Who Discovered America First?

the Colombian discovery of the Americas was one of the most important and revolutionary events in the history of humanity on a single day October 12 1492 the size of the world doubled and Christopher Columbus the leader of this expedition went down in history both famous and infamous as the man who discovered America this historic event should be recognized as the catalyst which saw our world changed forever for better or for worse that being said it may not have been the true first time humans from the old world sailed across the ocean and it's actually well known that Columbus wasn't the first European to reach the Americas at all the Vikings had already colonized Iceland and Greenland roughly a millennium ago by the Year 950 seee by 999 ze Leif Ericson is known to have left Norway on his way to convert Greenland to Christianity and was blown off-course and as a result found a new landmass which he eventually came back to explore making it as far down as New Brunswick in Canada the settlements he built here were only temporary and after trade with the natives turned up unsuccessful Ericson returned it to Greenland unaware of the scope of his discovery evidence for this voyage include the ruins of Viking settlements at the lonzell meadows as well as historical accounts of the journey this by most definitions is the only definitively proven contact between the old and the new world prior to the voyage of Columbus but that doesn't mean there isn't some evidence that points towards earlier discovery events sticking with European exploration there are some that believe the Romans could have made it to the Americas thousands of years ago as it stands currently we have evidence that the Romans made it as far as the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa which are still over 4000 kilometers away from the nearest portion of mainland America most potential evidence that Romans made this nearly 4,000 kilometer voyage comes from objects found throughout the new world which resemble the craftsmanship of the Romans more than any other Native American style perhaps the most popular example is the taxi colleagues they walk ahead or however you say it I can't pretend I actually know the artifact in question was discovered in a burial offering dated from between 1476 before Columbus and 1510 after Columbus the Terracotta head shows what many consider to be particularly European features and doesn't match any known and nay of art styles after analysis by several art historians and archaeological experts it was concluded that the figure was at least compatible with Roman sculpture styles from around the second century that being said many have called him to question the artefacts authenticity or have even suggested it found its way here after Columbus arrived another popularly cited example of out of place artifacts was found in Granada Bay in modern-day Brazil beneath the waters here remains of a shipwreck were uncovered in the late 1970s and continued to be found into the 2000s found among the shipwreck were the littering of many ceramic jars after being analyzed by experts these jars were identified as likely being m4a a container type used commonly by Greeks and Romans these amphora were so regular in fact that it was common practice for a trading ship to just dump them in the water near where they anchored because it was easier and faster to sail without them weighing down a vessel once they had been emptied fragments from an estimated 200 m fora were found under the waters of this Bay in Brazil and some have used this to suggest that Romans were trading with the natives of this region other explanations have been given however including a merchant ship being blown off-course on its way to the Canary Islands or even the wreckage of a ship being deposited here by ocean currents while there are plenty of other theories involving the ancient Europeans and especially the Romans the next ones I want to talk about comes from me Irish to understand this one first we need to learn about an old Irish writing system called Holcomb this language began to develop around 500 CE II and made use of many lines carved into a pillar to represent different letters this is still considered one of the most unique writing systems ever devised by humans and is unlike any other writing system ever studied so when rock carvings like these dated between 500 and 700 Cee were found in locations throughout Virginia and West Virginia in North America it made many people question if there could have been some kind of Irish influence almost 5000 kilometers away from Ireland but for the most part these claims are largely unsupported in the scientific community although no other ideas popularly supported either the interesting part of this however well actually this is all interesting but the really interesting part I guess is that the Irish have a completely separate story that's been passed down through the generations which some believe is connected to this story the tale and st. Brenton an Irish monk said to have sailed across the Atlantic to discover paradise roughly around the same time these markings were estimated to have been made the story is pretty long but insured st. Brendan leaves Ireland with 14 other monks to discover new lands call to the Isle of the Blessed while on this journey Brendon and the 14 monks and a couple of late comers encounters some strange animals some familiar ones - they run into a few people some described as having darker skin complexion and they generally get into shenanigans until Brendon and the rest of his Posse decide to head back home on the way it's said that they passed an island of blacksmiths who tossed a molten slag out at their ship and then they passed by crystal pillars the island of blacksmiths is thought to be an interpretation of the volcanic island of Iceland spewing out molten rocks as they sailed by while the crystal pillars is thought to be an allusion to floating icebergs found throughout the North Atlantic to add a cherry on top of all of this in 1977 the British explorer Tim Severn completed a voyage from Ireland to America using only a traditional Irish kirk boat proving that at the very least this trip and therefore this story was possible of course lines marked on a cave and an old irish Emran aren't exactly hard evidence and if none of these seemed very possible still then we're going to need to leave Europe in fact ideas about Africans reaching the Americas before Columbus are equally numerous and might even be more convincing before it get to them though I just want to look at the geography of this a bit hope you don't mind because when you take a real look at things Africa and South America aren't actually terribly far apart from one another the closest tips of each continent are less than 3,000 kilometres away but off the coast of Africa are also the Cape Verde Islands that make a suitable restocking station if launched from here the trip to South America would be less than 26 hundred kilometres not to mention if you look at prevailing wind patterns over this part of the world we can see that winds around the equatorial Atlantic all blow from Africa to South America these are what's called to the northeast trade winds trade winds because they're the same winds that were later used by Europeans during the times of the Columbian Exchange and colonisation what this means is that sailing across the sizable gap could be fast and efficient if explorers had a good understanding of the way in the area so it's no surprise the talk of Africans reaching America before Europeans had started as far back as 1862 when the first colossal head of the ancient Mesoamerican Olmec civilization was discovered in modern-day Mexico when analyzing the facial features displayed on these heads it was noted how similar they looked not to the native people but to Africans and it was suggested that the heads were either created with Africans in mind or by Africans themselves who had traveled here now these ideas have been heavily rejected by much of the scholarly community but it has left the question of African activity in America open and since then other theories have emerged it's commonly believed that Native American populations came across the now underwater land bridge of Beringia which once connected Alaska to Siberia and this has been more or less confirmed by genetic analysis showing Native Americans closest relatives to be those genetic groups from eastern Asia but what's strange is that many of the oldest human remains uncovered in the Americas come not from the land around Ferengi but rather further south towards the middle of the landmass the most well-known example of this are the remains of a teenage girl nicknamed Maya found in the Yucatan Peninsula in modern-day Mexico nowhere near where humans supposedly first stepped foot on the continent the bones left by this unfortunate girl and those of other early inhabitants of America were found to have completely different bone structures from the Native Americans later found by Columbus instead their faces were smaller and shorter while their entire skulls were longer and narrower than the typical Native American reconstructions of the girls face revealed these differences much clearer for me anyway and show just how these features are much more in line with those of a person of African descent as well as possibly native Australian or Pacific Islander this isn't the only fossil like this discovered in America either and the finding of similar ones all older than the ones found in Beringia has called into question whether those Asian explorers who crossed Beringia really were the first people to walk on American soil or if its first inhabitants were of African or even possibly Pacific descent the last thing I want to talk about in relation to Africans making their way to the Americas actually has to do with Columbus himself and more specifically his third voyage to the Americas it was recorded by the Torian Bartolome de las casas that Columbus's sole purpose on this voyage was to test the claims that had made it all the way to king john ii of portugal these claims described how canoes had been found which set out from the coast of Guinea which is West Africa and sailed to the west with merchandise or basically people from West Africa were sailing out west into the Atlantic with valuable things for trade and King John of Portugal was curious about where these goods were going following these directions Columbus sailed for the west of Africa and discovered the continent of South America hmm whether or not these myths of African merchants were true the land they were supposedly traveling to was real which if you ask me gives at least some credence to these stories despite this there's still been no tangible evidence to back up these claims other than word of mouth from some long dead and lost original sources moving away from Africa camp the Atlantic Ocean as a whole we come to East Asia and the Polynesian Pacific now if we again look at the prevailing wind patterns that may have helped Africans reach the east coast of the Americas the opposite is true in the Pacific where winds blowing east to west would have impeded explorers ability to travel east to near the equator but the opposite is true at higher latitudes where prevailing winds could have helped push explorers towards the Americas these are collectively known as the westerlies which blow from the west to the east these wind patterns result in ocean currents in the Pacific that looked pretty similar forming an Ocean gyre which moves water from around to Japan all the way to the American west coast before we get talking about ancient East Asians traveling to the Americas I want to give a brief summary of the story of the three key keys you see while serving his crew members on a rice transport ship three Japanese men he wiki G the ship's navigator cooky Chi an assistant cook and old okichi another assistant cook actually and 11 other men encountered a storm in the western Pacific off the coast of Japan during the storm the mast and rudder broke off from the ship leaving hid and its crew stranded in the middle of the Pacific but because it was a rice transport ship the men actually had enough food to survive and over 14 months the Pacific Ocean current now called the Kuroshio Current boat and the surviving crew across the ocean and deposited them in Washington State by the time they arrived on land only the three key cheese remained everyone else having died from nutrient deficiencies there's a lot more to the story too but for our purposes this is the first recorded example of the boat being swept from Japan to North America entirely without a source of propulsion or steering events like this have been recorded several times afterwards as well and many scholars find it hard to believe that these events only started to occur after the Columbian discovery I guess I should stress again that we don't actually have any evidence of this happening prior to colonization of the continent and all the statements about this are entirely circumstantial if we take another look at the prevailing winds and currents in the Pacific though we can see the Kuroshio Current is mirrored in the southern hemisphere by the South Pacific current which opens up the possibility of an American discovery by the Polynesians as well now it's already well known that the Polynesians were master seafarers and navigators which might explain why there's possibly the most evidence in favour of contact between the Polynesians and Native Americans there are numerous examples of this but my favorite includes the sweet potato which is known to have originated in Central and South America but when exploring the pacific early Europeans also found them growing throughout Polynesia now most of the islands the Polynesians inhabited were volcanic in origin meaning they never shared any sort of geological history with America and therefore the sweet potato must have been brought here by some other means the some have used this to say that the Polynesians themselves arrived in South America and brought vine clippings back with them to farm while others have proposed that the vegetable managed to disperse itself by writing ocean currents over many thousands of years this theory of a Polynesian introduction however would help explain to why the proto Polynesian word for sweet potato Tamala is noted to be very similar to those of South American Quechua and Aymara words for the same crop tomar and kumara I should remind you there are also numerous other similar examples to this one which include everything from Peruvian mummies being found with sap from a New Guinean tree all the way to canoes in California resembling both inform and named those built by the Polynesians like I said at the beginning though none of these hypotheses have been proven with large of undisputed evidence obviously someone made it to America before Columbus as evidenced by all the millions of people and ancient civilizations found here upon first contact clearly these people were the true discoverers of America as they were the first to establish permanent settlements on the continent thousands of years before Columbus or Leif Erikson or anyone else discovered is a relative term in this video as I hope you realized instead of writing redundant comments down below I'm not saying any of these have been legitimized to the point that we need to change our history textbooks all I'm trying to say is that there are things in this world that should make us question our understanding of American discovery and exploration and world history as a whole regardless of what the answer is the question who discovered America is still a question I believe is worth asking and can only help to improve our understanding of history that has long since passed I hope you agree with me on this one and judging by the fact that you watch this entire video I'd say you would besides that let me know of any other questionable examples of people making it to the Americas before Columbus I find this topic very interesting if you want to keep seeing videos like this I'd suggest checking out my patreon that's how all these people got their name on here and that's how I keep this channel running I should be back next week with another video so subscribe if you want to see that Thanks

Channel: undefined

Views: 823,931

Rating: 4.8494205 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, America, europe, romans, canary, island, cape, verde, saint, brendan, maya, aztec, olmec, inca, africa, guinea, brazil, south, north, central, polynesia, kichi, otokichi, japan, ocean, travel, exploration, native, beringia, ireland, columbus, christopher, leif, erikson

Id: rcSmqgFVUpU

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/NewClayburn]

Americans.