Age of discovery

daft

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Some questions about the age of discovery, meant as several centuries of the discoveries of the Americas, Australia and other, non EuroAsian lands.
Please list all the plausible claimants for the title of Discovery of America(Americas).
Columbus we all know about, who else? the Chinese? the Vikings? In (more or less) what dates were they supposed to have discovered the continent(s).
Which explorer (land an/or sea) accomplished the most for the sake of humanity?
If you were an explorer during that era, given 3 ships and crew, which way would you have headed? what would have been your goal?
 
The Chinese aren't really all that plausible. Certainly, no more plausible than the Phoenicians (the entire premise is based on them having the capacity to do so, not evidence they did). Scandinavians certainly did land in North America. I like the suggestion that the Basque were fishing in Cape Cod, but I haven't looked into it.

I have no idea what "accomplished most for the sake of humanity" even means.

If I were an explorer and the Americas had not been discovered, I'd have headed around the Cape of Good Hope. Given the size of the Earth, unless there was some new continent in the way I didn't know about, I would starve to death before I reached Asia.
 
Let's wait until user James Stuart comes and claims that the "Age of Discovery" is crap because there is literally no period in human history in which there hasn't been discoveries, including today... Let's maybe just call various historical periods with names like "Period A", "Period B", and so on. :)

The "Iron Age" is also crap because wood was still much more commonly used than iron. And farming tools were often made of bronze as it was cheaper.

Please list all the plausible claimants for the title of Discovery of America(Americas).

OK, so one more to the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis#Atlantic_crossing

The Solutrean hypothesis claims that Ice Age Europeans crossed the North Atlantic Ocean along the edge of pack ice that extended from the Atlantic coast of France to North America during the last glacial maximum. The model asserts these people made the crossing in small boats, using skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people: hauling out on ice floes at night; collecting fresh water from melting icebergs or the first-frozen parts of sea ice; hunting seals and fish for food; and using seal blubber as heating fuel.

But there is no evidence that they ever reached South America. Only North America, particularly eastern and north-eastern parts of it.

This hypothesis is based - among other kinds of evidence - on close similarity between Solutrean culture of Europe and Clovis culture of North America, as well as genetic mtDNA haplogroup X discovered among some groups of native North Americans (and these native variants of X come neither from the Vikings nor from post-Columbian admixture, because their presence in North America in isolation from European variants of X is much older). It seems that there were at least four "colonizations" of pre-Viking & pre-Columbian Americas, either separated from each other by long time or coming from distinct directions.

Solutrean culture: http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/solutren_a.htm
 
The Vikings, given the evidence of long-lasting small colonies in Greenland, have the best claim besides the Spanish expeditions we are familiar with.

The Portuguese were also exploring at the time but they were more focused on the coast of Africa. I have read some claims that Portuguese ships explored westwards pre-Colombus but I have not seen the solid archaeological evidence that would back that claim up.
 
You seem to be splitting a semantic hair, and I'm not clear on why. The Vikings had colonies that lasted for centuries on the fringe of North America, I think that counts as something more than a passing visit.

Or are you focusing on some requirement for an "Age of Discovery" that mandates widespread knowledge of foreign continents?
 
The Vikings had colonies that lasted for centuries on the fringe of North America

Those in Greenland lasted for few centuries. Those in North America itself did not last even nearly as long.

I think that counts as something more than a passing visit.

So does Solutrean settlement. Or was that too early to count? But they sailed there rather than walking.

Or are you focusing on some requirement for an "Age of Discovery" that mandates widespread knowledge of foreign continents?

Well just visiting a region is not "discovering" it, IMO. But what counts more - spreading the knowledge or just describing your visit? The Vikings described their visits in the Icelandic Sagas, granted. It is possible that someone visited the Americas before them and also described it, but those texts did not survive. Technically the Americas were discovered by ancestors of native Americans - groups of people who settled there. But of course those migrations were mostly in prehistoric times. Mostly, but not only, because some new migrations from Siberia also took place later than Viking expeditions, but before Columbus.
 
The Vikings visited North America but saying that they "discovered" it would perhaps be an exaggeration.

Nothing significant followed their visits. Knowledge about a new world did not become widespread.

I'm not sure discovered is the correct word you're looking for. Both the Scandinavians and Columbus discovered North America. Neither discovered it first. Columbus's discovery was far more important, but I'm not sure that's a requirement for discovery. While I don't disagree with the point you're trying to get at, you're splitting hairs in a way that's not really relevant in order to get there.
 
The difference between Solutrean hypothesis and Viking exploration is that one is a fringe hypothesis that belongs with Chinese and Phoenician visits (and possibly below even those) and the other is as close to proven fact as anything gets in history.

Putting them in the same sentence, on the basis of our current knowledge, is a joke.
 
No real evidence to speak of, actually. The only so-called evidence is similarity in stone-working style (god forbid that two population would figure out similar ways to craft stone spear points - especially given that they're NOT identical) and an alleged genetic link that appears to have been largely debunked by more recent genetic studies.

Against that you have the fact that the Atlantic, even at the edge of the ice pack, is kind of, uh, a whole lot bigger than the Bering Strait, and that the odds of someone attempting let alone pulling off that kind of journey are pretty low.

At least we have some sort of reasons to believe the Phoenicians and Chinese could have done it. That's more than the Solutreans have.

It's a crack theory.
 
The odds of someone attempting and pulling off the Polynesian migrations were also very low.

As for stone-working traditions, this is a rather solid evidence, watch this video lecture:

http://carta.anthropogeny.org/mediaplayer/play/16063/8178



Let's add that the Fuegians and the Patagonians - who lived in the southernmost part of South America - had very similar stone-working styles to Australian Aborigines and related groups* from Sahul. So maybe common ancestors of Aborigines and Patagonians-Fuegians split in Eurasia (and then one group migrated to the continent of Sahul while the other group towards the Bering Strait), or maybe Sahulians crossed the South Pacific Ocean (sic!). The problem with the latter version is that by the time of being discovered by Europeans, Australians could only produce very simple rafts (and maybe boats), while Tasmanians had no knowledge of boats or rafts at all.

But populations can sometimes forget inventions.

Sahul: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_(continent)

*Mostly Tasmanians, Melanesians, Papuans.

an alleged genetic link that appears to have been largely debunked by more recent genetic studies.

Which more recent studies have allegedly debunked it?
 
John Cabot probbaly deserves more credit than he gets, because his discoveries were almost independent of Columbus'- he'd been probing into the North Atlantic before 1492, Columbus just proved that there was something out there- but nobody seems to care about that except Canadians.
 
And then only the English Canadians because Quebecers would rather talk about Cartier, and argue incessantly over whether Cabot or Cartier (or Erikson) discovered Canada.

The debate being, of course, largely the result of the evolving notion of what Canada is. Cabot explored Newfoundland first ; Cartier explored Quebec first . There's some debate whether or not Cabot reached Nova Scotia.

Given that Newfoundland, Acadia/the Maritimes, and Canada were considered three entirely distinct regions until 1867 (the Maritimes) and 1949 (Newfoundland), the answers as to who actually discovered *Canada* isn't immediately obvious. Do we mean 1534-1867 Canada, 1867-1949 Canada, or modern Canada? And does "discovery of a country" goes to the first person to discover territory that will eventually become part of that country, or to the person to discover the initial territory of that country, regardless of where it later expand?

(Again that's discovery in the sense of European discovery)

Erikson likely discovered parts of Quebec AND Newfoundland AND the Maritimes, but then everyone forgot about him. So the whole thing had to be discovered all over again.
 
The Europeans didn't discover the Americas first. It were the Paleo-Indians that crossed the Bering Strait. But you could argue that it were the Solutreans.
 
See, thatS' why my latest post went to great pains to say

(Again that's discovery in the sense of European discovery)

Multiple groups discovered the Americas at different points. There's no real anything to debate about the natives being first (other than the Solutrean hypothesis on which I've already said my piece), and the Euroepans coming much later ; and sadly we're likely never going to establish which paleo-native actualy did the discovering.

The interesting question to debate is more in the nature of non-native discovery of the new world because that actually involve recorded history and people we are aware of.
 
There's no question that the initial native discovery had the biggest impact on the world (in a geological sense) because of the massive extinction event related to it. But it's also true that Columbus's discovery had the second biggest event (and was probably up there) in terms of both exchange of flora and fauna and in the impact on human interaction. The Scandinavian settlements (which were essentially a colony of a colony) were difficult to sustain and ended up failing with little permanent impact.
 
The odds of someone attempting and pulling off the Polynesian migrations were also very low.

As for stone-working traditions, this is a rather solid evidence, watch this video lecture:

http://carta.anthropogeny.org/mediaplayer/play/16063/8178

There are problems with that approach - yes, migrating people often take their property and ways of doing things with them, but those things travel even when people don't. Furthermore, most people who migrate from one group of people to other adopt the second culture's ways of doing things so quickly that they're invisible in the archaeological record. I think language is the best example of something which is not usually transferred except by migration, but I may be wrong there.
 
lol, I love seeing people get hung up on the too-literal argument about who really "discovered" the Americas.

It misses the real and important point that it is Columbus' discovery that fundamentally sends world history into a different trajectory. The shape the world has today has a the most immediate and pronounced relationship to what Columbus did. That is not true of any other "discoverer" of the Americas.
 
If you read what Louis posted just above, it certainly comes a distant second. Even then, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's not as if things actually changed all that much in 1492 - yes, the exploitation of the Americas made European politics a fundamentally different game, but that didn't happen straight away, and I'm not convinced that American colonisation was qualitatively different from similar efforts in Asia and Africa. After all, the British managed to dominate the world for well over a century despite owning a distinctly second-rate slice of the Americas in resource and population terms.
 
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