Muslims discovered America before Columbus, says Erdogan

[Herskerstad]

Let me guess, they flew to America on their "as seen on MythBusters" rocket, right?

Probably a magic carpet.

[Anollasia]

It's the villagers. Not to generalize anyone but, general consensus is people who were born in a village tend to not be as educated and so they get fooled.

I'd love to think that, but Erdogan won several of the major cities too, including Istanbul.

The opposition is split with the second closest having more than a 10 Percentage gap.

Lots of villagers migrate to cities, especially Istanbul.

[The Two Jerseys]

Let me guess, they flew to America on their "as seen on MythBusters" rocket, right?

Probably a magic carpet.

I don't think that's sufficiently Turkish enough for Erdogan's tastes.

[Meryuma]

It's a pretty sketchy claim The Native Americans were in America first anyways. IIRC there were some pretty solid theories about Polynesian/American contact though (Ancient Austronesians went damn near everywhere).

[Boomhaueristan]

Can we assassinate him, yet?

[Benuty]

Can we assassinate him, yet?

Why are you calling for death?

Besides the man has clinical psychosis brought on by religious fundamentalism they need treatment not death.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

Let me guess, they flew to America on their "as seen on MythBusters" rocket, right?

Probably a magic carpet.

So, where's Aladdin?

[Benuty]

Probably a magic carpet.

So, where's Aladdin?

Enslaved by Malians.

[Herskerstad]

Probably a magic carpet.

So, where's Aladdin?

Who needs Aladdin when you got Osman? Great founder, conqueror, and secret explorer of the Americas.

[Benuty]

So, where's Aladdin?

Who needs Aladdin when you got Osman? Great founder, conqueror, and secret explorer of the Americas.

Also a rumored pederest by his enemies.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

So, where's Aladdin?

Who needs Aladdin when you got Osman? Great founder, conqueror, and secret explorer of the Americas.

Emphasis on secret. Secretive secret.

[Benuty]

Who needs Aladdin when you got Osman? Great founder, conqueror, and secret explorer of the Americas.

Emphasis on secret. Secretive secret.

It is because he kept all his catamites their *nods*.

[Herskerstad]

Emphasis on secret. Secretive secret.

It is because he kept all his catamites their *nods*.

Secretly ALL of the Americas was his Harem.

Which is also, incidentally, a good enough reason to claim them I suspect.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

It is because he kept all his catamites their *nods*.

Secretly ALL of the Americas was his Harem.

Which is also, incidentally, a good enough reason to claim them I suspect.

Explains a lot. Or not.

Just fetch me some fallafel!

[Boomhaueristan]

Can we assassinate him, yet?

Why are you calling for death?

Besides the man has clinical psychosis brought on by religious fundamentalism they need treatment not death.

Police brutality
Corruption Scandals
Blocking of Internet sites that incriminate him
Electoral fraud
Giant mansion payed for by taxpayers

Obvious dictator. Dictators should be dealt with at every turn.

[Benuty]

Why are you calling for death?

Besides the man has clinical psychosis brought on by religious fundamentalism they need treatment not death.

Police brutality
Corruption Scandals
Blocking of Internet sites that incriminate him
Electoral fraud
Giant mansion payed for by taxpayers

Obvious dictator. Dictators should be dealt with at every turn.

By admittance to a mental health facility.

Then after recovery of sanity, a trial.

[The Kingdom of Wolfsea]

Meanwhile Scandinavia chuckles and shakes its head...

[Salus Maior]

Classy man, Erdogan.

Anyway, Scandinavians were the first Old-Worlders to not only discover, but establish a colony in the Americas. Leif Eriksson, yo.

(Although I've heard theories that ancient Celts somehow found their way there as well.)

And also, Columbus's notation of a "mosque" in Cuba was a reference to the shape of the landscape, not an actual mosque.

[Salus Maior]

According to the wiki article, that did not mentioned my idea, the tobacco was legit

And back then, the only place where you could find tobacco was South America.

And there is also reason to believe that ancient Egypt traded with South American civilizations, since they found traces of tobacco in Egyptian mummies.

That tobacco was a contaminant, not a substance present in the mummy prior to excavation.

[Cetatsenia]

It's a pretty sketchy claim The Native Americans were in America first anyways. IIRC there were some pretty solid theories about Polynesian/American contact though (Ancient Austronesians went damn near everywhere).

Er, the Native Americans ancestors probably migrated into the Americas sometime before 12,000 years ago. I don't think anyone else had gotten there before that.

[The Archregimancy]

They also left some chickens and took some women/men back to Easter Island - see the more detailed post on the previous page.

And, technically, sweet potatoes, not potatoes proper.

Although I've heard the DNA evidence with the chickens has recently been challenged. Not that I'm an expert in genetics, so I couldn't tell you if there is any merit to it.

You're correct about the chickens; that was challenged back in the first half of this year. See here; it's a good article that outlines both sides of the debate, both the specific debate and the broader debate. It also mentions the one major piece of negative evidence - where are the Pacific rats? However, the article pre-dates the recent publication of the human DNA study from Easter Island.

In isolation, any of the three primary pieces of evidence - the chickens, the sweet potatoes, the recently published human DNA study on Easter Island from the second half of this year - can be challenged to some degree and would be problematic by themselves.

When combined, they're beginning to offer a fairly compelling case that there was most likely some form of intermittent, occasional contact between Easter Island and South America. Clearly Polynesians didn't stop sailing east when they reached French Polynesia; Easter Island is solid proof of that. So there's no reason to think that some of the most accomplished sailors in history stopped at Easter Island, either; the evidence increasingly suggests that they didn't.

[The Archregimancy]

It's a pretty sketchy claim The Native Americans were in America first anyways. IIRC there were some pretty solid theories about Polynesian/American contact though (Ancient Austronesians went damn near everywhere).

You're perhaps confused over dates.

Native Americans reached South America several thousand years ago; there's an awful lot of disagreement over dates, but the extremes of the estimates are roughly 40,000 to 16,000 years ago.

Assuming Polynesian contact occurred with South America, it can't have occurred on anything resembling the same timescale because Austronesian language speakers didn't reach Western Polynesia until c.900 BC, didn't reach Tahiti until c.300 AD, and didn't reach Easter Island until c.700 AD.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

It's a pretty sketchy claim The Native Americans were in America first anyways. IIRC there were some pretty solid theories about Polynesian/American contact though (Ancient Austronesians went damn near everywhere).

Er, the Native Americans ancestors probably migrated into the Americas sometime before 12,000 years ago. I don't think anyone else had gotten there before that.

If Muslim sailors reached America, at any point, it would probably have been in the early Middle Ages. But that's, again, an if.

They may have, but as of now, there's no evidence to suggest they did. No archaeological findings, for example.

Before the Vikings, sure, the new world came to be populated by migrations from Siberia through the Bering Straight (?), 14,000 to 40,000 years ago. As far as I'm aware. Other groups may have also come from other places in Asia.

[The Archregimancy]

And there is also reason to believe that ancient Egypt traded with South American civilizations, since they found traces of tobacco in Egyptian mummies.

That tobacco was a contaminant, not a substance present in the mummy prior to excavation.

I missed this the first time around.

The evidence for nicotine (and, for that matter, cocaine and hashish) rests on a study undertaken by the German toxicologist Svetla Balabanova in the early 1990s. For reference, the citation is:

Balababova, S., F. Parsche, and W. Pirsig.
1992. First identification of drugs in Egyptian mummies. Naturwissenschaften 79:358.

Balababova professed to have been surprised by the results, and this was certainly not fringe analysis by kooks - which is why it caused a minor storm at the time.

The problem is that the results of the German team (subsequent publications in the immediate aftermath are all from the same team) have never been corroborated. In the 20 years since, no one else has been able to reproduce those results, and a substantial number of people have offered detailed criticisms of the findings.

For example, a far less well-known study published in 2009 directly contradicts some of Balababova's findings in that it found no cocaine, and only found trace elements of nicotine in the hair of three mummies in a sample of eight: http://www.fsijournal.org/article/S0379-0738(08)00506-9/abstract?cc=y

As the study notes:

In our opinion, even with respect to negative results in the washing solutions, the present results cannot definitely confirm an active consumption with body passage in the life time of the analyzed mummies: An external contamination cannot be excluded, e.g. by transfer from smoking visitors or employees during the early collection history of the objects in the 19th century, as well as in their respective lifetime.

This is not definitive proof either way, but it's typical of subsequent attempts to reproduce Balababova's results.

So we're left with three broad options:

1) Balababova's mummies were unique; they are the only mummies ever tested to display those characteristics.

2) Balababova was wrong, and the mummies tested by the team were contaminated.

3) Balababova was right, and the subsequent failure to reproduce those results forms part of a vast conspiracy of silence by Egyptologists.

For what it's worth, I tend to option 2 for what are likely obvious reasons.

The smoking habits of archaeologists in Egypt are, it has to be said, an ongoing problem for analysis. A friend of mine who used to work in the Valley of the Kings has told me any number of simultaneously amusing and appalling stories about the propensity of site staff to smoke near the C14 samples....

[Meryuma]

Can we assassinate him, yet?

Why are you calling for death?

Besides the man has clinical psychosis brought on by religious fundamentalism they need treatment not death.

Pathologizing bad ideas is wack.

Who needs Aladdin when you got Osman? Great founder, conqueror, and secret explorer of the Americas.

Also a rumored pederest by his enemies.

It was the Ottoman Empire, there wee pederasts all over the place.