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Depends on your definition of "discovery". Christopher Columbus's trip to America changed the course of history. Any previous visits by the lost at sea sailors

• babelfish 6y ago
  Really, America was first "discovered" by the indigenous folks who lived here before any European
  • mamon 6y ago
    And what of significance did they accomplish? Learnt how to build tents? Got proficient at making human sacrifices? Built a few pyramids? As i said, the real history of America started when Europeans came in.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • AlotOfReading 6y ago
      You can dismiss any region by ignoring everything they've accomplished. If you absolutely insist on silly "comparative metrics" though, many areas of the pre-columbian Americas were home to incredibly advanced agricultural civilizations whose productivity far exceeded that of their European contemporaries. This isn't a useful perspective for academic work, but maybe it'll help you come to grips.
      • saalweachter 6y ago
        4 of the 10 major food staples were domesticated by the pre-Columbian New World.
    • willhslade 6y ago
      Buddy, Cahokia may have had as many people as London. Disease ravaged the Native American population and estimates are that 90% died. History doesn’t start with European arrival.
    • macintux 6y ago
      Setting aside the cultural superiority complex: people in North and South America were severely hindered by the lack of large beasts of burden. It's hard to create an industrialized society without them. Even assuming "industrialized society" is the ideal, which, given our multiple ongoing ecological catastrophes, isn't necessarily a safe assumption.
      • jcranmer 6y ago
        Why do you need beasts of burden to develop industrialized society? In terms of agricultural resources, you don't need the plow to effectively farm the land in most of urbanized Pre-Columbian America (the Great Plains are a different matter). Aquaculture is a wonderful supplement--it's suggested that the founding agricultural crop in the Norte Chico region may be a flax instead of a staple food crop, and the early date of its monumental architecture may predate agriculture for food (although this is very much in debate right now). In terms of population, Tenochtitlan achieved a size greater than all but the very largest cities in Europe, and had no issues feeding its population out of the resources in the Central Mexican Valley. It's also not necessary for trade: the vast trade networks of North America are pretty well-documented, and they continue down into the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Indeed, it's been suggested that pottery was introduced to the Mississippians via trade with Amazon tribes across the Caribbean. Waterborne transport makes a lot more sense in the Americas: the Mississippi and its tributaries provides a strong link for much of North America, and of course the Amazon region even today relies almost entirely on water transport. If you look at Andean civilizations instead, the topography makes any form of cart completely impractical, and llamas and alpacas were already domesticated for use as pack animals.
        • macintux 6y ago
          Technically I didn't say "need", but that they were hindered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel is one controversial book on the topic. I was thinking more in terms of raw power than agriculture: before we could develop coal-fired industry it was useful to have draught animals to carry heavy loads and drive equipment. Not an expert, but it's clearly a lack, and the correlation between variety of domesticated animals and industrialization is interesting.
    • jcranmer 6y ago
      Tenochtitlan was larger than almost every other contemporary city in Europe. The market alone was noted by the Spaniards who saw it to be as large as the cities they knew. And, in addition to having universal primary education (for both males and females, imagine that!), as well as more opportunities for lower classes to rise into the ranks of the elites, the city was also more cosmopolitan than most, having what we would see today as ethnic neighborhoods. At a time when the Spanish were busy trying to erase any legacy of Moors or Jews in their country. Or maybe you'd want to consider instead the Mayans. Their astronomy was on par with--or better than--contemporary Eurasian astronomers. Their calendar is sufficiently precise, and their written legacy vast enough, that we know the chronology of successorship in polities and rulers for the Classical Maya where we struggle to even identify the existence of those same entities in contemporary Europe (although, to be fair, the Age of Migrations is responsible for a lot of that). And, personally, I think the Mayan writing system is more wonderful than anything derived from the Phoenicians or the Chinese. But why stop with the well-known urban civilizations? Several cultures challenge conventional notions about the development of civilization. The Mogollon culture developed impressive aqueduct systems to enable farming in a desert without any evidence for a centralized authority. The quipus of the Wari and the Inca challenge the notion of writing system. Norte Chico challenges the idea that agriculture is a necessary precondition for urban civilization. Pre-Columbian America developed very differently from the Eurasia. If you try to fit its development to a Eurasian development sequence, you will find that it doesn't match very well. But that doesn't mean it didn't develop civilization, and pretending that it does misses a wealth of fascinating advancements that they did.
      • AlotOfReading 6y ago
        Point of correction, it's the Hohokam and not the Mogollons that are known for their massive canal systems. The people inhabiting the broader Mogollon region had fairly small irrigation networks that don't really justify the term "canal". Most archaeologists would also have some quibbles with describing Hohokam irrigation as truly decentralized, particularly in e.g. the civano phase, but it's accurate enough I guess.
      • ardit33 6y ago
        Lets make it clear.... they build impressive things, and had a civilization, but they were way behind those both of europe and asia. the Aztecs were sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli (their war god), when europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford an Cambridge. Same with the mayans. We can discuss all day long, but their civilizations were not any more advanced than old egypt ones, and the ones in the Levantine era (Prior to the Roman period). Which were about 2080-3500 years prior.
  • socialdemocrat 6y ago
    When European history writes about discovery it naturally means discovery by a European. If somebody in China or India did it how would it matter to Europeans? History is always written from a perspective. If native Americans discovered Europe then whomever did so would have been recorded in their history. They would not go “ah but the Europeans where already there so let’s forget about this feat”
• pestatije 6y ago
  Oh, they are seriously important to me. Just so you cannot say Columbus was the first is very important. And to give you your dose of pride: yes, Columbus was very important in wiping out almost all indigenous people. Change of course of history my a__e.
• nudpiedo 6y ago
  I totally agree with you, "discovered" meanings are two: - as the first people to ever see it (their aboriginal folks) - Discover to the world by the Spaniard crew captained by Columbus/financed by the spanish monarchs. Everything else is just trying to mess with history, and if even any contact was there stablished they even didn't know for sure what american land was, even Spain wasn't totally sure if it was an extension of Asia or something of its own until one of its cartographers, the italian Américo Vespucio, determined it must be a continent of its own.