Australia Contact - earlier than thought

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Shannow

Shannow

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Wonder when the ACTUAL history of Australia will be taught (well the US as well).

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/o...nt-trade-routes

Quote:
Researchers have discovered the oldest images of the Australasian cockatoo in a 13th century manuscript written by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The drawings are 250 years older than the previously thought oldest depiction of the bird in an Italian painting, The Guardian reports. The birds depicted in the manuscript are thought to have been traded from Australia to Egypt and then brought to Europe. With this find, researchers speculate that trade routes during medieval times included Australia and the islands around it, suggesting that water trade routes near Australia were thriving in the 13th century.


We know that there are shipwrecks on Western Australia that are way older than Captain Cook's discovery, and that the prevalence of red hair in the natives of that area arose.

We know that ancient coins have been found around Gympie in Queensland, near what could be stone ruins (which were harvested by the early settlers either for benign means (construction), or to support the terra nullus (not owned) status of the Continent. Stone carvings near Newcastle are decidedly "foreign", but under lock and key.

In the US case, you had viking settlements predating discovery, and new world plants carved into the Rosslyn Chapel.
 
For an interesting read, try 1421 by Gavin Menzies - Royal Navy Submariner. It was recommended to me by a PhD and fellow Navy Officer (of the Royal Navy , a classmate from the Royal Navy War college).

Strong evidence to suggest that discovery didn’t happen as we once thought...
 
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Must look it up...looking at the precis, it sounds good.

Over Christmas, we were in a cruise, and had breakfast with a retired Oz Navy signalman, and started chatting...he was appalled that "charts" are dying and reliance is on GPS...and that if the "grid" goes down, then all these cruise liners are dead in the water.

We dicussed the Peri Reis map, at length...he's got a piece of Antarctic petrified wood on his mantle piece given to him by a scientist that they picked up of that "frozen wasteland"...
 
Ancient America, and a few other like magazines, document each month artifacts found in the America's that in antiquity came from places such as Greece, the Netherlands, and other countries.

It is apparent that significant trade and travelling by ship existed in ancient times, and that man was
"Born-to-Explore."
 
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People started barter a long while ago. To make bronze tin from Britan was mixed with copper inS yria. . I'm convinced that Portuguese were catching cod on the Grand Banks. before Columbus They kept it to themselves so as not to ruin their good fortune. 2000 yrs after people broke through the ice fields to escape Beringia, they hit Tierra del Fuego. Indians traded clam shells for obsidian .Clams from New England and obsidian from Yellowstone. The Papacy collected tithes from parishes that were on Greenland for sometime.
 
Just watched a BBC documentary series on DVD, on the Vikings.

With primitive navigation and a seagoing tradition (and I suspect the case would be similar for many early discovery worldwide) the Vikings used the sun to navigate the seas ... others may have used the stars, etc but no tools ... they even had a word for when the sun was not visible which translates basically to "no sun, we're screwed" ... and the prevalence of stormy weather on the high seas, it seems likely to me that many "discoveries" were simply being lost and carrying on, because they had to or starve.

In the case of the Vikings, the anthropologist record for Iceland shows clearly the date of their arrival. Sometime around 880 AD, there was a massive volcanic eruption on Iceland, which like Hawaii, is basically just one huge volcano. This left a clear layer of volcanic dust on the entire island. Below that layer, there is no trace of any human activity. But directly above it, there are Viking artifacts, placing the date of discovery right around 900 AD.

An eruption would clearly have obscured the sun necessary for navigation, so it's believed that the ships simply were blown off course in a storm and landed there more or less by accident. Further forays (Greenland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, plus evidence along the St. Lawrence seaway to possibly as far as the present day Montreal in Canada, and evidence all along the US eastern seaboard down to as far as the Carolinas) were made from there over the next 500 or so years.

It seems to me that ancient civilizations whom navigated by tools would tend to travel along known routes for trading and relocation. To discover an unknown land you pretty much had to have been travelling blind, without such tools, otherwise why would you? You would be courting sure death by starvation.

I surmise this partly from my experience learning large freshwater lakes before the age of GPS. Basically what you do is travel to where you were before, and then venture just a bit further, before doubling back so as not to get disoriented and so you can find home that evening. In that way you learn the lay of the land. (You can always tell whom has had experience learning a new waterbody, because they always look between the landmarks at the sea, basically viewing the open water as your highway. A novice will view the shoreline and islands, using them as landmarks instead, and they get disoriented when weather obscures the landmarks. That works fine with small lakes, but in my case I learned lakes that were 100 miles long and beyond horizon [more than 25 miles] wide).*

And sometimes you would be forced by weather to take a different route home (big waves mean you must travel into them, and then with them, both at a small angle towards home, and basically dog-leg it home). You will be forced to travel not in the line you would in good weather, but over water you are unfamiliar with, and possibly wary of (maybe there are known marine hazards (technical term for reefs and difficult to navigate shallows which can kill a prop and leave you stranded) or there was no good purpose to go there (in my case, the lay of the land perhaps would not be good for fishing for your target species, so it was ignored).

Super interesting stuff. I also know of some very old Polynesian evidence, another group of people who were seafaring and had primitive navigation, as the island chains they populated and explored were basically just examples of what I described ... hop to the next unexplored island, not far away, and carry on from there) at the South American pacific coast which means some "Native Americans" may have Polynesian ancestry.

* One lake I fished lake trout on (a deep water species) is 176 miles E-W and about 35 N-S. It has one island. You would set out on a compass heading when I learned it (AKA: Dead Reckoning).

I know about 40 lakes and rivers, most quite large by US standards, and only used my GPS mostly to mark fishing spots ... I quickly used up all 1000 waypoints on my first Garmin GPS. About two dozen were waypoints to navigate home in fog, there were maybe another 50 for dangerous reefs and sunken islands on open water to keep me safe, and the rest were sunken weedbeds, ridges and dropoffs, sand basins, and the like, useful to fish on.
 
The polynesians navigated by ocean currents, there are many, and they knew which ones by wave frequency - the navigator either lying in the bottom of the boat and going by how it was rocked...or by standing and feeling the sway of testicals. Read Lyall Watson, I think it was Heaven's Breath, about the winds of earth.
 
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