 |
| Who Discovered America |
Who Discovered America
Christopher Columbus is credited with discovering America in 1492.
Share it
Americans get a day off on October 10 to celebrate Columbus Day. It’s an annual holiday that commemorates October 12, 1492, when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus officially set foot in the Americas and claimed the land for Spain. It has been a national holiday in the United States since 1937.
It is commonly said that “Columbus discovered America.” It would be more accurate to say, perhaps, that he introduced America to Western Europe during his four voyages to the region between 1492 and 1502. It is also safe to say that he paved the way for the massive influx of Western Europeans that eventually formed several new countries, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
But to say he “discovered” America is a bit of a misnomer because there were plenty of people here when he arrived.
The area looked a lot like the land on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula: treeless, dry tundra. But despite the relative inhospitality, life abounded there.
U.S. According to the National Park Service, “The land bridge played an important role in the spread of plant and animal life between continents. Many species of animals—woolly mammoths, mastodons, scimitar cats, arctic camels, brown bears, moose, muskox, and horses—to name a few—Bering. moved from one continent to another across land bridges. Birds, fish, and marine mammals formed migration patterns that continue today.”
And archaeologists say humans followed in a relentless hunt for food, water and shelter. Once here, humans spread throughout North and eventually Central and South America.
Until the 1970s, these first Americans had a name: the Clovis people. They get their name from an ancient settlement discovered 11,000 years ago near Clovis, New Mexico. And DNA suggests they are the direct ancestors of about 80 percent of all Native Americans.
But there is more. Today, it is widely believed that before the Clovis people, there were others, and as Bawa says, “they have not really been identified.” But there are remnants of them as far away as the US states of Texas and Virginia, and as far south as Peru and Chile. We call them, for want of a better name, pre-Clovis people.
And to complicate matters further, recent discoveries threaten to push the arrival of humans into North America further back in time. Probably 20,000 years ago or more. But science is far from settled on this matter.
Return to European
So for now, Clovis and pre-Clovis peoples, long gone but still present in the genetic code of nearly all Native Americans, deserve credit for discovering America.
But those people arrived on the west coast. What about arrivals from the east? Was Columbus the first European to catch a glimpse of the pristine, green paradise that America had been centuries before?
There is evidence that Europeans visited what is now Canada about 500 years before Columbus set sail. They were Vikings, and evidence of their presence can be found at L’Anse aux Meadows on the Canadian island of Newfoundland. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and consists of the remains of eight buildings that were probably wooden structures covered with grass and earth.
Today the area is barren, but a thousand years ago there were trees everywhere and the area was probably used as a winter stopover point, where Vikings repaired their boats and sat out bad weather. It’s not entirely clear whether the area was a permanent settlement, but it’s clear that expansion-minded Norsemen were here long before Columbus.
Yes, sweet potatoes are exactly that. This humble pinkish-red tuber is native to South America. And yet, sweet potatoes were on the Polynesian menu 1,000 years ago. So how does it get there?
By comparing the DNA of Polynesian and South American sweet potatoes, scientists think it’s clear that either someone brought them back to Polynesia after visiting South America, or that islanders brought them from South America when they were exploring the Pacific. Either way, it suggests that at about the same time Nordic sailors were cutting trees in Canada, someone in Polynesia was trying sweet potatoes from South America for the first time.
Speaking of genetics, a 2014 study of the DNA of natives of the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, found a significant admixture of Native American genes. Incorporation of American DNA into the genetics of the Rapa Nui Aboriginal people indicates that the two peoples lived together around 1280 AD.
There are other theories. A retired British naval officer named Gavin Menzies is pushing the idea that the Chinese colonized South America in 1421.
Another theory from a retired chemist named John Raskamp suggests that the pictographs discovered in Arizona are nearly identical to Chinese characters. He places the Chinese in the US state of Arizona around 1300 BC.
We mention these two because we’ve seen them pop up in newspaper articles recently. They’re thoroughly disrespectful, so we’ll leave it at that.
A melting pot indeed
