Evidence Accumulates for Ancient Transoceanic Voyages, Says Geographer

EPOCH TIMES

8 June 2016 last updated 9 June

by Tara MacIsaac
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www.theepochtimes.com...
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“A classic example is the continental drift [theory],” said cultural geographer Stephen C. Jett, professor emeritus at the University of California–Davis. “In 1955, if you believed in continental drift, you were laughed at. In 1965, if you didn’t believe in continental drift, you were laughed at.”
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According to Jett, one of the reasons it has been difficult for the concept of early transoceanic voyages to penetrate mainstream history is that it requires a multidisciplinary perspective.
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‘Evidentiary Revolution’ No. 1: Maritime Archaeology and Navigation Traditions

A major objection raised against the so-called diffusionist theories is that transoceanic travel would not have been possible with the watercraft and navigation techniques available to ancient peoples who supposedly made it to the New World.
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‘Evidentiary Revolution’ No. 2: Parasites and Pathogens
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‘Evidentiary Revolution’ No. 3: Domesticates
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‘Evidentiary Revolution’ No. 4: Human Genetics
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‘Evidentiary Revolutions’ No. 5 and No. 6: Linguistics and Calendar Systems
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I think the linguistic and DNA evidence regarding the Cherokees & the Egyptians; the Ojibwe & the Druze; The Cherokees & the Greeks etc. is very fascinating stuff.
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Anomalous Native American DNA: New Tests Show Middle East Origins?
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www.theepochtimes.com...
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Geneticist Traces Mysterious Origins of Native Americans to Middle East, Ancient Greece
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www.theepochtimes.com...
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I don't know what this does to the abundant evidence that all Native American tribes have genetic ancestors in the area of Southern Siberia/Northern Mongolia.
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I think the political wails against such evidence are short-sighted, insecure, immature and idiotic.
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Maybe some ATS experts will contribute their views.
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It took Vikings several ays to cross the North Sea by taking advantage of the weather conditions and a Westerly wind. With that combination of factors they could travel with good weather. But usually they wouldn't go anywhere where they couldn't see coastline. So they would go up and down European and UK coastline. They could follow the route to Iceland, Nova Scotia then go down the East side of the USA.

a reply to: BO XIAN

Bo,

The middle eastern and north african DNA found among the cherokee is from shepardic jew and moorish prospectors that came to the new world very early in the european expansion. They settled in highland georgia to work the very same the gold and silver fields that drew maya traders to the area centuries earlier.
There is very good circumstantial evidence that the people we know of as the cherokee are the product of these early prospectors and the creek.

I have been planning on doing a thread on it and it keeps coming up before i've had time to finish my research.

I'll post a couple blurbs from ther sources i have found so far.

a reply to: punkinworks10

Thanks.

Perhaps you could address the issue . . . that their DNA . . . in DNA terms predates the timeline you espouse? At least IIRC.

I purportedly have Cherokee in my ancestry but from a female and can't find a suitable relative to test for that.

a reply to: BO XIAN

Although man may have been sailing for a very long time what you site is what is known as pseudo science and for a very good reason.

Try reading good books (by science authors in the subjects that interest you) and not just the pseudo crap, your mind will thank you and you will i=understand better what you are talking about.

Become the educated generalist that is widely read that you are saying there are not enough of.

Pseudo science will not get you there.

We have all entertained these ideas for what they may offer and enjoyed the mystery but in the end logic moved us past them and we learned anthropology, archeology, and geography, and many another ology as well.

There are many more ideas in science than you are aware and many more than pseudoscience which are intellectually bankrupt

a reply to: cryptic0void

I think your eagerness to risk a false negative error soooo much more

than your willingness to risk a false positive error

makes your contention at least extremely suspect.

1. Science--professional, most lauded etc. science--for the last 200 years or so has REPEATEDLY DEMONSTRATED utter idiocy at denying the truth just because some "purported fringe" bloke first proposed it.

2. I think you label some things pseudo-science out of bias and colored glasses vs objective facts.

3. The points in the article in the OP are solid, well reasoned and full of evidence points. Your post makes it sound like you didn't read much of the article at all. Sure it's difficult to say with absolute certainty. But that hasn't stopped main-stream science from labeling and considering originally wild theories as solid almost fact, now, has it--witness continental drift etc.

4. You come across as a Religion of Scientism TRUE BELIEVER in the most accurate Eric Hoffer sense of the word.

a reply to: BO XIAN

I suspect these cattle leg bones were rendered to provide neatsfoot oil for waterproofing leather boats.

. . . a deposit of cattle tibia, the very same cattle leg bones found carefully deposited in such astonishing abundance in the passageway which surrounds Structure Ten.

www.orkneyjar.com...

The boat in this video was waterproofed on the inside with sheep's fat. They didn't realise it should be done months before setting off and they found every interior surface covered in fat for the first few weeks. Neatsfoot oil would have soaked into the leather.

Inuit kayaks occasionally reached Britain.

One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence for Aberdeen’s interaction with the circumpolar world dates from around 1700, and astonishingly, represents an epic voyage from the Americas to Europe; perhaps exploration, perhaps misadventure. The University preserves an ‘Esqimau' canoe in which a native of that country was driven ashore near Belhelvie, about the beginning of the 18th century, but he died soon after landing’.

The 1st record of this kayak is in a diary written by the Rev. Francis Gastrell of Stratford-upon-Avon who visited Aberdeen in 1760. He says that, “In the Church . . . was a Canoo about 21ft long by 2 ft wide which about 32 years since was driven into the Don with a man in it who was all over hairy and spoke a language which no person there could interpret. He lived but 3 days, tho’ all possible care was taken to recover him.” At the time of Gastrell’s visit, the University Chapel was used as the library, and also as the museum, hence the ‘Canoo’ being ‘in the Church’.

This enigmatic visitor has since been identified as a Greenlander, on the grounds of the style of his kayak. His arrival in Aberdeen seems almost miraculous, but he may have had an experience resembling that of another Inuit visitor to Scotland, who turned up in 1818 (the story is told in another books; Thomas McKeevor’s - A Voyage to Hudson’s Bay (London,1819). This poor fellow had been drifted out to sea in his Kayak near a 100 miles, when he fortunately met with 1e of the homeward-bound Greenland Ships, which took him up,

There is a long standing oral tradition in Belhelvie relating to an Inuit man and his kayak being washed ashore on the Aberdeenshire coast sometime between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries. As yet we have not been able to clearly identify where this occurred: some sources refer to the Don river, other sources imply that the man and his kayak landed further north, perhaps along the Balmedie beach. Apparently the inventory to Marischal Museum from 1842 listed an ‘esquimaux canoe […] driven ashore ner Belhelvie’..

www.mcjazz.f2s.com...

There is a family on Orkney still who can trace their ancestry to 'the seal people' who lived in their skin kayaks and rarely came ashore. The seal people were obviously highly skilled in navigation and the use of kayaks. Some could even submerge fully and travel a short distance underwater, allegedly.

Sewn wooden boats were made in many parts of the world, Some of them were sophisticated and very similar in design to more recent boats made with metal fixings which have circumnavigated the world.

What makes this ship particularly remarkable is that it’s the largest, most intact vessel ever found to be constructed with a ancient technique known as “sewing”. Homer mentions this ship-building method in the Illiad.

www.thehistoryblog.com...

One tribe in Lapland specialised in producing reindeer sinew for sewn boats. Some of these boats were used for sea voyages yet were still light enough to be carried overland.

. . . transoceanic travel would not have been possible with the watercraft and navigation techniques available to ancient peoples . . .

Only a fraction of the watercraft and even less of the navigation techniques have survived. We don't know how far people travelled in the past. I expect worldwide travel was the norm for an adventurous minority.

a reply to: Kester

Thanks for your excellent post and examples.

It likely won't shut the terminally uninformed and irrationally tunnel visioned up but it is a great contribution to the thread, anyway.

I think a lot of that craftsmanship is quite stunning. That and the South Seas craftsmanship of their ocean going outrigger etc. sorts of craft are very impressive, to me.

We are given to the arrogance of the "modern" age in our era--perhaps more than most other eras. And it is a blinding arrogance, indeed.

Thanks thanks.

a reply to: BO XIAN
From your link:

But many replica boats have made the journey in modern times, successfully using only the technology available in antiquity. One famous example is that of Dr. Thor Heyerdahl, who built a boat similar to those used by ancient Egyptians, made of papyrus, and sailed it from Morocco to Barbados in 1970.

Where it fell apart off the coast.
The current stance on Precolumbian transoceanic contacts does not preclude accidental contact, such as Heyerdahl's experiment illustrates.

From the source given in your link:

The new findings presented here confirm an-cylostomid and T. trichiura infection before Columbus’s arrival. Dixon (2001), based on geological and archaeological data, hypothesizes that the first settlers used a sea-route along the southern coast of the Bering Land Bridge. Humans had vessels and were able to navigate
near-shore waters prior to 14,000 BP (Dixon 2001). Whether by transoceanic route or coastal navigation, prehistoric
settlers brought such soil-transmitted helminths to the New World, in a journey no longer than the life-span of
these helminths.

From your link:

In 2007, anthropologist Alice A. Storey at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, led a study titled “Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile.”

Chicken bones found in Chile seemed to prove Polynesians introduced chickens to the Americas before Columbus. In 2014, a study led by Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, took a different approach to DNA analysis of the chicken bones and suggested they were genetically distinct from Polynesian chickens.

The DNA analysis is not the only counter to the chicken bones.
Chickens consuming old carbon (from shell middens) when pecking gravel (for their gizzards) will have their C14 dates skewed through this sort of "natural" contamination.
That these chicken bones were located around shell middens is then problematic for the analysis.

From your link:

We have the sweet potato, the bottle gourd, all this New World stuff that has been firmly documented as being out here pre-Columbian. If the Polynesians could find Easter Island, which is just this tiny speck, don’t you think they could have found an entire continent?

Gourds float. But the sweet potato is a head scratcher.
You should look into this if you are really interested. I seem to remember reasonable arguments have been made against it, but I can't recall right now what they were.

From your link:

Of haplogroup X, he wrote: “The only other place on Earth where X is found at an elevated level apart from other American Indian groups like the Ojibwe is among the Druze in the Hills of Galilee in northern Israel and Lebanon.”

X has been found in other parts of Asia since this quoted statement was made- and is considered to have originated in the Altai region and spread from there. This was part of the Solutrean Hypothesis, which basically fell apart with the discovery of X in Eastern Asia.
Current theory is based on the evidence we have in hand. Any change would then need to be evidence-based.

Until the evidence is actually found, the current paradigm will remain in place. People can wish otherwise all they want, but that's the way science works.

Harte

a reply to: Harte

Some of your assertions seem as full of theory and fuzziness as the evidence you are assailing.

Time will tell.

originally posted by: BO XIAN
a reply to: Harte
Time will tell.

My point exactly.

Harte

You can cross Haplogroup X off the list, the evidence presented seems to think that there is just one haplogroup X, when in fact, there are several sub groups and no actual straight X

The Druze for instance are Haplogroup X1 AND X2
Haplogroup X found in the Altai is X2e
North Americans are X2a

So all this means is like the rest of humanity, we all passed through the middle east, the Druze Haplogroup stayed where it was while the others migrated North and East and mutated along the way

This is definitive proof that North American Indians did not get their X from the old world any more recent than 20,000 years ago. So is definitely not proof of an ocean voyage


You can read all about it here
Doubt most will though and we will be seeing these claims repeated for years to come. Its been about twenty years now that I've been reading all about how Haplogroup X is from Atlantis, written by idiots who don't know what genetics is or how to use it in an evidentiary manner...

a reply to: BO XIAN

Your wrong on both counts as well as the points I illustrated, good luck though

oops

originally posted by: Marduk
You can cross Haplogroup X off the list, the evidence presented seems to think that there is just one haplogroup X, when in fact, there are several sub groups and no actual straight X

The Druze for instance are Haplogroup X1 AND X2
Haplogroup X found in the Altai is X2e
North Americans are X2a

So all this means is like the rest of humanity, we all passed through the middle east, the Druze Haplogroup stayed where it was while the others migrated North and East and mutated along the way

This is definitive proof that North American Indians did not get their X from the old world any more recent than 20,000 years ago. So is definitely not proof of an ocean voyage

But didn't someone say that it got there through very early Jewish and ME gold prospectors? So it didn't?

originally posted by: Kester

I can only find the first 2 parts of that on YouTube, do you have a link for the others?

originally posted by: Cinrad
But didn't someone say that it got there through very early Jewish and ME gold prospectors? So it didn't?

It didn't, if that were the case then Haplogroup X would only show up in populations after that date, when in fact its known to be an original NA haplogroup along with haplogroups A, B, C and D and the route that the Native Americans took through the Altai region also shows traces of their genetics in populations that still live there. Besides that Haplogroup X is not associated with Jewish populations, which are more associated with Haplogroup K

originally posted by: BO XIAN
a reply to: punkinworks10

Thanks.

Perhaps you could address the issue . . . that their DNA . . . in DNA terms predates the timeline you espouse? At least IIRC.

I purportedly have Cherokee in my ancestry but from a female and can't find a suitable relative to test for that.

I doesn't matter. It should still show up in the autosomal DNA regardless of gender, especially if this relative was from the last four or five generations. It's Y-haplogroups where the trouble starts in terms of gender, and that is paternal deep ancestry. So if you are female you need a male relative to test for that.

a reply to: redhorse

Am male . . . have had the ftdna.com Big Y done etc. etc. May ask around again and see what possible matches might be.

Thanks.

Wiki has a page on all the pre Colombian contact theories here
en.wikipedia.org...
it debunks most of them