2020 Blog Week 49: Some Scant Evidence

The essential reason I chose not to take history at GCSE was that it seemed like an endless list of names and dates. All through my teens, I never really regretted it.

You begin to realise history is opinion masquerading as fact. Sure, the central facts are more or less indisputable, but beyond that it gets more and more disputable, and some people make a living out of those disputes. And naturally those disputes are informed by ideology.

America was discovered by Christopher Columbus. That’s ideology. Not only because there were natives already living there, but also because Christopher Columbus was Cristoforo Columbo, Genoan explorer, in an anglicized guise.

So yes, okay, but he was the first sailor from outside the Americas to discover the continent. Nope — that was the Vikings.

But yes, okay, but the Vikings didn’t integrate, they didn’t trade: they just killed a handful of locals, built a few huts, and eventually headed back to Asgard. An interesting historical fact, but not hugely consequential.

However, Viking colonization in America is a socially acceptable fact. We think of the Vikings in many ways as the epitome of white masculine society: strong, fearless warriors, pillaging and plundering huge portions of the globe. The notion that they might have made it to America centuries before Columbus is cool, easy assimilated into our preexistent conceptualization of history.

How about Black people discovering America?

You hear the phrase black people in America and your mind jumps to slavery. Thousands, millions, of tribal, uncivilized West Africans transported in horrific conditions to work in chattel slavery, followed by a harrowing fight for human rights which continues to this day. But from the moment those first slave boats docked in the Caribbean, black Africans had already been in America for hundreds of years.

Maybe I’m ignorant, but when I heard this (from Akala) it felt like this wasn’t common knowledge. When I heard it I wanted to find evidence. What I was expecting to find was some scant evidence: maybe a few scraps of circumstantial conjecture. What I found was, well, a little bit more.

Mesoamerican Stone Heads: There are numerous Olmec stone carvings which clearly have a traditionally African facial structure.

Proven Shipbuilding Capabilities: Civilizations such as the Malian and Benin Empires are proven to have built ships. In fact, one shipbuilding expert actually travelled to Mali, built a ship with local materials based on historical documents, and crossed the Atlantic. It could’ve been done. Why shouldn’t it have been done? If we’d found similar evidence of shipbuilding prowess in Ireland, wouldn’t we assume they had sailed in the opposite direction to their coastline?

Structural Similarities in Pyramids

In Egypt, they didn’t start with the Great Pyramids of Giza, they worked their way up. In fact, there still remains some earlier, simpler pyramids, as the culture gradually taught themselves to construct bigger and bigger.

Yet in Mexico, where the great stepped pyramids are eerily similar, there’s no such evidence of a learning process. Did the mesoamericans just get it right first time? Or were they taught?

(This applies to certain ancient civilizations of south-east asia, too)

And here’s where it gets ridiculous.

American Narcotics have been found in Egyptian Mummies. A biologist running tests on the stomach lining of cadavers found in North Africa found traces of cocaine. One issue — cocaine is native to the Americas. So the biologist ran the test again, assuming the traces of coke had been left on the equipment by dodgy Gareth from the lab. But she found the same thing again. Then a third time. Trade links must have existed between the two civilizations.

Not enough?

Christopher Columbus wrote in his diary that black people had been to America. In his own journal, Columbus writes of a discussion with native Caribbeans, in which they told him that black people came in boats from the south-east, and traded spears with them. According to Akala, some of these spears were returned to Europe afterwards and their African origin was verified.

Still not enough?

This is a mummified body found in America.

Apparently, none of this evidence is absolutely conclusive. Who knows — maybe it isn’t, I’m not an expert, and maybe I’ve been misled. But there’s very rarely fully conclusive evidence of anything in ancient history.

The real question to ask is: why not? What’s stopping this being accepted? If we’d found all of this evidence for white people having discovered America in ancient times, wouldn’t we have accepted it? So why not black people?

Why not?