History is pack of lies, agreed upon: So Christopher Columbus discovered America and we all unofficially agreed. To be fair some believed more the claim of another contemporary man, Amerigo Vespucci, both around the same period. An influential German map maker believed Amerigo more. That called the land on the map America. However did any of them really discover anything? Well the first obvious clue is the presence of native Americans long before Columbus. But maybe Columbus was the first to arrive to America, after all the natives were born there, right? Wrong? The are like us all descendents of the same species, the same root. Be it Adem, or mother Africa, someone had to travel to arrive there. And indeed archaeological, cultural and DNA evidences all proves that around 11,000 years ago people from Siberia were forced to migrate to America due to weather conditions. So basically Columbuss claim is simply like you moving to a new house and then few years later someone arrives and claims he is the first to ever use this house. But again lets be fair, I guess the meant that Columbus or Amerigo were the first to know about Americas existence thousands of years after that natural migration. I mean look at the bravery here, until Columbus people thought that the earth is flat and has an edge. Wrong again, the concept of a spherical Earth dates back to ancient Greek philosophy from around the 6th century BC, but remained a matter of philosophical speculation until the 3rd century BC when Hellenistic astronomy established the spherical shape of the earth as a physical given. The Hellenistic paradigm was gradually adopted throughout the Old World during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Actually Columbus himself when claiming the discovery of America, said he was attempting to travel to China and Japan faster. Ok, the last hope. I mean it was not so brave but atleast he is the first to set foot in America since the human migration 11,000 years ago, using big ships of the great Spanish Navy. So before the Spanish and British no one ruled the Atlantic Ocean to be strong enough to cross over. Right? What about the Vikings, the Scandinavians. Well they ruled the ocean much before Columbus time in the 15th century and surely never mentioned arriving to the new lands of America, right? Around the 10th Century AD, in 982 AD, a Viking by the name of Eirík the Red discovered Greenland, which is geologically part of the continent of North America. Although Greenland is mainly covered in ice, there is habitable land around the edges. Eirík invented the name Grænland to make the country sound inviting and to encourage people to live there. In the 10th century the climate was milder than it is today and a colony of Vikings survived in Greenland for about four hundred years. A century after that, The Vínland Saga tells how Eirík s son, Leif, sailed south from Greenland and discovered a temperate land. Because the berry known as vínber grew there in abundance, he called it Vínland. We dont know where Vínland was, or what berries he was talking about when he said vínber. It is translated as grapes, making the name mean Wineland, but there are no grapes growing anywhere close to Greenland, he must have sailed all the way to Virginia. In 1492, Columbus set sail and went down in history as discovering America. He landed in the Caribbean and saw various islands before returning to Europe, but never even saw the mainland of either North or South America.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 09:14:18 +0000
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