Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories

Yup'ik and Aleut peoples residing on both sides of the Bering Strait had frequent contact with each other, and European trade goods have been discovered in pre-Columbian archaeological sites in Alaska.

Recent genetic studies have also suggested that some eastern Polynesian populations have admixture from coastal western South American peoples, with an estimated date of contact around 1200 CE.

Many others are based only on circumstantial or ambiguous interpretations of archaeological evidence, the discovery of alleged out-of-place artifacts, superficial cultural comparisons, comments in historical documents, or narrative accounts.

[12] A later review paper of Polynesian history suggested that it was "more likely that these are the skulls of two people who died in Polynesia sometime early in the period of European voyaging, and whose graves were robbed by later visitors, and then mistakenly grouped in collections with the remains of Native Americans.

Proto-Polynesian *kumala[24] (compare Easter Island kumara, Hawaiian ʻuala, Māori kūmara; even though a proto-form is reconstructed above, apparent cognates outside Eastern Polynesian are either definitely borrowed from Eastern Polynesian languages or irregular, calling Proto-Polynesian status and age into question) may be connected with dialectal Quechua and Aymara k'umar ~ k'umara; most Quechua dialects actually use apichu instead, but comal was attested at extinct Cañari language on the coast of what is now Ecuador in 1582.

[26] Ageratum conyzoides, also known as billygoat-weed, chick weed, goatweed, or whiteweed, is native to the tropical Americas, and was found in Hawaii by William Hillebrand in 1888 who considered it to have grown there before Captain Cook's arrival in 1778.

This theory has attracted limited media attention within California, but most archaeologists of the Tongva and Chumash cultures reject it on the grounds that the independent development of the sewn-plank canoe over several centuries is well-represented in the material record.

He believed that claims that these were very old made them notorious and he wrote that "The temple coins were shown to many people and different versions of stories pertaining to their discovery and age spread around the province to be put into print and changed frequently by many authors in the last 100 years.

[68] In his debunked pseudohistorical book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, British author Gavin Menzies claimed that the treasure fleets of Ming admiral Zheng He arrived in America in 1421.

Japanese ships landed at places between the Aleutian Islands in the north and Mexico in the south, carrying a total of 293 people in the 23 cases where head-counts were given in historical records.

[83] Cunningham was not initially aware that this plant, indigenous to the New World tropics, was introduced to India after Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route in 1498, and the problem was pointed out to him.

[85] Some objects depicted in carvings from Karnataka, dating from the 12th century, that resemble ears of maize (Zea mays—a crop native to the New World), were interpreted by Carl Johannessen in 1989 as evidence of pre-Columbian contact.

His claims included the attribution of Mesoamerican pyramids, calendar technology, mummification, and mythology to the arrival of Africans by boat on currents running from Western Africa to the Americas.

[94] According to the only known primary-source-based copy of Christopher Columbus's journal (transcribed by Bartolomé de las Casas), the purpose of Columbus's third voyage was to test both (1) the claims of King John II of Portugal that "canoes had been found which set out from the coast of Guinea [West Africa] and sailed to the west with merchandise" and (2) the claims of the native inhabitants of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that "there had come to Española from the south and south-east, a black people who have the tops of their spears made of a metal which they call guanin, of which he had sent samples to the Sovereigns to have them assayed, when it was found that of 32 parts, 18 were of gold, 6 of silver and 8 of copper".

[105] The Phoenician state of Carthage minted gold staters in 350 BC bearing a pattern in the reverse exergue of the coins, which McMenamin initially interpreted as a map of the Mediterranean with the Americas shown to the west across the Atlantic.

[107] The Bat Creek inscription and Los Lunas Decalogue Stone have led some to suggest the possibility that Jewish seafarers may have traveled to America after they fled from the Roman Empire at the time of the Jewish–Roman Wars in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

[126] A small terracotta sculpture of a head, with a beard and European-like features, was found in 1933 in the Toluca Valley, 72 kilometres (45 mi) southwest of Mexico City, in a burial offering under three intact floors of a pre-colonial building dated to between 1476 and 1510.

[128] According to Arizona State University's Michael E. Smith, a leading Mesoamerican scholar named John Paddock used to tell his classes in the years before he died that the artifact was planted as a joke by Hugo Moedano, a student who originally worked on the site.

No conclusive archaeological proof of such a man or his voyages has been found in the New or Old World; however, speculation abounds connecting him with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone, located on the Ohio River at Fourteen Mile Creek near Louisville, Kentucky.

The plaque repeated a claim by Tennessee governor John Sevier that Cherokees believed "a people called Welsh" had built a fort on the mountain long ago to repel Indian attacks.

Sed praeter physicos Homerumque qui universum orbem mari circumfusum esse dixerunt, Cornelius Nepos ut recentior, auctoritate sic certior; testem autem rei Quintum Metellum Celerem adicit, eumque ita rettulisse commemorat: cum Galliae pro consule praeesset, Indos quosdam a rege Boiorum dono sibi datos; unde in eas terras devenissent requirendo cognosse, vi tempestatium ex Indicis aequoribus abreptos, emensosque quae intererant, tandem in Germaniae litora exisse.

[174] In 2010, Sigríður Sunna Ebenesersdóttir published a genetic study showing that over 350 living Icelanders carried mitochondrial DNA of a new type, C1e, belonging to the C1 clade which was until then known only from Native American and East Asian populations.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, for example, was intrigued by the presence of cross symbols in Maya hieroglyphs, which according to him suggested that other Christians may have arrived in ancient Mexico before the Spanish conquistadors.

Fray Diego Durán, for his part, linked the legend of the Pre-Columbian god Quetzalcoatl (whom he describes as being chaste, penitent, and a miracle-worker) to the Biblical accounts of Christian apostles.

[185] Fringe theories suggest that Quetzalcoatl may have been a Christian preacher from the Old World who lived among indigenous peoples of ancient Mexico, and eventually attempted to return home by sailing eastwards.

Later on, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier argued that the cloak with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which the Catholic Church claims was worn by Juan Diego, was instead brought to the Americas much earlier by Thomas, who used it as an instrument for evangelization.

[184] Mexican historian Manuel Orozco y Berra conjectured that both the cross hieroglyphs and the Quetzalcoatl myth might have originated on a visit to Mesoamerica by a Catholic Norse missionary in medieval times.

In response to L'Estrange, Thorowgood published a second edition of his book in 1660 with a revised title and included a foreword written by John Eliot, a Puritan missionary who had translated the Bible into an Indian language.

Declaration of Independence, made similar claims in his 1816 book titled A Star in the West: A Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel; Preparatory to Their Return to Their Beloved City, Jerusalem.

[198] In the 1950s, Professor M. Wells Jakeman popularized the belief that the Izapa Stela 5 represents the Book of Mormon prophets Lehi and Nephi's tree of life vision and was a validation of the historicity of the claims of pre-Columbian settlement in the Americas.