Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies (14 August 1937 – 12 April 2020)[1][2][3] was a British submarine lieutenant-commander who authored books claiming that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus. Historians have rejected Menzies' theories and assertions[4][5][6][7][8]: 367–372 and have categorised his work as pseudohistory.[9][10][11]
The Haida and other native groups of coastal BC have no record of Zheng He's voyage.
And because his ships weren't capable of handling the open ocean, the only way he'd be able to do such a trip is by hugging the coast, so they'd have absolutely seen them.
I'd never heard about this "Zheng He in America" thing before, so I just did a little reading about it. One thing I read said he supposedly sailed around Africa and to the east coast of America, which is even more implausible.
Hasn't it been proven that eastern polynesians have amerindian DNA, and also that their word for their crops of sweet potatoes is related to the Quechua word for similar crops still in south america?
Yeah in 1200-1300 not 700AD, but there is some evidence of eariler voyages to South America and Antarctica
Also the DNA is the other way around and also a coin flip as to whether it came from Madagascan slaves after the slave trade or from Polynesians hundreds of years earlier, and the sweet potato is also not hard evidence as it could be coincidence, and there is some evidence of it having spread earlier
However oral history is quite strong in Polynesia and for whatever reason there's no stories of large landmasses to the east, only icy ones to the south
Essentially there's no hard proof like there is with Leif Erikson and Columbus as it was at most a couple of accidental crossings which may not have even been return journeys, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests there was contact of some sort or another
And the reason why Columbus managed to get funding for his journey was because he used incorrect estimations of the earth’s circumference, which indicated a much shorter distance to India than previous (much more accurate) estimations.
No african artifacts have ever been discovered in South or Central America.
Only one of the ships returned, and it only reported the existence of the "Canary Current" which that ship did not enter.
In addition. The dark skin of some South Americans is genetically distant to modern Africans, but has ties to the same markers in some asian cultures, implying its addition was prehistoric and happened in the old world.
Not incorrect measurements of the earth's circumference, rather he used incorrect maps that showed Asia as being like 4 times bigger than it actually is, with the Polynesian islands and Japan being a continent sized chain, each at minimum the size of Sardinia
The reason people think he was using an incorrect circumference is because one of his journal entries can be read to either say he was close to mount purgatory, which would have been super far from where he'd have been, or that he believed he was heading in that direction, which to be fair he actually would have been had the mountain existed.
I forget who but someone put it like this, if you asked Columbus for what continent he was on, he'd have been wrong, but if you asked for his coordinates on the earth's surface, he'd have actually been pretty close to accurate.
He knew "where" he was, he just didn't know where that where was.
Bruh, it's because Columbus kicked off the age of colonization that led to the modern world. All other claims to the first discovery are either the initial settlement or largely inconsequential meetings between worlds.
Columbus did not in fact do that, nor is that "the reason" the modern world exists. Broken window fallacy, slaughtering people and generally doing colonialism is not an effective way to create technological progress.