"So, Who Did Discover America?" Topic

"For more than a century an army of scholars, enthusiasts and outright eccentrics has delved into the question of who discovered America. Some of the claims are truly exotic, with fanciful reportage on ancient Phoenicians in Rhode Island or Chinese from the Middle Kingdom in the Bay Area. Back in the 1950s the colourful Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl contended that Peruvians in sailboats made of balsa wood were commuting back and forth between the Americas and Polynesia centuries before Columbus set sail.

Leaving aside patently absurd theories, there are a number of serious­ claimants for the title. First comes Zuan Chabotto (c.1450-99), the Venetian navigator and explorer. His claim turns on the fact that Columbus did not reach the American mainland until 1498, while he touched the North American shore a full year earlier. That he had set sail from England caused him to be remembered in the Anglophone world as John Cabot and shifted bragging rights from Venice to the ‘Sceptred Isle'. Then it turned out that, while Cabot found investors in Bristol and received a patent from Henry VII, his principal financial backer was an Italian banking house in London. The laurels shifted back to Italy…"

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Amicalement
Armand

The native peoples who crossed the land bridge from Asia during the Ice Age. That's who.

I think it would be fun to watch a Chabotto Day parade.

If its the first Europeans to discover North America, I would guess that to be the Vikings.

Latest theories revolve around the 'Clovis points' found in various parts of the USA.
They appear to precede the Asians and are of a technology and quality not found among Asians and their native American descendants.
However they DO match similar points found in Spain and Portugal (the Iberian peninsular). A recent documentary suggests that the ice came much further south and water levels were lower. The theory is that prehistoric Iberians hunted in canoes/kayaks along the edge of the ice sheet and may have over-wintered in America and then either settled or else got stranded when the ice retreated.
This theory is dependent on the ability to cover long distances by kayak/canoe. Researchers for the documentary spoke to the modern day Inuits who said their fathers/grandfathers covered similar distances, camping on the ice and eating from the sea. On that basis alone it appears that Stone Age Iberians reached the USA first and brought the Clovis points with them and then produced more locally.

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The above link provides this:

"Whether Clovis toolmaking technology was native to the Americas or originated through influences from elsewhere is a contentious issue among archaeologists. Lithic antecedents of Clovis points have not been found in northeast Asia, from where the first human inhabitants of the Americas are believed by the majority of archaeologists to have originated. Strong similarities with points produced by the Solutrean culture in the Iberian peninsula of Europe have been noted, leading to the controversial Solutrean hypothesis, that the technology was introduced by hunters traversing the Atlantic ice-shelf, meaning some of the first American humans were European".

Barry

Alieas. It was aliens.

As per peterx above, I thought it was the ice age or pre-ice age immigrants from Asia. I'm no expert but I did once stay at a Holiday Inn Express.

Footnote:
Of course if the theory of the Iberian source for Clovis is true then it gives further credence to the native American oral tradition of a 'white skinned tribe'.

Possible sources for the 'white skinned tribe' story include:

1) Stone Age Iberians (see my post above)
2) Gauls of the Venetii tribe on the run from Caesar's Gallic War. Caesar said their ships were so high that the Romans were boarding UPHILL from their galleys. Some of the Venetii fled from Caesar. If their ships were that big then they were bigger than Columbus' three carracks.
3) Viking settlers. That story is well known.
4) the Welshman Madog ab Owain Gwynedd who fled from Wales.
bbc.co.uk/guides/z2q22hv
and: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc
The first link suggests that the Mandan language shared 300+ words with Welsh. The second does not confirm this!
5) Lost Templars with their treasure.
OK… so I seriously doubt number 5 but theories 1) to 4) all seem plausible explanations for the 'white skin tribe'.

Barry

Brief description of the Solutrean hypothesis:

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Brief description of refuting genetic study:

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I wasn't aware that it needed discovered. What we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.

ME!

The Americas are God's own country, every good Mormon boy and girl knows that! First the Jaredites, from the Tower of Babel. Then c. fifteen hundred years later, some Israelites out of Jerusalem. There are your "white skinned tribe" people. Any indigenous people were so few in number and scattered abroad that they get lost in the shuffle. (Okay, this has arguably jumped the tracks………)

It was the Beatles, wasn't it?

The answer to the OP question has never been so confusing as it is today, when there are so many different disciplines (specially DNA) with so many potential theories.

Perhaps the first ones to the New World was the parent group that also gave rise to the Australian Aboriginal people. Nobody knows anymore.

Dan

Do you mean 'who discovered America first' or 'who discovered America most recently'? If the latter, I think it's a twelve year old from Portugal who just stepped off of flight 7482 in Miami.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I didn't even know it was lost.

Sorry. The reason this question is so confusing is that everyone is looking at it backwards. America was not discovered. Modern humans originated in the Americas and spread out across the globe from there. Columbus, Cabot, et al were just a long delayed homecoming.

Unfortunately, what has been discovered can not be undiscovered.

Serious historical debate is a rare gem in the internet…

Afaik there is not in question that the vikings "discovered" (for themself, as in: it was previously unknown to them or those around them) America.

There is an open question wether the Chinese reached America. Afaik there is no conclusive clue that they did so, and the probability is rather low.

Another open question is wether the Portugese did know of America. They did send out many explorers, and some of the other claimants were in Portugese service (like the Pining/Pothurst expedition, or eg. Columbus for some time), and whalers from Portugal or Galicia may have been drifting that far. What is imho known here is that no records were released (and if there were some, Drake burned them), and that the Portugese, when they landed in Brazil in 1500 on their way to India, showed no surprise at all about the land they just "discovered". My quess would be that they knew of land to the west, but – already owning the Canaries, Cape Verde and Azores – did not give them much importance as their focus lay (correctly, imho) on establishing a sea lane to India. Just speculation, though.

There are, of course, plenty of other theories:
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I'd not heard of Madoc, but I thought Welsh monks 'discovered' America prior to the Vikings?

Also, wasn't Cabot's voyage a certainty as English and French fishermen were already fishing off the coast of North America?