The unknown remains open in the present: who discovered America before Christopher Columbus? This October 12 Columbus Day we offer possible answers.
Popular history places the navigator Christopher Columbus like the man who discovered America in 1492. However, before the arrival of this character, the indications about settlements or arrivals of characters show that Columbus, ultimately, was not the discoverer of the so-called The new World. So who discovered America before Christopher Columbus? Let’s dig into this question.
The first inhabitants of America
It is a proven truth that before Columbus arrived in America, men They already inhabited this part of the world for thousands of years before. Some specialists consider that humanity came to America from Asia before the Last Glacial Maximum (the coldest period on Earth in the last 30 thousand years).
They crossed through the call Bering strait (a natural bridge today submerged that crossed from Russia to Alaska). We are talking about 16,000 years ago in the past.
However, a recent find suggests that man’s arrival in America may have been long before. It is about the discovery of a group of footprints dating back 23,000 years, which were preserved for millennia in White Sands National Park.
Today, this area is a desert with white sand and sparse vegetation, but thousands of years ago it was a swamp located in New Mexico, United States. It is the oldest record of human presence on the continent.
Were the Vikings, led by Leif Erikson, the first to arrive in America?
There has also been talk about the vikings they could be the true discoverers of America. A group of Icelandic Norse explorers, led by Leif Erikson, it could have advanced to Columbus some 500 years, approximately.
Various data and historical documents suggest that this Nordic navigator sailed with 89 men and women in 1000 and settled in the New World. For a long time it was believed that this group of explorers had settled in what is now Rhode Island in the United States.
Everything changed when in 1960 a place called L’Anse Aux Meadows -A spot at the northern tip of the island of newfoundland, in the present province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada -, which was considered an indigenous camp.
Two Norwegian archaeologists (Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad), discovered that the design of some strange mounds of L’Anse Aux Meadows was very similar to the Viking settlements of Iceland and Greenland.
What was the purpose of Columbus’s voyage that brought him to America in 1492
When Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, he believed he was arriving in the East Indies, when in fact he was in the current Antilles. Together with his men, he landed on the Guanahaní island, which he baptized as San Salvador (later he arrived in the current territories of Santo Domingo and Cuba).
The purpose of his journey was not to discover new territory, but something much more mundane: to find new trade routes to India. In addition to this, there was a strong interest in achieving a territorial and religious expansion by Spain for commercial and economic purposes.
It is evident that the Genoese navigator cannot be considered the man who discovered America, but he can be considered the one who allowed the world to set its eyes on this part of the world. In this way, the colonial period also began, which ended with entire towns and civilizations by Spanish conquerors (in the case of Mexico and its most important pre-Hispanic civilization: the Aztec).
October 12, Columbus Day
The arrival of Columbus was institutionalized in schools in Mexico and other parts of America under different names: Columbus Day and Hispanic Heritage, Columbus Day or National Holiday. Seeing it from this perspective creates a historical problem that disdains the past and makes it impossible to study the facts in a rigorous way.
“The indigenous people of the continent who had remained unknown to Europeans only enter the scene when it happens that they ‘are discovered’, ‘they are conquered’, ‘they are Christianized’ and they are ‘colonized'”, says Miguel León-Portilla in his text Encuentro of two worlds.
For his part, the historian Federico Navarrete, points out:
“The ease with which the ‘discoverer’ began to dispose of the territory and the lives of the Americans is inseparable from the very idea of discovery. For the Europeans, the lands they found (…) and also its inhabitants were unknown and that meant that they were available to do their bidding with them, ”says Navarrete.
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