up until 2018 James W Lowen says that although some books cite the alternative possibility that Vikings Norse or even Irish may have reached America first not one textbook old or new mentions the West Africans so whether or not you give any credence to this admittedly controversial Afrocentric theory it's obvious that Columbus was not the first to discover America but the last so why did he make such an indelible mark on Western people's minds well conquest may have a lot to do with it right your ascent RISM unlike and and also unlike the mundane attea perhaps thousands of years of peaceful african transatlantic trade the quest for gold and world domination makes a much better story and you know the good Queen Isabella was so proud of her fella that she immediately equipped Columbus with 17 ships 1500 men 200 cannons crossbows cavalry and even 20 attack dog for a second voyage and another and another the story of Columbus remains the most widely accepted version of American discovery most likely because it was the most recent the most well armed the most documented and the most similar in appearance to the authors of American textbooks and and one other thing that that should be pointed out here is that in the years after Columbus discovered discovered America in 400 years 20 million Africans were stripped from the coast of Africa half of them dying in transit for slavery who knows how many fleeing inland and at the same time within five years of Columbus's arrival in the New World 90% of the indigenous population had died from disease or murder 90% so the fact is that leaves few people to have a written or a memory or an oral history of the seafaring of their African discoverers historian Samuel D Marvel wrote as a subject for research the possibility of African discovery of America has never been a tempting one for American historians we choose our own history or more accurately we select those vistas of history that more or less kind of explain to have the promise of the greatest satisfaction for ourselves and we have had little appetite to explore the possibility that our founding father was a black man so nevertheless there is considerable evidence that to suggest that African Mariners also participated in this great adventure no less than Vikings the Portuguese Spaniards Celts Chinese Polynesians and Arabs and others so now I would like to raise a toast to all the discoverers of America before Columbus wherever you may came from may more of us discover you thank you

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Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019