Who Really Discovered the Americas?

I’ve just turned 60 years old and; I'm a 1969 high school graduate; all of my instructors through high school taught me and everyone else that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas while searching for a quicker and shorter route to the West Indies / Asia.  It was a failed attempt to reduce the shipping costs associated with the spice trade.

By the time I entered college at Morehead State University (yes, the same MSU that beat U of L in the 2011 NCAA Basketball Tournament) the professors in the history department had began to express doubt about the authenticity of that long standing “land mark” conclusion.

So I expect that the real question to ask is whether or not there is evidence to support an alternative to Mr. Columbus.  Keep in mind that practically all United States Citizens, cheerfully honor him with a special holiday day each October (it’s called Columbus Day).   It has been argued by some historians that he (Columbus) died believing that he had in fact reached Asia in that 1492 voyage and he never accepted the fact that the New World was really another continental land mass.  Other historians will argue that he new better, in fact a few historians insist that Columbus some how gained access to much older maps or charts (The Piri Reis’s map that I discussed in a recent post no less) displaying the Americas that he “discovered” in 1492.

Historians have examined in great detail evidence that has been found regarding the cultures that populated the American continent before Christopher Columbus was even born. Their thirst for research was based on the assumption that the great Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations did not appear all of a sudden in the Western world. Instead, they must have somehow obtained significant influence from ancient Eastern cultures, most likely from India.  It is easily accepted that some twenty thousand years ago primitive Asians crossed the Bering Strait into North America and gradually traveled south all the way to Argentina, after all, even Columbus acknowledged that there were “Indians” already here when he first visited the Americas.

I expect that practically everyone recognizes that there were people in America long before Columbus. These peoples thought to be of Asiatic descent became Native Americans and were certainly the first people here, tens of thousands of years ago.

There is evidence however supporting the theory that Norse expeditions to North America, starting with Bjarni Herjolfsson in 986, and Lief Ericson around 1000 AD are in fact much more than legend.  Several other pre-Columbian “discoveries” are not quite so well established. Such claims include the Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, and even the Carthaginians. Some of these claims may be true; most are probably not.

This debate may forever be an unanswered question I suppose; for no one will ever truly know who “discovered” the Americas first.  I personally think the Norse, or some would say the Vikings, most likely arrived here first, due to their having lived in Greenland for a time. But America was always been here and native peoples were obviously here long before the first European came, so I don't think that 'discovered' is the correct term for the referenced event, perhaps the terms “stumbled upon” a land mass that was already inhabited is closer to the fact. 

If you must select someone or give credit to someone for discovering the Americas, then you would have to say that the Native Americans did, but they came from somewhere else, most likely by way of the Bering Land Bridge more than 20,000 years ago; and they were not even Native Americans at the time.  

Even though it has been established that Columbus probably wasn't the first, his discovery (or re-discovery, you might say) is correctly regarded as the most important, and will likely continue to be the case; even if one of the earlier claims are eventually proven true. This is because; Columbus initiated permanent large scale two-way commerce between the Old World and the New World.   Earlier discoveries were so obscure that almost no one in either hemisphere (the Americas or Europe) was even aware that the other hemisphere existed.  But after Columbus, everyone knew; the Spanish Government, and even the church of the era, you see were really into exploiting foreign lands in those days.

Sources …                                                          http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/who-discovered-america.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807597,00.html http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090824180334AAo0QC1 http://www.columbusnavigation.com/discover.shtml http://tgsfree4allinfo.blogspot.com/2011/07/piri-reis-map-proof-of-alien-visitors.html http://kurungabaa.net/2010/02/12/ancient-maps-of-oceans-on-gazelle-skin/