China was the first in the New World! New PBS Documentary Says So!

Check this out:

1421: THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED AMERICA?, airing on PBS Wednesday, July 21, investigates a theory that could turn the conventional view of world history on its head: the startling possibility that a daring Chinese admiral, commanding the largest wooden armada ever built, reached America 71 years before Columbus.

www.pbs.org...

Very interesting, would that many world historians be willing to admit they've been wrong all this time though?

As we all know,
The Norwegian Viking Leiv Erikson discovered america long before that...



EDIT: Just found this link to backup the claim...: www.carmensandiego.com...

[edit on 2004/7/7 by Hellmutt]

You're all wrong!!! The first people in the new world were the ancestors of the Native Americans of course... Thousands of years earlier via the bering street.

Whoa. Well I wrote a long response, then it disappeared, well long story short, to summarize my response. Historians and I'm guessing archaeologists alike have known that the new world came in contact with the east before the west. I believe that several anchors were found off the coast of washington and california. It is because western civilization has taken so much credit and claims to world superiority, most people in the americas are only taught one side of the world rather than the other.

You're all wrong!!! The first people in the new world were the ancestors of the Native Americans of course... Thousands of years earlier via the bering street.

We all know that.

But I think in history, you can only "discover" lands if your on a boat.

If that is the case, Columbus wasn't the first. The Chinese weren't the first and neither were the Vikings.


The Black Africans, Egyptians, discovered America perhaps 3,000 years ago, through sailing the Atlantic Ocean.

Bravo, Illmatic. That is exactly my view. The Egyptians were involved with the Mayans heavily IMO. That is why the Emerald Tablets of Thoth were in the Mayan ziggurats...

Originally posted by TheBandit795
You're all wrong!!! The first people in the new world were the ancestors of the Native Americans of course... Thousands of years earlier via the bering street.

I was watching the Discovery or History channel, I forget which one, and it explored the school of thought that says it was impossible for people to cross the Bering Strait. If you Google it, I'm sure you'll find more info. Interesting theory.

P.B.S. kicks A$#, they are the last unsided media we have, Just a reminder of why people should donate to their cause. I know I do . I'll go to the pbs web site and see if I can catch the program in my area. Thanks for the post lockheed.

Originally posted by curme

I was watching the Discovery or History channel, I forget which one, and it explored the school of thought that says it was impossible for people to cross the Bering Strait. If you Google it, I'm sure you'll find more info. Interesting theory.

I also don't believe that much in the crossing of the Bering Straight.

The Native American Indians were already here and it's heavily documented that they traded with black peoples from the ocean thousand of years ago.

in a way china could be the first because of when its people crossed the bering strait. and illmatic can you give a link about egyptians sailing across the atalantic? the only proof i have seen id the egyptians had weed which was only grown in south america.

Originally posted by machinegunjordan
in a way china could be the first because of when its people crossed the bering strait. and illmatic can you give a link about egyptians sailing across the atalantic? the only proof i have seen id the egyptians had weed which was only grown in south america.

Lol... where did you read that from? That's proof.

The Egyptians traded with the Mayans and the Native American Indians. They didn't have FedEx back then.

There's a book called They Came Before Columbus

Illmatic, do you have any links besides the book? Would be interesting to read.

They also found cocanie in egyptian mummies back then cocanie was only found in the americas. There must have been some type of trade between the two cultures.

Originally posted by TheBandit795
You're all wrong!!! The first people in the new world were the ancestors of the Native Americans of course... Thousands of years earlier via the bering street.

The Clovis people (i forget the date on their civilization, but i'll find it for you later) seem to be technologically related to a tribe on the iberian peninsula. It can be argued that the native American colonization was not entirely from the bearing straight.

Did you know that some tribes in South America speak languages of African origin? I think it's Bantu specifically but I'm rusty, so again i'll have to get back to you. (i'm in a hurry).

There is decent evidence for Chinese exploration (such as anchors found in San Francisco Bay, and supposedly a written account of a journey in America with notable landmarks and their distances from eachother given). I don't know the date.

The Vikings knew America was here and established a colony called Vinland. There are even obscure claims I will look up later that Carthage was aware of America. (specifically, there was supposed to be a large continent 12000km from the bearing straight. I don't know the width of the atlantic off the top of my head, but it seems like huge distance...

Equally obscure, but soon to be researched, there were supposed to be 3 large islands of Chronus in addition to the islands of Poseidon (Atlantis). Greenland is actually 3 islands linked by ice. There are supposedly ancient maps showing Greenland as seperate Islands but i'll find out about that later.

So... let your imaginations run wild for a day or so, then i'll probably debunk half of my own claims when I post the facts.

Who discovered America? And why? There are any number of possible claimants before Christopher Columbus for the honor of Discoverer of America. The earliest good claim is that of two Chinese astronomers, His and Ho, who ca 2640 BC were ordered to make astronomical observations in the land of Fu Fang, east of China.

Evidence from two Chinese texts indicate the pair sailed north to the Bering Strait then coasted North America as far south as Guatemala before returning to China. But the pair were executed shortly afterwards for failing to predict a solar eclipse.

www.nevadamercantile.com...

No opinion on whether this is true, but I remember hearing the story of the two Chinese astrologers getting drunk, forgetting to predict the eclipse, and getting executed for it. Thought it was pretty funny.

Originally posted by The Vagabond
Did you know that some tribes in South America speak languages of African origin? I think it's Bantu specifically but I'm rusty, so again i'll have to get back to you. (i'm in a hurry).

I have a friend of mine who is Navajo. We were in Korea together, and she said some the the Korean words are Navajo! Kind of freaked me out.

Whether the chinese were the first to find America or not, at least PBS is willing to admit that the current theory might be wrong. It's about time we got less euro-centric

well an egyptian pharoh or maybe ihmotep was buried with some marijuana leaves and a big dooby to smoke in the afterlife.

Originally posted by curme

Originally posted by TheBandit795
You're all wrong!!! The first people in the new world were the ancestors of the Native Americans of course... Thousands of years earlier via the bering street.

I was watching the Discovery or History channel, I forget which one, and it explored the school of thought that says it was impossible for people to cross the Bering Strait. If you Google it, I'm sure you'll find more info. Interesting theory.

It was the history channel. They said that they found no clovus spear points or anything man made in beringia[sp?]. As the theory goes, the inhabitatants island hopped with rafts to get to North America. Then after dredging and filtering mud for a day, that used to be coastline they found several spearpoints.

Whoa. Well I wrote a long response, then it disappeared

I did the same damn thing...I think I clicked on new topic instead of new link....I had a friggin load of stuff too - lemme see if I can remember everything...I'll save it this time

I took a course at FSU with underwater archaeologist Dr. Michael K. Faught, and although my major was Anthro, I was not too big into archaeology at the time (although my love for it has grown), but I do remember a lot of fascinating stuff...

Faught's primary research involved Pre-Clovis research on the continental shelves of FL (he has found Clovis there), where most of FLs oldest sites still remain burried under the sand - here are some interesting quotes from a couple of his publications and research:

Third, if fluted points are indeed evidence for initial human settlement, the clustered distribution of these artifacts suggests that colonization more likely proceeded in a leapfrog, rather than wave-of-advance pattern (cf., Anderson a nd Gillam 1997, Dincauze 1993, and Faught and Anderson 1996 with Martin's (1973) and Martin and Mosimann�s (1975) wave of advance colonization model). The recent dating of Monte Verde to well before the era when fluted points appeared, however, suggests f luted points are not markers of the first colonists, but instead the remains of a later and quite obviously wildly successful and archaeologically highly visible adaptation. It is this adaptation, the data suggest, that spread in a leap-frog pattern. The fluted point adaptation may have moved among pre-existing populations, although this possibility seems unlikely across the board, given the lack of unequivocal evidence for pre-Clovis cultures in the areas of greatest fluted point frequency. The nature of the fluted point adaptation may, in fact, have prompted the first movement of peoples into many of the areas where concentrations are observed. The technological organization and hunting preferences of fluted point peoples, in fact, would have likely cau sed them to gravitate into areas where large game animals and high quality stone could both be found in quantity.
search.yahoo.com...

And then there are the issues that Faught raised in his dissertation in 1996. If Clovis hunters came from Asia then why hasn't anyone reported finding fluted points in northeast Asia, and why are significantly more found east of the Mississippi than west of it? Is it possible that the first people to reach Florida did not come by land?
condition.fsu.edu...

But of recent, there's been a spur in the Clovis research...If Clovis was the earliest form of mankind in North America (11,500 BP), then how come dates from Monte Verde in Chile are consistantly at 12,500 BP? - This challenges the Beringia model as it suggests that South America was inhabited before what should logically have been North America...here's a quote from a related source:

Dr. Carol Mandryk, a Harvard University archeologist who has studied the American paleoenvironment, said the concept of an ice-free corridor as the migration route emerged in the 1930s, but her research shows that even after the ice sheets began to open a path, there was not enough vegetation there to support the large animals migrating people would have had to depend on for food.

"It's very clear people couldn't have used this corridor until after 13,000 years ago," Mandryk said. "They came down the coast. I don't understand why people see the coast as an odd way. The early people didn't have to be interior big-game hunters, they could have been maritime adapted people." No archeologists seriously considers the possibility that the first Americans came by sea and landed first in South America, a hypothesis made popular in the 1960s by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. There is no evidence of people's occupying Polynesia that long ago. All linguistic, genetic and geological evidence points to the Bering Strait as the point of entry, especially in the ice age, when lower sea levels created a wide land bridge there between Siberia and Alaska.

Although several other potential pre-Clovis sites have been reported, none has yet to satisfy all archeologists in the way Monte Verde has just done. But archeologists expected the verification of Monte Verde would hasten the search for even older places of early human occupation in the Americas.
www.unl.edu...

The Native American Indians were already here and it's heavily documented that they traded with black peoples from the ocean thousand of years ago.

Illmatic67 - I don't know if the evidence for this trade is as "heavy" as you've suggested - maybe some articles can help boost my memory - but I do recall that there is more clear evidence of the further advanced South American tribes trading with African Americans closer to the apex of Native American civilization (Hopewell, Cahokia, Etowah) whereby the South American tribes would then trade the goods with Native American tribes...but there's also those who believe that certain items could have simply floated over on occasion, and I believe this was actually documented by Cortez...

As far as the arguement that Native Americans were "already here" is a bit far-fetched - are you suggesting they evolved seperatly from other human species? There is clear skeletal evidence that suggests that Native Americans were of Asian descent, which is kind of difficult to question on a forensic and bilogical level, including shoveled incisors and smaller frames...

But it's obvious that The Vagabond said earlier, theories abound as to the possibilites - I know my professors are working very hard at trying to work together with many other academic sources to discover the origins of New World inhabitation

Luckly, my office is right next door to the SEAC, which heads up all the major digs in the SE...If I walk past their sifting zone outside one day and hear mass hysteria and celebration, I'll be sure to join in for a few moments then add something here

Sorry that's a little long winded, but I hope my basic understanding of some this will add to the debate, and I look forward to comments and/or answers

[edit on 7/7/2004 by EnronOutrunHomerun]