Luzia is the oldest dated skeleton ever found in the Americas, Brazil, at 11,500 years old.
Posted on 01/13/2003 2:50:54 PM PST by NP-INCOMPLETE
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:01:55 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
NEW YORK (CNN) -- In his new book, "1421: The Year China Discovered America" (William Morrow), Gavin Menzies claims that a massive Chinese fleet of huge junks and support ships made a two-year circumnavigation of the globe, with extensive exploration of the Americas, nearly a century before Magellan and Columbus.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Liberal Decoder Ring.
More importantly, the Spanish crown gained control over massive amounts of new territory, greater than the greatest extent of any empire hitherto known to history. If that isn't a bit more substantial than a haphazard and fruitless trip to a new shore (which is what the Chinese trips were), I don't know what is.
The Chinese "treasure fleets" are hardly something new to history; historians have known about them for a long time. The claim that the Chinese circumnavigated the globe, however, is highly dubious. The Chinese admiral, Chen Ho (if memory serves; I may have his name wrong) left detailed records of where he traveled. He made no claims like what this author is claiming. I rather trust the word of the actual explorers over a johnny-come-lately who is gathering together a large hodge podge of disparate info, some dubious, some not.
The Chinese treasure fleets were massive Imperial Chinese boondoggles: impressive, but expensive, and they did not open up new trade routes, or do anything productive, unlike the early Portuguese explorations which were going on at the same time. The proof that these were a boondoggle was how easily the entire program was ended, and the treasure ships scrapped, once the Mandarins opposed to it were able to get in control and end the program. This was nothing like Europe, where exploration was done either privately or was financed as a private venture by the crown, with the numerous nations of Western Europe competing against each other for better trade routes and other advantages over each other.
Proof of which exploration program was important, and which was not: imagine if these Chinese expeditions had never taken place. Would the world be any different today? No; we would hardly notice the difference. The Chinese treasure fleets changed nothing; they are a footnote in history; impressive, but still just a footnote. Now, imagine if the European explorations had never happened. The entire history of the world, for all nations, would be radically altered. That is the difference.
In fact, it is my opinion that some mixing of the Xiongnu and Caucasians produced the Picts of Scotland.
Luzia is the oldest dated skeleton ever found in the Americas, Brazil, at 11,500 years old.
Spirit Cave Man, the oldest mummy ever found in the Americas, 9,400 years old, found in Nevada.
Chinese is not related to any of the above languages; it is part of the Sino-Tibetan language group.
Japanese is not related to Chinese; it may be related to Korean; possibly it may be distantly related to the Altaic languages.
Where you get the idea that any of the above are related to the Picts is beyond me. But just mention the word "Pict", and every kind of weird and harebrained theory is trotted forth. In fact, enough of Pictish has now been deciphered from inscriptions, to place Pictish in the Brythonic Celtic group.
But these pet theories never seem to die; everyone wants a piece of the action, no matter how improbable.
It is almost certainly related to Korean (the most plausible explanation I've heard is that the Japanese came from one of the Three Kindoms while Korean comes from a different dialect but this is a very politically touchy topic -- more touchy than the question of who came to America first).
The Altaic languages are also probably related to the Uralic languages. From what I've seen looking at language families is that there is a Northern migration band that runs from Finland to Japan that involves Ural-Altaic languages and a Southern migration band that runs from Ireland to India and Western China that involves the Indo-European languages.
Dunno about this author, but I could have told you about the Chinese voyages to America years ago, before this guy published. We have stone anchors left by Chinese vessels.
But the Chinese didn't discover America.
Before the Chinese, were the Vikings. Before the Vikings were the Phonecians, Egyptians and Celts.
Click on the link in post #32.
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