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Evidence is evidence and until it's found, we don't really know much. That said... ancestors of Polynesians, melanesians and Micronesians were navigating to re

Evidence is evidence and until it's found, we don't really know much. That said... ancestors of Polynesians, melanesians and Micronesians were navigating to remote islands 2-3kya. They found nearly all of them, essentially surveying the entire Pacific. Their wider language group ranges from Indonesia to Easter island, Hawaii & Madagascar! That is evidence of feats that "western civilization" did not master until the 1700s, in Darwin or Cook's days using industrial era technology. I think it's very likely that ancient voyages contacted south America, Australia & Africa & asia at least to some degree. Doesn't say much about the particulars, but ancient long distance ocean travel happened. Eric the red is (now almost certainly) real. This suggests (imo) the stories of the St Brendan voyage west and North American voyages to Europe are totally plausible. Even Plato's Atlantis (10kya) is back on the table, especially considering the finds we now have from these very early periods.

jcranmer 9y ago
It takes certain developments in shipbuilding to cross oceans reliably, particularly the need to build ships that can take storms and high waves well. Crossing the North Atlantic without a keeled ship is a good way to guarantee shipwreck. There's no habitation of intermediate island hopping points that one might expect from transoceanic-capable cultures before European exploration: islands like the Falklands, Bermuda, Azores, Iceland. It's plausible that isolated, shipwrecked people drifted to land via oceanic currents, but that's not the kind of contact posited. Viking precolumbian contact is confirmed. Polynesian contact is suspected, but the only evidence for this is the sweet potato, and there is a maddening lack of cultural, linguistic, or archaeological evidence to back this up. Pretty much every other hypothesis tends to be rooted in individual misunderstanding of evidence, very loose artistic correspondence ("this image from <insert culture here> totally looks like <insert other culture here>. CONTACT CONFIRMED!"), nationalistic priority claims (particularly of the discovery of Grand Banks, and Chinese claims to have gotten to the Americas before Columbus), or outright fraud.

jcranmer 9y ago

It takes certain developments in shipbuilding to cross oceans reliably, particularly the need to build ships that can take storms and high waves well. Crossing the North Atlantic without a keeled ship is a good way to guarantee shipwreck. There's no habitation of intermediate island hopping points that one might expect from transoceanic-capable cultures before European exploration: islands like the Falklands, Bermuda, Azores, Iceland. It's plausible that isolated, shipwrecked people drifted to land via oceanic currents, but that's not the kind of contact posited. Viking precolumbian contact is confirmed. Polynesian contact is suspected, but the only evidence for this is the sweet potato, and there is a maddening lack of cultural, linguistic, or archaeological evidence to back this up. Pretty much every other hypothesis tends to be rooted in individual misunderstanding of evidence, very loose artistic correspondence ("this image from <insert culture here> totally looks like <insert other culture here>. CONTACT CONFIRMED!"), nationalistic priority claims (particularly of the discovery of Grand Banks, and Chinese claims to have gotten to the Americas before Columbus), or outright fraud.