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Nov. 5, 2013 - Skeptoid
16:46
Skeptoid #387: Who Discovered the New World?

Of all the many claims of Europeans being first to the New World, only one is true. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Top Five New World Explorers 00:08:28
Alternative historians are those who insist that the standard model of history, as supported by all available evidence, must be wrong for whatever reason, and usually to accommodate their own pet belief, whatever that is.
Among these are those who insist that the first non-natives to visit the Americas was some ancient explorer who probably never did.
Today, we're going to examine the top five contenders for first to the new world.
And that's coming right up on Skeptoid.
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Who Discovered the New World?
In 1492, Columbus sailed the blue and was for a time considered to be the first European to set foot on the Americas.
And then came evidence that Viking explorers led by Leif Erickson had beaten him to it by some five centuries.
Early archaeological uncertainty resulted in a minor controversy over which explorer was first, but the story was yet to thicken.
Along came authors who suggested that Chinese Admiral Sheng He had also beaten Columbus, though only by a few years.
Not European, but since he came by boat and not by the Bering Strait Land Bridge, we'll let him enter the contest.
And then someone discovered petroglyphs in West Virginia that seemed to indicate that 6th century Irish navigator St. Brendan had beaten everyone to the continent.
Finally, this wrestling mass of Spaniards, Italians, Vikings, Chinese, and Irish were joined by Muslims when researchers presented both archaeological and documentary evidence that West African Muslims were in fact first to the New World.
These are the five main contenders for the honor.
There are always fringier claims to this and just about everything else, but these are the five we're going to look at today.
They can't all be right.
So among these five, who was actually the first to arrive in the Americas?
And of those who weren't the first, did any of them not make it at all?
So there's no real doubt anywhere about the familiar Columbus story.
He landed in the Bahamas in 1492, and although he believed he'd reached India, he'd actually reached some big continent that was blocking the way.
In three subsequent voyages over the next 12 years, he explored the Caribbean, the top of South America, and the coast of Central America.
On his heels came colonists and other explorers, and ever since he first set foot on land, the New World has been connected with Europe.
So now let's look at the other claimants one at a time, working backwards from Columbus's own time.
The Muslim claim is not of a specific explorer, but of general knowledge of the New World that predated Columbus and could only have been obtained by previous European visitors.
Piri Race was an Ottoman Turk mariner and naval cartographer who died in 1553.
His name means Captain Piri.
He's best known for a map he drew in 1513, known today as the Piri Race Map.
The map is often referenced by alternative historians who say that it depicts an impossibly accurate representation of the entire world, thus indicating that Piri must have had knowledge far superior to that of Columbus.
And thus traditional history must be wrong, and early Ottomans must have traveled the entire world, including the Americas from Cuba all the way down through Brazil and even Antarctica.
The Piri Race map forms the basis for almost all modern claims about Islamic sailors being the first to the New World.
There is no doubting the historical importance of the Piri Race map.
However, most of the sensational claims surrounding it are inaccurate.
Mainly, it does not at all upset traditional history.
It fits right in where we'd expect.
In his notes on the map, Piri wrote that he'd compiled it from about 20 existing maps from seafaring nations all around Europe and Asia.
These included ancient Greek maps of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, Arabic maps of India, Portuguese maps of Pakistan and China, and the latest map from Columbus, showing the Caribbean islands and a bit of the American East Coast.
The map is nowhere near as accurate or comprehensive as usually claimed.
At a glance, it's obvious that major features are wrong, and the consensus to explain this is that Piri didn't have context for all the individual charts he assembled.
Piri showed Brazil as connected to Antarctica, and we believe this was either just an effort to include the presumed Terra Incognita, or was just the coast of South America twisted around to fit on the page.
Portuguese sailors, following Prince Henry the Navigator, had thoroughly explored Western Africa and had made sorties west across the Pacific prior to Columbus.
Columbus himself studied navigation in Portugal and was closely followed by other Portuguese sailors when he arrived in the New World.
From his base, these explorers quickly developed a sketchpad knowledge of the Eastern Americas from Newfoundland to Argentina.
And by the first decade of the 16th century, there was more than adequate source material from which Piri could draw.
In short, there is no need to introduce an Islamic voyage to the Americas to explain the Piri Race map, and insufficient archaeological or documentary evidence to support such a voyage either.
I give early Islamic explorers 0.5 out of 5 Skeptoid plausibility points.
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Viking Plausibility Points Explained 00:07:56
Sheng He was a great Chinese admiral in the 15th century who died just 18 years before Columbus was born.
We've talked about Sheng before on Skeptoid in connection with various urban legends surrounding his travels and his ships.
It's always been well known and well documented that Sheng traveled south and west from China as far as Africa, but there had never been any evidence that he ventured east across the Pacific to reach the New World.
This changed in 2006 when a Chinese lawyer, Liu Gang, announced the discovery of a map copied in 1763 from an original dated 1418, titled Overall Map of the Geography of All Under Heaven.
The map shows the Americas in all their glory, proof that Chinese cartographers, sailing under Sheng He, had beaten Columbus to the New World by coming from the other direction.
Unfortunately, his announcement of the map did not go over very well.
Virtually nobody takes the map seriously.
It's evidently a copy of a well-known French map from the 1600s, as shown by its depiction of California as an island.
It also has textual errors.
One of the Chinese characters in the title is misused.
An unsurprising error from a modern forger more familiar with simplified Chinese, but not an error that would have been made by a Qing dynasty user of traditional Chinese.
Liu Gong has proven to be his own worst enemy in this enterprise.
He published a book in China in 2009 called The Ancient Map Code to promote his map.
But in it, he goes more than 400 years earlier, claiming to have discovered another Chinese map from 1093 that also depicts the entire world.
This particular map, quote-unquote, is even sadder.
Liu shows a photo taken inside the 1093 tomb of Shang Kuang Xing that shows paint and plaster flaking off of a wall.
Liu superimposed his own concept of a world map over the pattern of damage in such a way as to almost beg pity and calls this deterioration a map.
Sheng He, intrepid explorer though he was, gets one out of five skeptoid plausibility points, and Liu Gong has a deficit of about 15 points.
Leif Erickson was the son of Eric the Red, the Viking who first settled Greenland.
Leif followed in his father's mighty footsteps and founded the first colony in Iceland.
Much of Leif's doings west of there are known from two Norse sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eric the Red.
Now, the problem with sagas is that they were not exactly reliable historical documents.
They focused on individuals in a narrative storytelling fashion.
The primary destination in these sagas was Vinland the Good, which is believed to have been settled around 1000 CE.
Fortunately, a second line of more empirical evidence was added to Leif Erickson's tale.
In 1960, archaeologists discovered ruins at the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.
It's called L'An Son-Medu, Jellyfish Cove, and of a number of Norse sites believed to have been discovered along the east coast, it's by far the best.
The village was built of sawed roofs on wooden frames, and the buildings include a forge complete with iron slag, a boathouse with all sorts of wooden scraps and iron hardware, and sufficient relics to tie it beyond any reasonable doubt to the Norse.
We don't know for sure whether Lazamedu was part of Vinland or not, or whether it was associated with Leif Erikson, but we do know the Norse lived in this village at the same time the sagas placed him in the vicinity.
Since you can hold the Laza Medu rivets in your hand that are consistent with those from Viking longships of the day, and they date to 1000 CE, Leif Erickson gets 4.5 out of 5 skeptoid plausibility points, and the Vikings as a group get 5 out of 5.
St. Brendan the Navigator was a legendary 6th century Irish monk who sailed around the British Isles in leather boats.
He's known only from two ancient annals called The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot and The Life of Brendan.
It's said that he sailed to the Isle of the Blessed, or St. Brendan's Island.
Supposedly this was off the coast of Africa, but both Brendan and his island are really only known from legend.
But in 1983, the promotional magazine Wonderful West Virginia published three articles claiming that some ancient petroglyphs found there prove that St. Brendan actually reached the New World around the year 525 and left the petroglyphs, said to be written in the old Irish script Ogum.
They're called the Horse Creek Petroglyphs.
They were translated by a Dr. Barry Fell and found to be Christian.
Ever since a loyal following has claimed St. Brendan to be the first European to the New World, beating even the Vikings by some five centuries.
However, sadly, the list of problems with this claim is a long one.
No serious archaeologists have ever bothered to study the carvings, because nobody thinks they look like writing.
The prevailing feeling is that they're simply marks left where Native Americans had sharpened tools.
They were originally discovered by amateurs with no language expertise and filled with chalk according to which markings the amateurs thought were probably intentional lines and photographed.
Dr. Barry Fell, a retired marine biologist, saw only these photos and never inspected the site.
Actually, Ogum experts have universally disagreed with Dr. Fell's translation and even with the depictions of the characters themselves.
So who knows, better information may surface in the future, but for now the West Virginia petroglyphs have no archaeological credibility.
St. Brendan's voyage to the New World gets 0 out of 5 skeptoid plausibility points, and the carvings get 0.5 points until such time as a proper expert analysis is done.
And so tallying up the score, we have a winner, the Vikings, under the leadership and probable physical presence of Leif Erickson.
The Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, and Turks did all make it here soon thereafter.
Jung He wouldn't get credit for being first even if he had beaten all of those guys though, since the New World was already thoroughly populated by northern Asians via the Bering Strait.
He still would have been a few tens of thousands of years late to the party.
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