Who Discovered America?
Don't let the politics outshine the science
When I was a kid, there was no ambiguity. The textbook clearly stated that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492 (after “sailing the ocean blue”).
Of course, my teacher knew full well that there were people onshore to greet Columbus, the moment that he set foot on land, but still, the word “discovered” was never questioned.
By that point, the United States had fully embraced the Columbus as “discoverer” narrative, and it was a point of pride for the millions of Americans of Italian heritage, which is more than a little odd since Columbus wasn’t really all that Italian.
In fact, no one is quite sure what he was, especially since all of his written documents and correspondence were in Latin or else a melange of Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. And sometimes, he also wrote in a kind of code using the Greek alphabet.
Either way, there were hundreds of statues and monuments to Columbus across the United States, and it wasn’t easy to change the narrative.
Today, of course, he’s pretty much universally loathed, which is definitely warranted as he was the epitome of a psychotic, warmongering asshole. Not only did he torture, rape, murder, and enslave all the kindly natives that he met during his voyages, he was utterly incompetent at sailing his own ship.
Columbus was also a blithering idiot on land as well, which is why we still use the word “pepper” to mean both the black spice (from India, the kind that often accompanies salt on a table) and a New World fruit (bell/green pepper).
Indeed, he was such an all-around useless piece of shit that even Spain (his sponsor) got sick of him and had him arrested, and he died in utter poverty, still fully in denial, convinced that the Caribbean and Central America places he visited were part of India (which is why indigenous people are still called “Indians” by the United States government even today - sigh).
Nonetheless, you can still find children’s stories for sale that glorify this utter turd of a human being.
Vikings
Meanwhile, in 1960, a Norwegian husband and wife team of archeologists discovered unmistakeable proof of a Viking settlement in what is now Canada.
For hundreds of years, there had been historical tales of Vikings exploring and (for a few years, anyway) living in North America, but these had all been dismissed as “fantasy” until the settlement in Labrador was excavated, thus proving that the Vikings had been to America some 200 years before Columbus and his motley crew.
Meanwhile, of course, even the Vikings themselves acknowledged that there were people living there when they arrived.
The discovery of a Viking settlement in Canada set off a wave of rather exuberant excitement as the Vikings are perceived as a lot more dashing and cool than those miserable old Spaniards.
Yale University even went so far as to trot out a complete forgery, a supposed Viking map of their explorations in North America, and only finally admitted their “mistake” in 2018 after overwhelming evidence was produced that showed that it was modern.
The Land Bridge
Those old textbooks glorifying Columbus may be long gone, but the new ones aren’t quite accurate either.
Today, most children will learn that the First Peoples or Native Americans, otherwise known as the first human beings in all of history to set foot in the Americas, crossed over into what is now Canada/Alaska from Siberia approximately 13,000 years ago.
Unlike the Vikings or the Spaniards, these peoples simply walked across a “land bridge” that existed then due to sea levels being far lower then than they are today.
There is one hell of a lot of debate and theories about exactly when the first people walked across the land bridge and how long it took them to travel south all the way to the southernmost tip of South America, but just about everyone agrees that these were the first human beings to ever live in the Americas.
It must be remembered that human originated in Africa and then spread out from there into Europe and Asia (and even some Pacific Islands) millions of years ago, long before homo sapiens even existed.
Therefore, (genuinely) discovering and inhabiting a brand-new continent really was a game-changing event for humanity.
Of course, few modern people want to admit that some truly horrific events happened during this “Native American” expansion into new territories, including the extermination of all the horses and other large mammals, which had huge repercussions when the Europeans came along in the 15th century.
The Solutreans
In today’s modern view, the “Native Americans” arriving from Asia being the first human beings to discover the Americas and not Europeans is definitely the preferred interpretation of archeological evidence.
Instead of evil “white” Europeans with their absurd claims of discovery in 1492 (or the 1200s), the preferred narrative today is of a peaceful, environmentally friendly group of (former) Asians living in the Americas for thousands of years until they were enslaved, hunted down, abused, and nearly exterminated by European diseases.
Mind you, no one is dismissing the abuse and wide-scale destruction of human life and culture that took place after the (medieval) Europeans arrived, but the rest is a carefully contrived fantasy.
And perhaps the darkest secret of this fantasy is that, oops, it turns out that the first people to set foot in the Americas actually were Europeans after all.
Known today as the Solutreans, this was a group of people living in western Europe (mostly France) during the last great Ice Age some 20,000 years ago. Aside from the archeological evidence, we don’t really know much about them except for one important fact - they were incredibly skilled at making tools.
But no evidence has ever been found that they built or used large sailing craft. And from France to North America is a very long journey, indeed.
So what makes anyone think that they discovered America?
Flint Knapper
These days, with steel knives and factory made tools, the ancient art of knapping is largely forgotten. But for 99% of human history, it was the only way to make a sharp edge for a tool or a weapon.
If you’ve ever seen flint knapping (flint is a really hard type of rock) being performed, it looks deceptively easy - just someone using a bone or rock to whack a piece of flint until little bits flake off and make a sharp edge or point.
But skilled flint knapping is a supreme art, and nobody ever did it better than the Solutrians.
Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1970s that an archeologist was examining some Solutrean arrow points and edged flint weapons in a museum in France when he realized that the items on display looked almost identical to those of the Clovis culture in North America, the first wave of Siberian Asians to migrate into Americas.
There is no evidence that the ancient Asians possessed the same level of skill at flint knapping as the Clovis artefacts, so what happened? Did the Asian migrants suddenly take a giant leap forward in their tool-making skills?
Or was something else going on?
These questions and more led to the formation of the Solutrian hypothesis, that it was actually Solutrians themselves who had brought their technology to the Americas. But without any oceangoing boats, how could that have been possible?
The theory is that the Solutrians used a seasonal “ice bridge” to get to North America that formed during the winter months, obviating the need for any large sailing vessels.
Instead of sailing across thousands of kilometers of open water, they followed the edge of the ice pack, hunting and fishing during the day and resting “on shore” (on the ice) at night, much like Inuit people still do today.
Mostly, these hunting expeditions would’ve been of short duration, with the Solutrians just going a little ways out to sea before returning home. But somewhere along the line, a small band of them kept going until they unexpectedly arrived at dry land (North America).
Initially, some very respected scientists deemed the Solutrian hypothesis as feasible. But others claimed that DNA evidence now shows that the ancient Native Americans had entirely Asian lineage. Yet even the DNA isn’t clearcut, and some analysis show that the ancient Native Americans were, indeed, of ancient European (Solutrian) heritage.
Today, it’s considered taboo to acknowledge the Solutrian hypothesis, and it’s easy to see why. After centuries of blather about Europeans (Columbus, Vikings, et al) discovering America, nobody wants to disenfranchise the (Asian origin) Native Americans yet again.
In a perfect world, nobody would care that the Solutrians were, in fact, the true discoverers of America. After all, they were only European in the most technical sense of the word.
The Solutrians sure as heck weren’t Christian (Jesus didn’t come along until 15,000 years later), nor did they adhere to any type of European “values.” Furthermore, they didn’t even speak a European language as we mean it today. And there’s even evidence that the Solutrians had dark-colored skin.
Nonetheless, the prevailing narrative does not allow for the fact that the Solutrians were undoubtedly the real discoverers of America.
Amerigo “Sexy Times” Vespucci
One thing my long-ago teacher never quite could explain is why America is called “America” and not “Columbia” or something else related to Columbus.
Sure, there are plenty of “Columbias” in the United States, including the national capital, but nobody has ever referred to the New World as anything but America. But why is the entire western hemisphere named after Amerigo Vespucci?
The sanitized version of history is that Vespucci traveled to the New World shortly after Columbus and was the first to realize that it was a new continent, not some unknown part of India.
The real truth is that, although Vespucci was definitely a real guy, we know almost nothing about him. He may or may not have gone to the New World (although he did certainly provision the ships used in Columbus’s second voyage), and he may have gone up to four different times, or maybe just two, or maybe not at all.
His only known connection to the New World is two letters that he supposedly wrote about his voyages, but a lot of scholars think these are fake or perhaps pastiches of real letters that he wrote that were intercepted and then "amplified” to be more interesting.
Whether he actually wrote the letters or not, one thing is for certain - the printed version of them (in a kind of book format) were the all-time best sellers of the 16th century. Everybody, and I mean everybody, bought them and read them (unlike Columbus’s journals, which sold quite poorly).
Although nobody would ever admit it, the secret to Vespucci’s literary success (if he was, indeed, the author) is that they contained lots and lots of juicy stories about hot naked indigenous women who loved to skinny-dip in the ocean and then jump into the sack with men, including European visitors.
One thing is for sure - the premiere mapmaker of that age, Martin Waldseemuller, created the first map of the Americas, based on Vespucci’s letters. And the map is the first document to show that the new continent with the name America, which Waldseemuller coined as a kind of quasi-Latin version of Amerigo’s first name.
Waldseemuller’s maps also sold like hotcakes, but over the next five centuries, they disintegrated or were lost. However, about 100 years ago, a German count discovered an original Waldseemuller map in the turret of one of his castles.
After a lengthy series of negotiations, the United States government spent $10 million in 2003 to acquire this map, and today, it hangs in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, labeled “America’s birth certificate.”