Who Discovered North America?

L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site in Newfoundland, which features archaeological remains of Viking encampments and a reconstructed base camp. mynewturtle/Shutterstock

Commentary

There are many legends surrounding the discovery of the Americas: tales of Phoenician seafarers, Chinese explorers, Roman dissidents, West African traders with gold-tipped spears, and Irish monks, all long before Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, or Jacques Cartier. Fleets of nameless Basque fishermen figure somewhere in the lineup too.

The fashionable objection now is that Columbus could not have discovered America, because it was already there. By that standard, Galileo did not discover the biggest four moons orbiting Jupiter, and Banting and Best did not discover insulin. Indeed, by that logic no one discovered anything previously unknown to them.

Even so, it’s safe to say that the first discoverers of America were Paleo-Siberian hunter-gatherers descended from Eurasian forebears. We know because the maternal DNA of indigenous people indicates who their ancestors were, and that they migrated 25,000 years ago by stages through Beringia into present-day Canada, likely up the Mackenzie River Valley. Far from being present “from time immemorial” (an assertion based on mere oral tradition), North American Indians are descended from Canada’s first settlers, migrants from the Russian Far East.

Historic climate change was significant in those migrations: in the Late Pleistocene era, global sea levels were at least 200 feet lower than today, creating the Bering land bridge. And once again, DNA divulges that, among other species, “contemporary wolf populations trace their ancestry to an expansion from Beringia at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.” As the climate changed naturally, wolves followed their prey and perhaps humans too.

Millennia later, Norse explorers reached Greenland in 985 or 986 A.D. during a climatic blip in 10-degree summer weather, about 1.5℃ warmer than the era before or after. At that time the global ocean was probably three to six feet higher than today. Scientists writing in the journal Geology found that “a brief warm period interrupted a consistent cooling climate trend driven by changes in Earth’s orbit.”

Where today there is only ice, prehistoric DNA from forest insects, chironomids preserved in a lakebed under advancing ice sheets, suggests a temperature range that enabled trees to flourish. That would explain why the seafarers from Iceland—meaning “Island” not an icy land—found a green land. They settled, attracted more settlers and, according to the Smithsonian Institution, “built manor houses and hundreds of farms; they imported stained glass; they raised sheep, goats and cattle; they traded furs, walrus-tusk ivory, live polar bears and other exotic arctic goods with Europe.”

Then the climate changed again and, after a few famine winters, the Norse left. “Recent analyses of the central Greenland ice-core, largely corroborated by data obtained from tree-ring studies and sea-sediments have produced an apparently incontrovertible paleo-climatic argument for the failure of the Norse colony in Greenland,” says a research article by Alexandra Slack published by the Centre for Medieval Studies at York University.

Some fault the Norse for “failing” to “adapt to Inuit hunting techniques,” as the indigenous had done from time immemorial. But perhaps they didn’t want to revert to a stone age lifestyle. Dr. Slack insists the Greenlanders abandoned their colonies for internal cultural reasons such as the “need to reaffirm their frontier identity,” returning to the seas.

The Viking presence in Greenland lasted 400 years. By contrast, l’Anse aux Meadows, the Norse outpost at “Vinland” on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, was used merely as a seasonal camp, and then for less than two decades around the year 1000.

What about others who may have come by sea from Ireland, Egypt, West Africa, China, the Middle East, or Ancient Rome? Farley Mowat’s book “The Far Farers,” published in 1998, asserted that voyagers he calls “Albans” reached North America from the Orkney Islands between the 5th and 7th centuries, settling in southwestern Newfoundland—a notion that Canadian Geographic magazine summed up as “highly speculative.”

For most of these stories the evidence is vanishingly thin, usually championed by only a few eccentrics.

A tourist attraction near Salem in New Hampshire, known as “Mystery Hill” or “America’s Stonehenge,” purports to be a Phoenician or Carthaginian settlement, complete with a stone for human sacrifice and a drainage rim for blood. Did a fleet of Phoenicians, among the world’s first great seafarers, flee the Mediterranean in 146 B.C., when the Romans destroyed Carthage and outlawed human sacrifice, in quest of religious freedom? That was posited in the 1960s by an eccentric amateur anthropologist, Charles Boland.

The fantasy was picked up in 1977 by the “In Search Of” program hosted by Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in the original “Star Trek.” In 1982, Nimoy’s program covered the notion that Chinese Buddhist monk Hu-Shen “discovered America 1,000 years before Columbus.” If it all sounds rather flaky, that’s because it is.

A few stones that show signs of having been moved around, drilled, or quarried; a few pictograms of indeterminate origin; a few artifacts that probably belonged to 17th- or 18th-century collectors—no wonder scholars dismiss such discoveries as pseudo-archeology.

“In fact, no one has found a single artifact of European origin from that period anywhere in the New World,” wrote Professor Curtis Runnels of Boston University, an expert on prehistoric archeology and early hominin dispersals. The same applies to wild stories of African exploration across the Atlantic. There is no chance that any African kingdom built ocean-worthy ships.

Nor did a flotilla of Romans fleeing Nero’s persecutions in 64 A.D. cross the Atlantic and live in Jeffress and Clarksville, Virginia—leaving only a bronze cup that resembles similar Pompeiian vessels in the Naples Museum. The cup, which can be seen at the Smithsonian Museum with the label “origin uncertain,” most likely belonged to a 17th- or 18th-century collector. As for Roman coins or supposed Roman symbols cut into rock now submerged by flooding when the John H. Kerr Dam on the Roanoke River was completed in 1952 (another theory championed by Charles Boland), it’s impossible to say how or when they got there.

Granted, the Romans had a massive commercial fleet. They reached the Canary Islands. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus recorded a voyage from Alexandria to Rome, also in the year 64, with 600 passengers. Quite a ship. But the idea of transatlantic Roman seafaring fails the basic smell test since they notoriously had limited sailing skills.

Another legend is that of Irish monk Brendan and his companions, told in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, “The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot.” It describes a great westward voyage to the “promised land” or “Delicious Isle” that might have been North America. Popular British explorer-adventurer Tim Severin famously reconstructed a contemporary oxhide-covered “curragh” vessel and recreated the legendary crossing to Newfoundland in 1977, published in his book “The Brendan Voyage.” Severin proved that it could be done. But there is no archeological evidence to support the presence of Irish monks in Newfoundland around the year 800.

The Bollandist monk-scholars who own the Brendan manuscript dismiss the tale as pious fantasy. Indeed, it is likely an allegory of the monastic life, inspired by “The Odyssey” by Homer—a return through life’s hardships to the divine light of Paradise.

My suggestion for the holidays: Rather than speculate about pre-Norse exploration legends, just enjoy reading Norse myths that were also preserved by the monks. Or better yet, read Homer.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.