Round about to the New World

     Humans live in a wide variety of habitats around the world from the ice-covered Arctic Circle and high altitude valleys of the Himalayas to warm, tropic jungles and vast, intercontinental deserts. Aside from Antarctica, human history covers the world. The major continental division created by the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans has effectively separated the two major land groupings between Old and New Worlds. While Christopher Columbus, a fifteenth-century Spanish-sponsored sailor, is recognized as the discoverer that brought knowledge of the New World into the collective conscious of the European world, he was not the first one to find this huge land mass in the Western Hemisphere.
     When Columbus's crew arrived, native peoples already lived throughout North and South America with well-developed agricultural systems, impressive architecture, and powerful empires. Obviously people lived in the Americas long before their "discovery" by Columbus, but was there any other historical knowledge of this land aside from its inhabitants?
     In 1961 archaeologists discovered evidence of a Norse settlement along the Canadian coast. This proved that medieval sailors had the sailing capacity to reach across the Atlantic with stops at the settlements of Iceland and Greenland. The Icelandic Annals report the birth of a child in the settlement before war with the native "Skraelings" drove the settlement back to Greenland.
     This Norse settlement is the only widely accepted, documented, and evidenced proof of interaction between Old and New Worlds within the last several thousand years. Propositions of Phonecian sailors, medieval European sailors, Mali-nese sailors, and the Chinese sailor Zheng He all base claims on circumstantial evidence or on evidence that could have been fabricated anachronistically.
     Despite these contested findings of settlements and trade routes in the Pre-Columbian world, people did colonize the Americas before their discovery by Europeans in 1492. The most famous of the theories of American settlement is the overland migration over the Berring Strait during lower ocean levels. Theories involving Polynesian island hopping and even island hopping from Japan along the Berring land bridge. Both of these claims are based on archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence although methods, dating, and migrant numbers are debated.

     Regardless of the accuracy of any of these theories, several things stand out. First, the Americas were indeed colonized long ago largely by Asiatic and Micronesian peoples. Second, Columbus initiated continuous contact of Europe and the Old World to a previously isolated land mass. Lastly, modern historian methodology closely mirrors scientific mentality in process, methodology, and peer-reviewed claims.
     The globalization of the modern era continues to benefit many people through agriculture, knowledge, and economics, but the founding process for intercontinental contact was long, difficult, controversial, and tentative. Despite the dangers of invasive species, trade imbalance, and pollution, let us enjoy the ever-widening distribution of health, food, and promise around the world in an era of peace.


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Agatha Tyche