Why discovered america

Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of the discovery. The Irish claim centers on St Brendan, who in the sixth century is said to have sailed to America in his coracle. The English have never claimed first contact, but in the English colonies John Cabot was sometimes invoked in connection with English origins.

After the War of Independence, when the new American republic needed to dissociate itself from England, Cabot was displaced in the popular imagination by Christopher Columbus , despite the fact that he had never visited what is now the U. Eventually, the fact that Columbus was an Italian Catholic sailing in the service of Spain caused unease in a country in which the dominant group was descended from English Protestant colonists, and so the myth of a Norse discovery was born in the late 18th century.

In the years since, the continued persistence of this myth has illustrated just how easy it is for false history to have serious consequences. Scandinavian Americans are now part of the cultural mainstream, but in the 19th century, Scandinavian farmers struggling to make a living in Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas were regarded with condescension by the New England cultural elite. The discovery in of the Kensington Runestone , with its inscription recording the arrival of a group of Norse explorers in , enabled rural Minnesotans to feel proud that their ancestors had visited the region five centuries earlier.

Scholarly dismissal of the authenticity of the Runestone has not erased belief that it is genuine. On the east coast, the dominant group was of British rather than Scandinavian descent, but a myth arose that combined the two ancestries. It is of course the case that America was already populated by the descendants of those who had arrived many millennia earlier, but native Americans were discounted. Only Indians lived there.

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And DNA suggests they are the direct ancestors of nearly 80 percent of all indigenous people in the Americas. But there's more.

Today, it's widely believed that before the Clovis people, there were others, and as Bawaya says, "they haven't really been identified. We call them, for lack of a better name, the Pre-Clovis people. And to make things more complicated, recent discoveries are threatening to push back the arrival of humans in North America even further back in time.

Perhaps as far back as 20, years or more. But the science on this is far from settled. So for now, the Clovis and the Pre-Clovis peoples, long disappeared but still existent in the genetic code of nearly all native Americans, deserve the credit for discovering America.

But those people arrived on the western coast. What about arrivals from the east? Was Columbus the first European to glimpse the untamed, verdant paradise that America must have been centuries ago? There is proof that Europeans visited what is now Canada about years before Columbus set sail. They were Vikings, and evidence of their presence can be found on the Canadian island of Newfoundland at a place called l'Anse Aux Meadows.

Today the area is barren, but a thousand years ago there were trees everywhere and the area likely was used as winter stopover point, where Vikings repaired their boats and sat out bad weather. It's not quite clear if the area was a permanent settlement, but it is clear that the expansion-minded Norsemen were here long before Columbus. And to add one fascinating wrinkle to the story of America's discover, consider the Sweet Potato.

Yes, that's right the sweet potato. This humble pinkish-red tuber is native to South America. And yet, there have been sweet potatoes on the menu in Polynesia as far back as 1, years ago. So how did it get there? By comparing the DNA of Polynesian and South American sweet potatoes, scientists think it's clear that someone either brought them back to Polynesia after visiting South America, or islanders brought them from South America when they were exploring the Pacific Ocean.

Either way, it suggests that about the same time Nordic sailors were cutting trees in Canada, someone in Polynesia was trying sweet potatoes from South America for the first time.

There are other theories out there. Another theory from a retired chemist named John Ruskamp suggests that pictographs discovered in Arizona are nearly identical to Chinese characters.