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It just occurred to me, boats have been around way before 1492, and they would drift away by accident, just like in this case, more often than not. Hence, folk

It just occurred to me, boats have been around way before 1492, and they would drift away by accident, just like in this case, more often than not. Hence, folks from East Asia drifted away and landed on west coast of North America all the time, from time immemorial to 1492, and all of them were designated native/indigenous. Conclusion: Asia to America migration didn't only happen through Bering/Beringia land bridge pre-10000 BC? Question: Has there been any investigation of similarities between west coast indigenous languages and Asian languages, esp. Japanese?

tsimionescu 6y ago
You need to also take into account the likelihood of them surviving the trip and reaching a shore. It has likely been an extremely minute amount of people who would have done this, almost certainly too insignificant to influence the culture or genes in any way.
tpmx 6y ago
Ship building technology development is an important factor you didn't factor in. You'd need a ship that can survive crossing the pacific and also enough rations of food to survive the trip. In this case they also used some desalination tech to survive those 14 months, per the article. Edit: More details: https://www.historylink.org/File/9065 https://www.historylink.org/File/9065 > The crew had an adequate food supply (rice from the cargo, supplemented with fish and an occasional seagull). They could collect rainwater for drinking. They probably had on board a device called a ranbiki, normally used to brew sake, which they could have used to desalinate water from the sea. They also could have distilled saltwater simply by boiling it. But they had no source of vitamin C. By the time the ship washed ashore near Cape Flattery on a wintery day in 1834, there were only three survivors. Most of their crewmates had died of scurvy. (That essay seems to have a lot of other interesting details, by the way.)
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  From the essay you linked: "Traces of Japan were not entirely unknown in the Northwest. More than 1,000 Japanese ships are estimated to have disappeared during the Exclusion Era (1633-1854). Most presumably sank in storms, but iron fittings and other remnants of some of those ships washed up on the Northwest coast over time. A few drifted to coastal areas farther south with survivors on board. According to historian Frederik L. Schodt, at least 34 Japanese sailors reached the shores of North America or Mexico on disabled ships between 1806 and 1852. One of the best known cases involved the Tokujomaru, which ran aground near Santa Barbara, California, in 1813, with three survivors out of a crew of 14. But until the Hojunmaru, there is no record of the presence of any Japanese, sailors or otherwise, in what is now the state of Washington."
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    And the iron was being reused to make tools, on a fairly large scale apparently[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America#Iron_in_the_Pacific_Northwest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - totetsu 6y ago
    I was reading an historical newspaper article from West coast America about a sole shipwreck survivor whos boat drifted from Japan after a storm in that time period.
dyeje 6y ago
I'm not familiar with boat technology through the ages but it seems like it would be pretty uncommon for someone to survive an accidental journey across the Pacific considering people die doing so in modern times when attempting it intentionally.
opportune 6y ago
I think this is almost trivially true due to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples
- tpmx 6y ago
  That crossing was from North Asia (Siberia), not East Asia though? Crossing the Bering strait (88 km) seems a lot less demanding than crossing the pacific from East Asia to North America (~7000 km or so).
  - runarberg 6y ago
    I think that is the point of the parent. People made numerous crossing between Asia and America as it was and is simple with good canoes (and later kayaks). Note also that Kamchatka is not that far from Chukotsky and it is not far fetched to think that the Aino peoples from Northern Japan could have some shared cultures with the Yubik peoples, the latter bringing that culture to Northern America and the Indians that had been living there for 10.000 years.
nnf 6y ago
That's an interesting question, though I wonder if many such people would have survived the journey all the way across the ocean without access to fresh water or an understanding (and the necessary materials) for desalinating seawater. Some may have, but there are lots of filters working against survival, of increasing efficiency the further back in time we look.
masklinn 6y ago
> Hence, folks from East Asia drifted away and landed on west coast of North America all the time, from time immemorial to 1492, and all of them were designated native/indigenous. Most of them would be designated "dead" at the very best. Odds were they wouldn't be designated anything because the ship would sink long before it got through the pacific: aside from polynesian navigators (which likely had at least some pre-columbian contact with the americas) navigation was coast-hugging and ships were simply not designed to survive through the Pacific. And then the crew would still need to survive through a journey they were completely unprepared for. Not to mention the pacific doesn't really work that way: usually the ship would get caught in the gyres and never make it out, without wilful navigation it'd have incredibly low odds of catching the Alaska current or the equatorial counter-current.
JamesLeonis 6y ago
For a direct answer to your question, the Polynesians populated much of the vast Pacific ocean and founded many island native lineages. There is some strong evidence they came into contact with West Coast American natives within the last couple thousand years [0]. > We find conclusive evidence for prehistoric contact of Polynesian individuals with Native American individuals (around AD 1200) contemporaneous with the settlement of remote Oceania. Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2.epdf
- deaddodo 6y ago
  It's probably a good idea to point out that the evidence for Polynesian/S. American contact is extremely scant and mostly conjectural. This is a very controversial topic among archeologists and historians and there are biased interpretations on both sides.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Isn't there some speculation about Chumash dugout making techniques too around Santa Barbara?
  - 1-more 6y ago
    The kumara really bolsters the theory https://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2205 https://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2205
ksm1717 6y ago
Check out Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon Tiki expedition. I believe that his theory was about religions and this pacific drift phenomena. There’s a very cool museum outside of Oslo. I think that their findings have eventually been proven less meaningful than they thought, but still cool. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Has there been any investigation of similarities between west coast indigenous languages and Asian languages, esp. Japanese? Yes, plenty, and no similarities have been found in reputable scholarship. (Note that when Gavin Menzies, the crackpot historian whose claim is that the Chinese explored the whole world pre-Columbus, stated that West Coast indigenous languages bear a resemblance to Chinese, he had to base himself on 19th-century conjectures that were pre-scientific and now totally discredited. Nancy Yaw Davis’s theory that the Zuni people of North America are related to the Japanese, is also not taken seriously by any historical linguist). The Japanese language itself only entered Japan in the last centuries BC/first centuries AD. Japanese is originally from the Asian continent and displaced whatever languages were spoken on the Japanese isles before. So, that’s only a few centuries when Japanese speakers could have somehow come into contact with Native Americans, and there doesn’t seem to be any firm evidence for it.
runarberg 6y ago
I feel like people often leave the numerous Inuit and pre-inuit migration across the Bering straight on canoes and kayaks. Follow up questions: Is there any research on how much of pre-inuit culture spread southwards to Indian cultures? How much Asian culture did the Inuit and pre-inuit cultures take with them to America?
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  People don't leave out the connections, it's just that there isn't much firm evidence to outline whatever nature it had. More difficult statements about relationships outside the circumpolar world remain purely speculative. As for the follow up questions, Asia is a big place, and India is on the order of 4,000-5,000 miles from the Bering strait where pre-Thule cultures likely originated. There's no identifiable, historic relationship between modern Inuit/eskimos and people in India. However, they remain closely related to the Yuit on the other side of the strait.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Sorry, I meant Indian culture as in American Indian. Native American is confusing in this context as it could refer to Inuits as well. The Asian culture I’m thinking about would be from Siberia or Kamchatka. Interestingly, the Ainu people historicly lived pretty close to the Kamchatka peninsula (perhaps even on it), guessing that some culture that later was adopted by the Japanese from the Ainu but was also brought to North-America by proxy of pre-inuit peoples is not that far off. EDIT: And as for what they brought over, couldn’t the American Indians further south have benefited from escaped domesticated animals like the dog breeds they brought over from Asia. And wouldn’t the closest neighboring tribes have learned different hunting techniques from each other, techniques that would have traveled south. Did pre-inuit people never trade or fight with American Indian people? I’m sure there is a lot of interesting interactions going on there that we are missing.

tsimionescu 6y ago

You need to also take into account the likelihood of them surviving the trip and reaching a shore. It has likely been an extremely minute amount of people who would have done this, almost certainly too insignificant to influence the culture or genes in any way.

tpmx 6y ago

Ship building technology development is an important factor you didn't factor in. You'd need a ship that can survive crossing the pacific and also enough rations of food to survive the trip. In this case they also used some desalination tech to survive those 14 months, per the article. Edit: More details: https://www.historylink.org/File/9065 https://www.historylink.org/File/9065 > The crew had an adequate food supply (rice from the cargo, supplemented with fish and an occasional seagull). They could collect rainwater for drinking. They probably had on board a device called a ranbiki, normally used to brew sake, which they could have used to desalinate water from the sea. They also could have distilled saltwater simply by boiling it. But they had no source of vitamin C. By the time the ship washed ashore near Cape Flattery on a wintery day in 1834, there were only three survivors. Most of their crewmates had died of scurvy. (That essay seems to have a lot of other interesting details, by the way.)

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
From the essay you linked: "Traces of Japan were not entirely unknown in the Northwest. More than 1,000 Japanese ships are estimated to have disappeared during the Exclusion Era (1633-1854). Most presumably sank in storms, but iron fittings and other remnants of some of those ships washed up on the Northwest coast over time. A few drifted to coastal areas farther south with survivors on board. According to historian Frederik L. Schodt, at least 34 Japanese sailors reached the shores of North America or Mexico on disabled ships between 1806 and 1852. One of the best known cases involved the Tokujomaru, which ran aground near Santa Barbara, California, in 1813, with three survivors out of a crew of 14. But until the Hojunmaru, there is no record of the presence of any Japanese, sailors or otherwise, in what is now the state of Washington."
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  And the iron was being reused to make tools, on a fairly large scale apparently[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America#Iron_in_the_Pacific_Northwest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- totetsu 6y ago
  I was reading an historical newspaper article from West coast America about a sole shipwreck survivor whos boat drifted from Japan after a storm in that time period.

dyeje 6y ago

I'm not familiar with boat technology through the ages but it seems like it would be pretty uncommon for someone to survive an accidental journey across the Pacific considering people die doing so in modern times when attempting it intentionally.

opportune 6y ago

I think this is almost trivially true due to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples

tpmx 6y ago
That crossing was from North Asia (Siberia), not East Asia though? Crossing the Bering strait (88 km) seems a lot less demanding than crossing the pacific from East Asia to North America (~7000 km or so).
- runarberg 6y ago
  I think that is the point of the parent. People made numerous crossing between Asia and America as it was and is simple with good canoes (and later kayaks). Note also that Kamchatka is not that far from Chukotsky and it is not far fetched to think that the Aino peoples from Northern Japan could have some shared cultures with the Yubik peoples, the latter bringing that culture to Northern America and the Indians that had been living there for 10.000 years.

nnf 6y ago

That's an interesting question, though I wonder if many such people would have survived the journey all the way across the ocean without access to fresh water or an understanding (and the necessary materials) for desalinating seawater. Some may have, but there are lots of filters working against survival, of increasing efficiency the further back in time we look.

masklinn 6y ago

> Hence, folks from East Asia drifted away and landed on west coast of North America all the time, from time immemorial to 1492, and all of them were designated native/indigenous. Most of them would be designated "dead" at the very best. Odds were they wouldn't be designated anything because the ship would sink long before it got through the pacific: aside from polynesian navigators (which likely had at least some pre-columbian contact with the americas) navigation was coast-hugging and ships were simply not designed to survive through the Pacific. And then the crew would still need to survive through a journey they were completely unprepared for. Not to mention the pacific doesn't really work that way: usually the ship would get caught in the gyres and never make it out, without wilful navigation it'd have incredibly low odds of catching the Alaska current or the equatorial counter-current.

JamesLeonis 6y ago

For a direct answer to your question, the Polynesians populated much of the vast Pacific ocean and founded many island native lineages. There is some strong evidence they came into contact with West Coast American natives within the last couple thousand years [0]. > We find conclusive evidence for prehistoric contact of Polynesian individuals with Native American individuals (around AD 1200) contemporaneous with the settlement of remote Oceania. Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2.epdf

deaddodo 6y ago
It's probably a good idea to point out that the evidence for Polynesian/S. American contact is extremely scant and mostly conjectural. This is a very controversial topic among archeologists and historians and there are biased interpretations on both sides.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Isn't there some speculation about Chumash dugout making techniques too around Santa Barbara?
- 1-more 6y ago
  The kumara really bolsters the theory https://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2205 https://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2205

ksm1717 6y ago

Check out Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon Tiki expedition. I believe that his theory was about religions and this pacific drift phenomena. There’s a very cool museum outside of Oslo. I think that their findings have eventually been proven less meaningful than they thought, but still cool. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> Has there been any investigation of similarities between west coast indigenous languages and Asian languages, esp. Japanese? Yes, plenty, and no similarities have been found in reputable scholarship. (Note that when Gavin Menzies, the crackpot historian whose claim is that the Chinese explored the whole world pre-Columbus, stated that West Coast indigenous languages bear a resemblance to Chinese, he had to base himself on 19th-century conjectures that were pre-scientific and now totally discredited. Nancy Yaw Davis’s theory that the Zuni people of North America are related to the Japanese, is also not taken seriously by any historical linguist). The Japanese language itself only entered Japan in the last centuries BC/first centuries AD. Japanese is originally from the Asian continent and displaced whatever languages were spoken on the Japanese isles before. So, that’s only a few centuries when Japanese speakers could have somehow come into contact with Native Americans, and there doesn’t seem to be any firm evidence for it.

runarberg 6y ago

I feel like people often leave the numerous Inuit and pre-inuit migration across the Bering straight on canoes and kayaks. Follow up questions: Is there any research on how much of pre-inuit culture spread southwards to Indian cultures? How much Asian culture did the Inuit and pre-inuit cultures take with them to America?

AlotOfReading 6y ago
People don't leave out the connections, it's just that there isn't much firm evidence to outline whatever nature it had. More difficult statements about relationships outside the circumpolar world remain purely speculative. As for the follow up questions, Asia is a big place, and India is on the order of 4,000-5,000 miles from the Bering strait where pre-Thule cultures likely originated. There's no identifiable, historic relationship between modern Inuit/eskimos and people in India. However, they remain closely related to the Yuit on the other side of the strait.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Sorry, I meant Indian culture as in American Indian. Native American is confusing in this context as it could refer to Inuits as well. The Asian culture I’m thinking about would be from Siberia or Kamchatka. Interestingly, the Ainu people historicly lived pretty close to the Kamchatka peninsula (perhaps even on it), guessing that some culture that later was adopted by the Japanese from the Ainu but was also brought to North-America by proxy of pre-inuit peoples is not that far off. EDIT: And as for what they brought over, couldn’t the American Indians further south have benefited from escaped domesticated animals like the dog breeds they brought over from Asia. And wouldn’t the closest neighboring tribes have learned different hunting techniques from each other, techniques that would have traveled south. Did pre-inuit people never trade or fight with American Indian people? I’m sure there is a lot of interesting interactions going on there that we are missing.