Every September, the United States celebrates the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the man who ‘discovered’ America.
The holiday has courted much controversy because of his genocidal treatment of the natives he encountered.
However, there is another issue to challenge him on.
Was Columbus even the first explorer on America’s shores?
It seems that from the moment Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492 theories popped up claiming that he was the last to the show, not the first.
It seems that many a historian, folklorist, and archaeologist have theorized, and in at least one case confirmed these claims.
Between the Bering Strait migration of the ice age, and Columbus’s voyage other explorers made it to the shores of the Americas.
There are actually so many potential theories of first contact that we have to make several videos to cover them all!
Not all theories are made equal however, and so these videos will figure out which are plausible, and which are likely bunk.
Let’s start with the first humans to arrive in the Americas.
The first people came via a land bridge that connected Russia and Alaska during the last ice age.
The low sea levels opened up a land bridge, and those hunter gatherers hunted and gathered their way across.
As the world temperature warmed, the giant ice sheets covering most of Canada began to melt and the land bridge closed.
In a shocking short amount of time, people migrated from Alaska to the southernmost part of Argentina.
These were the ancestors of all the Native American people.
The first confirmed contact after this migration was from our Norse friends in the 11th century.
Erik the Red, and Leif Ericson navigated their way through the northern Atlantic.
Their legend claims they settled in Greenland, Helluland suspected to be Baffin Island, Markland suspected to be Labrador, and Vinland which we think to be Newfoundland.
These colonies lasted for 400 years.
Historians always suspected these stories were true.
And then in 1960 archaeologists found the L’Anse aux Meadows site in northern Newfoundland.
Finally we had definitive proof of a Norse colony in the Americas, centuries before Columbus.
This discovery was really profound, and shook up our narrative that old and new worlds never connected before Columbus.
Although that’s the only confirmed contact, I’d be remiss however to not tell you about some of the more fringe theories.
These range from the probable, to just plain silly.
The first, and most likely theory concerns a Polynesian contact with South America.
We know the Polynesians settled as far as Easter Island, just 3,686 kilometers from the Chilean coast.
It is close enough that given the prodigious sailing skills of the Polynesians, contact could be possible.
There are four main reasons researchers suspect this.
The first has to do with the humble sweet potato.
Both the Polynesian islands and South America have this plant, and genetic testing has shown that the sweet potato was introduced from the Americas to Polynesia around 700 AD.
The real debate here is whether or not a sweet potato needed humans to be introduced, or if an enterprising sea potato made the brave voyage herself.
The second deals with bird bones found in Chile, which belong to a chicken, an animal not native to the Americas.
Two separate genetic tests show that the bones ARE a chicken, but they have no idea whether it was from before or after contact.
The third piece of evidence deals with linguistics.
The words for sweet potato, and stone axe are very similar in Polynesian languages, and the Quechua and Aymara languages of South America.
The last link may be the nail in the coffin.
Genetics show that an island off the Chilean coast has people of both Polynesian and Native American descent.
Moreover, evidence was found of a genetic link in the extinct Botocudo people in the interior of Brazil.
The latter is highly contested, with research both suggesting they do and do not have Polynesian genes.
Tune in next time, when we will look at other theories of travelers to the Americas from East Asia, as well as Arab and Semitic explorers predating Columbus by possibly over a thousand years.
I will warn you though, from here on out, the hypotheses become more and more disputed, and based on less and less evidence, but they are really interesting to think about.
Do you know of a crazy pre-Colombian contact theory?
Let me know down below!
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