[blam]

GGG Ping.

I think we've posted on this subject previously.

[Alter Kaker]

I think a larger point can be made. While the vikings certainly landed in Canada, and while it is conceivable that others from the Old World encountered the New World at various times, they changed nothing. Columbus changed everything.

[Inyokern]

I have read that there are people in Siberia whose DNA indicates that they are descended from people who had once lived in North America and came back to Asia. They are haplotype Q3, which is distinctively American Indian.

[Christopher Lincoln]

Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that America was discovered many times before Columbus, but it was always hushed up.

[kingu]

Bah, I hate bad science. There isn't a single speaker of the original language among the Tongva (Gabralieno) people, and every word currently known comes from a pamphlet book sold on Catalina Island. No one knows if these words are original or not, it is hotly debated as to if these words were simply made up by someone who wanted to sell the culture to tourists.

As to the Chumash, again, most have adapted words from that same 'Coastal Indian Language' pamphlet, with only a single inlander knowing any of the original language and none of it has to do with the ocean.

And what likely sparked the interest in these vaunted linguists was the recreation of the ocean going canoes that the Chumash supposedly used to populate the Channel Islands (as well as the endearing memories of folks who loved the book, Island of the Blue Dolphins.) That recreation was done in cooperation with Achimen (Juaneno) Indians from the Dana Point area who are the last known ocean going tribal people in the greater Southern California region... Their design, however, might have been borrowed from a person who married into the family from ... Polynesia.

Finally, if there was such a link between Southern California and Polynesia, the likely link would be local indians here traveling to Polynesia, not the other way around. Ocean and wind currents wouldn't lend it to happening in any other fashion.

The only reason why junk like this continues to be spewed into the journals is that no one wants to bother to counter it.

[Jim Noble]

Everybody's gone surfing

Surfin' USA

[Michael.SF.]

Vikings from Maine to Minnesota, Romans crossing from Africa to Brazil, and Chinese and Japanese voyagers hitting the Pacific coastline have all been proposed.

What about the Irish? Add them to the list of people who came to the 'new world" then went back and did not tell anyone about it.

Monument to St. Brendan, the Navigator

Historical note: Later upon realizing that the ocean was deeper then anticipated, they gave up on their early idea of using stilts to walk to American and tried sailing)

[Thinkin' Gal]

Who discovered America... Who were the first Americans... Where did the name America come from...

The questions (and theories) are intruiging but what's even more interesting is...

Why all of the questions? Why is America the place that can't discern her origins, her native peoples, or her name? She's like an adopted child who is compelled to search for her birth mother.

Egads this reminds me of the book Are You my Mother?.

Hosea 1:9-11

9 Then said God, Call his name Loammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God.
10 Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.
11 Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land: for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Blam. I think you're right, a repeat. Heyerdahl noted that South American species of food plants -- which would die from salt water immersion during a "cork bob" trip -- are found on various small, isolated islands in the Pacific, and had to arrive by boat. Since it's obvious that people must also not have walked there, I wonder why his observation remains controversial.

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[SunkenCiv]