Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories

Scientific and scholarly responses to other claims of post-prehistory, pre-Columbian transoceanic contact have varied. Some of these claims are examined in reputable peer-reviewed sources. 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archaeological evidence, the discovery of alleged out-of-place artifacts, superficial cultural comparisons, comments in historical documents, or narrative accounts. These have been dismissed as fringe science, pseudoarchaeology, or pseudohistory.^[7]

Claims of Austronesian contact

Human genetics

Between 2007 and 2009, geneticist

In 2020, a study in Nature found that populations in the Mangareva, Marquesas, and Palliser islands and Easter Island had genetic admixture from indigenous populations of South America, with the DNA of contemporary populations of Zenú people from the Pacific coast of Colombia being the closest match. The authors suggest that the genetic signatures were probably the result of a single ancient contact. They proposed that an initial admixture event between indigenous South Americans and Polynesians occurred in eastern Polynesia between 1150 and 1230 CE, with later admixture in Easter Island around 1380 CE,^[6] but suggested other possible contact scenarios—for example, Polynesian voyages to South America followed by Polynesian people's returning to Polynesia with South American people, or carrying South American genetic heritage.^[14] Several scholars uninvolved in the study suggested that a contact event in South America was more likely.^[15][16][17]

Plant genetics

The genetics of several plant species has also been used to support pre-Columbian contact via the Pacific. For example, there is a genetically distinct sub-population of coconuts on the western coast of South America. This has been suggested to be evidence of introduction by Austronesian seafarers.^[18]

Sweet potato

The

Dutch linguists and specialists in

Adelaar and Muysken assert that the similarity in the word for sweet potato "constitutes near proof of incidental contact between inhabitants of the Andean region and the South Pacific." The authors argue that the presence of the word for sweet potato suggests sporadic contact between Polynesia and South America, but not necessarily migrations.[26]

Ageratum conyzoides

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. A legitimate native name (meie parari or mei rore) and established native medicinal usage and use as a scent and in leis have been offered as support for the pre-Cookian age.^[27][28]

Turmeric

In December 2007, several human skulls were found in a museum in

Rocker jaws have also been found at an excavation led José Miguel Ramírez in the coastal locality of Tunquén, Central Chile.^[33] The site of excavation corresponds to an area with pre-Hispanic tombs and shell middens (Spanish: conchal).^[33] A global review of rocker jaws among different populations show that while rocker jaws are not unique to Polynesians "[t]he rarity of rocker jaw in South American natives supports" the view of "Polynesian voyagers who ventured to the west coast of South America".^[34]

Disputed evidence

Araucanian chickens

In 2007, evidence emerged which suggested the possibility of pre-Columbian contact between the Mapuche people (Araucanians) of south-central Chile and Polynesians. Bones of Araucana chickens found at El Arenal site in the Arauco Peninsula, an area inhabited by Mapuche, support a pre-Columbian introduction of landraces from the South Pacific islands to South America.^[35] The bones found in Chile were radiocarbon-dated to between 1304 and 1424, before the arrival of the Spanish. Chicken DNA sequences were matched to those of chickens in American Samoa and Tonga, and found to be dissimilar to those of European chickens.^[36][37]

However, this finding was challenged by a 2008 study which questioned its methodology and concluded that its conclusion is flawed, although the theory it posits may still be possible.^[38] Another study in 2014 reinforced that dismissal, and posited the crucial flaw in the initial research: "The analysis of ancient and modern specimens reveals a unique Polynesian genetic signature" and that "a previously reported connection between pre-European South America and Polynesian chickens most likely resulted from contamination with modern DNA, and that this issue is likely to confound ancient DNA studies involving haplogroup E chicken sequences."^[39]

However, in a 2013 study, the original authors extended and elaborated their findings, concluding:^[40]

This comprehensive approach demonstrates that the examination of modern chicken DNA sequences does not contribute to our understanding of the origins of Chile's earliest chickens. Interpretations based on poorly sourced and documented modern chicken populations, divorced from the archeological and historical evidence, do not withstand scrutiny. Instead, this expanded account will confirm the pre-Columbian age of the El Arenal remains and lend support to our original hypothesis that their appearance in South America is most likely due to Polynesian contact with the Americas in prehistory.

A 2019 study of South American chickens "revealed an unknown genetic component that is mostly present in the Easter Island population that is also present in local chicken populations from the South American Pacific fringe".^[41] The Easter Island chicken's "genetic proximity with the SA continental gamefowl can be explained by the fact that both populations were not crossed with cosmopolitan breeds and therefore remain closer to the ancestral population that originated them. "^[41] The genetic proximity might also "be indicative of a common origin of these two populations".^[41]

California canoes

Researchers including Kathryn Klar and Terry Jones have proposed a theory of contact between

Archaeological artefacts known as clava hand-clubs found in Araucanía and nearby areas of Argentina have a strong resemblance to the mere okewa found in New Zealand.^[49] The clava hand-clubs are also mentioned in the Spanish chronicles dating to the Conquest of Chile.^[49] According to Grete Mostny, clava hand-clubs "appear to have arrived to the west coast of South America from the Pacific".^[49] Polynesian clubs from Chatham Islands are reportedly the most similar to those of Chile.^[50] The clava hand-club is one of various Polynesian-like Mapuche artifacts known.^[50]

Possible linguistic evidence for Austronesian-American contact is found in words for axes.^[51][52][53] On Easter Island, the word for a stone axe is toki; among the New Zealand Maori, the word toki denotes an adze. Similar words are found in the Americas: In the Mapuche language of Chile and Argentina, the word for a stone axe is toki; and further afield in Colombia, the Yurumanguí word for an axe is totoki.^[26]

Stone adzes often had ceremonial value and were worn by Maori chiefs.^[54] The Mapuche word toki may also mean "chief" and thus may be related to the Quechua word toqe ("militia chief") and the Aymara word toqueni ("person of great judgement").^[55] In the view of Moulian et al. (2015) the possible South American links complicate matters regarding the meaning of the word toki because they are suggestive of Polynesian contact.^[55]

Claims of East Asian contact

Claims of contact with Ecuador

A 2013 genetic study suggested the possibility of contact between Ecuador and East Asia, that would have happened no earlier than 6,000 years ago (4000 BC) via either a trans-oceanic or a late-stage coastal migration that did not leave genetic imprints in North America.^[56] Further research did not support this but was rather "a case of a rare founding lineage that has been lost elsewhere by drift."^[57]

Claims of Chinese contact

Some researchers have argued that the

In his 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.^[68] Professional historians contend that Zheng He reached the eastern coast of Africa, and dismiss Menzies's hypothesis as entirely without proof.^{[69][70][71][72]}

In 1973 and 1975, doughnut-shaped stones that resembled stone anchors which were used by Chinese fishermen were discovered off the coast of California. These stones (sometimes called the Palos Verdes stones) were initially thought to be up to 1,500 years old and therefore, they were thought to be proof of pre-Columbian contact by Chinese sailors. Later geological investigations showed that they were made of a local rock which is known as Monterey shale, and it is currently believed that they were used by Chinese settlers who fished off the coast during the 19th century.^[73]

Claims of Japanese contact

Archaeologist

In 1879, Alexander Cunningham wrote a description of the carvings on the Stupa of Bharhut in central India, dating from c. 200 BCE, among which he noted what appeared to be a depiction of a custard-apple (Annona squamosa).^[82] 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. A 2009 study claimed to have found carbonized remains that date to 2000 BCE and appear to be those of custard-apple seeds.^[83]

Grafton Elliot Smith claimed that certain motifs present in the carvings on the Mayan stelae at Copán represented the Asian elephant, and wrote a book on the topic entitled Elephants and Ethnologists in 1924. Contemporary archaeologists suggested that the depictions were almost certainly based on the (indigenous) tapir, with the result that Smith's suggestions have generally been dismissed by subsequent research.^[84]

Some objects depicted in carvings from

Proposed claims for an African presence in

One supporter of the interpretation of Mulan Pi as part of the Americas was historian Hui-lin Li in 1961,^[99][100] and while Joseph Needham was also open to the possibility, he doubted that Arab ships at the time would have been able to withstand a return journey over such a long distance across the Atlantic Ocean, pointing out that a return journey would have been impossible without knowledge of prevailing winds and currents.^[101]

According to

In 1996, Mark McMenamin proposed that Phoenician sailors discovered the New World c. 350 BC.^[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.^[105][106] McMenamin later demonstrated that these coins found in America were modern forgeries.^[107]

Claims of ancient Judaic contact

The

However, American archaeologists Robert C. Mainfort Jr. and Mary L. Kwas argued in American Antiquity (2004) that the Bat Creek inscription was copied from an illustration in an 1870 Masonic reference book and introduced by the Smithsonian field assistant who found it during excavation activities.^[109][110]

As for the Decalogue Stone, there are mistakes which suggest that it was carved by one or more novices who either overlooked or misunderstood some details on a source Decalogue from which they copied it. Since there is no other evidence or archaeological context in the vicinity, it is most likely that the legend at the nearby university is true—that the stone was carved by two anthropology students whose signatures can be seen inscribed in the rock below the Decalogue, "Eva and Hobe 3-13-30."^[111]

Scholar Cyrus H. Gordon believed that Phoenicians and other Semitic-speaking groups had crossed the Atlantic in antiquity, ultimately arriving in both North and South America.^[112] This opinion was based on his own work on the Bat Creek inscription.^[113] Similar ideas were also held by John Philip Cohane; Cohane even claimed that many geographical placenames in the United States have a Semitic origin.^[114][115]

Claims of European contact

Solutrean hypothesis

The

Claims of ancient Roman contact

Evidence of contacts with the civilizations of

Archaeologist Romeo Hristov argues that a Roman ship, or the drifting of such a shipwreck to American shores, is a possible explanation for the alleged discovery of artifacts that are apparently ancient Roman in origin (such as the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca bearded head) in America. Hristov claims that the possibility of such an event has been made more likely by the discovery of evidence of travels by Romans to Tenerife and Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, and of a Roman settlement (from the 1st century BCE to the 4th century CE) on Lanzarote.^[122]

In 1950, an Italian botanist, Domenico Casella, suggested that a depiction of a pineapple (a fruit native to the New World tropics) was represented among wall paintings of Mediterranean fruits at Pompeii. According to Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski, this interpretation has been challenged by other botanists, who identify it as a pine cone from the umbrella pine tree, which is native to the Mediterranean area.^[123] The leaves shown in the depiction (as with stone carvings from Nineveh)^[124] make the pine cone identification problematic.

Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head

A small

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. Despite speaking with individuals who knew the original discoverer (García Payón), and Moedano, Smith says he has been unable to confirm or reject this claim. Though he remains skeptical, Smith concedes he cannot rule out the possibility that the head was a genuinely buried post-Classic offering at Calixtlahuaca.^[127]

14th- and 15th-century European contact

Henry was the grandfather of William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, the builder of Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, Scotland. The authors Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight believe some carvings in the chapel were intended to represent ears of New World corn or maize,^[132] a crop unknown in Europe at the time of the chapel's construction. Knight and Lomas view these carvings as evidence supporting the idea that Henry Sinclair traveled to the Americas well before Columbus. In their book they discuss meeting with the wife of the botanist Adrian Dyer and explain that Dyer's wife told them that Dyer agreed that the image thought to be maize was accurate.^[132] In fact Dyer found only one identifiable plant among the botanical carvings and instead suggested that the "maize" and "aloe" were stylized wooden patterns, only coincidentally looking like real plants.^[133] Specialists in medieval architecture have variously interpreted the carvings as stylised depictions of wheat, strawberries, or lilies.^[134][135]

Henry Yule Oldham suggested that the Bianco world map depicted part of the coast of Brazil before 1448. This was immediately opposed by members of the Royal Geographical Society but later repeated by American and European historians. This was later refuted by Abel Fontoura da Costa, who proved that it actually depicted Santiago, the largest island of the Cape Verde archipelago.^[136]

Some have conjectured that Columbus was able to persuade the

In 1925, Soren Larsen wrote a book claiming that a joint Danish-Portuguese expedition landed in Newfoundland or Labrador in 1473 and again in 1476. Larsen claimed that Didrik Pining and Hans Pothorst served as captains, while João Vaz Corte-Real and the possibly mythical John Scolvus served as navigators, accompanied by Álvaro Martins.^[141] Nothing beyond circumstantial evidence has been found to support Larsen's claims.^[142]

The historical record shows that

The legend of Saint Brendan, an Irish monk from what is now County Kerry, involves a fantastical journey into the Atlantic Ocean in search of Paradise in the 6th century. Since the discovery of the New World, various authors have tried to link the Brendan legend with an early discovery of America. In 1977, the voyage was successfully recreated by Tim Severin using a replica of an ancient Irish currach.^[144]

According to a British myth, Madoc was a prince from Wales who explored the Americas as early as 1170. While most scholars consider this legend to be untrue, it was used to bolster British claims in the Americas vis-à-vis those of Spain.^[145][146] The "Madoc story" remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Madoc's voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendants still live somewhere in the United States. These "Welsh Indians" were credited with the construction of a number of landmarks throughout the Midwestern United States, and a number of white travelers were inspired to go look for them. The "Madoc story" has been the subject of much speculation in the context of possible pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. 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.^[147]

At

Biologist and controversial amateur epigrapher Barry Fell claims that Irish Ogham writing has been found carved into stones in the Virginias.^[150] Linguist David H. Kelley has criticized some of Fell's work but nonetheless argued that genuine Celtic Ogham inscriptions have in fact been discovered in America.^[151] However, others have raised serious doubts about these claims.^[152]

Claims of transoceanic travel originating in the New World

Claims of Egyptian coca and tobacco

Traces of

A television show reported that examinations of numerous Sudanese mummies which were also undertaken by Balabanova mirrored what was found in the mummy of Henut Taui.^[154] Balabanova suggested that the tobacco may be accounted for since it may have also been known in China and Europe, as indicated by analyses run on human remains from those respective regions. Balabanova proposed that such plants native to the general area may have developed independently, but have since gone extinct.^[154] Other explanations include fraud, though curator Alfred Grimm of the Egyptian Museum in Munich disputes this.^[154] Skeptical of Balabanova's findings, Rosalie David, Keeper of Egyptology at the Manchester Museum, had similar tests performed on samples which were taken from the Manchester mummy collection and she reported that two of the tissue samples and one hair sample tested positive for the presence of nicotine.^[154]

However, mainstream scholars remain skeptical, and they do not see the results of these tests as proof of ancient contact between Africa and the Americas, especially because there may be possible Old World sources of cocaine and nicotine.^[155][156] Two attempts to replicate Balabanova's findings of cocaine failed, suggesting "that either Balabanova and her associates are misinterpreting their results or that the samples of mummies tested by them have been mysteriously exposed to cocaine".^[157]

A re-examination of the mummy of Ramesses II in the 1970s revealed the presence of fragments of tobacco leaves in its abdomen. This finding became a popular topic in fringe literature and the media and it was seen as proof of contact between Ancient Egypt and the New World. The investigator Maurice Bucaille noted that when the mummy was unwrapped in 1886 the abdomen was left open and "it was no longer possible to attach any importance to the presence inside the abdominal cavity of whatever material was found there, since the material could have come from the surrounding environment."^[158] Following the renewed discussion of tobacco sparked by Balabanova's research and its mention in a 2000 publication by Rosalie David, a study in the journal Antiquity suggested that reports of both tobacco and cocaine in mummies "ignored their post-excavation histories" and pointed out that the mummy of Ramesses II had been moved five times between 1883 and 1975.^[156]

Claims of travel in Roman times

Metellum Celerem adjicit, eumque ita retulisse commemorat: Cum Galliae proconsule praeesset, Indos quosdam a rege [Suevorum] dono sibi datos; unde in eas terras devenissent requirendo, cognôsse, vi tempestatum ex Indicis aequoribus abreptos, emensosque quae intererant, tandem in Germaniae litora exiise. Restat ergo pelagus; sed reliqua lateris ejusdem assiduo gelu durantur, et ideo deserta sunt.

Metellus Celer recalls the following: when he was proconsul in

Sueves; upon requesting why they were in this land, he learnt that they were caught in a storm away from India, that they became castaways, and finally landed on the coast of Germania. They thus resisted the sea, but suffered from the cold for the rest of their travel, and that is the reason why they left.^[159]

Frederick J. Pohl suggested that these castaways were possibly American Indians.^[161] This account is open to question, since Metellus Celer died just after his consulship, before he ever got to Gaul.^{[citation needed]}

Icelander DNA finding

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. Using the deCODE genetics database, Sigríður Sunna determined that the DNA entered the Icelandic population not later than 1700, and likely several centuries earlier. However Sigríður Sunna also states that "while a Native American origin seems most likely for [this new haplogroup], an Asian or European origin cannot be ruled out".^[162]

In 2014, a study discovered a new mtDNA subclade C1f from the remains of three people found in north-western Russia and dated to 7,500 years ago. It has not been detected in modern populations. The study proposed the hypothesis that the sister C1e and C1f subclades had split early from the most recent common ancestor of the C1 clade and had evolved independently, and that subclade C1e had a northern European origin. Iceland was settled by the Vikings in the 9th century and they had raided heavily into western Russia, where the sister subclade C1f is now known to have resided. They proposed that both subclades were brought to Iceland through the Vikings, and that C1e went extinct on mainland northern Europe due to population turnover and its small representation, and subclade C1f went extinct completely.^[163]

Norse legends and sagas

In 1009, legends report that Norse explorer Thorfinn Karlsefni abducted two children from Markland, an area on the North American mainland where Norse explorers visited but did not settle. The two children were then taken to Greenland, where they were baptized and taught to speak Norse.^[164]

In 1420, Danish geographer

In Ferdinand Columbus's biography of his father Christopher, he says that in 1477 his father saw in Galway, Ireland, two dead bodies which had washed ashore in their boat. The bodies and boat were of exotic appearance, and have been suggested to have been Inuit who had drifted off course.^[167]

Claims of Inuit travel to the Old World

It has been suggested that the Norse took other indigenous peoples to Europe as slaves over the following centuries, because they are known to have taken Scottish and Irish slaves.^[165][166]

There is also evidence of Inuit coming to Europe under their own power or as captives after 1492. In Scotland, they were known as the Finn-men. A substantial body of Greenland Inuit folklore first collected in the 19th century told of journeys by boat to Akilineq, depicted as a rich country across the ocean.^[168]

Claims of Inca travel to Oceania

Peruvian historian

A popular thread of conspiracy theory originating with Holy Blood, Holy Grail has it that the Templars used a fleet of 18 ships at La Rochelle to escape arrest in France. The fleet allegedly left laden with knights and treasures just before the issue of the warrant for the arrest of the Order in October 1307.^[174][175] This, in turn, was based on a single item of testimony from serving brother Jean de Châlon, who says he had "heard people talking that [Gerard de Villiers had] put to sea with 18 galleys, and the brother Hugues de Chalon fled with the whole treasury of the brother Hugues de Pairaud."^[176] However, aside from being the sole source for this statement, the transcript indicates that it is hearsay, and this serving brother seems to be prone to making some of the wildest and most damning of claims about the Order, which have led some to doubt his credibility.^[177] What destination, if any, was reached by this fleet is uncertain. A fringe theory suggests the fleet may have made its way to the Americas, where the Knights Templar interacted with the aboriginal population. Helen Nicholson of Cardiff University has cast doubt on the existence of this voyage, arguing that the Knights Templar did not have ships capable of navigating the Atlantic Ocean.^[178]

Claims of ancient Jewish migration to the Americas

Since the first centuries of European colonization of the Americas and up until the 19th century, several European intellectuals and theologians tried to account for the presence of the Amerindian aboriginal peoples by connecting them to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who according to Biblical tradition, were deported following the conquest of the Israelite kingdom by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In the past as well as in the present, these efforts were and still are being used to further the interests of religious groups, both Jewish and Christian, and they have also been used to justify European settlement of the Americas.^[179]

One of the first people to claim that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were descendants of the Lost Tribes was the Portuguese rabbi and writer Menasseh Ben Israel, who in his book The Hope of Israel argued that the discovery of the alleged long-lost Jews heralded the imminent coming of the Biblical Messiah.^[179] In 1650, a Norfolk preacher, Thomas Thorowgood, published Jewes in America or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race,^[180] for the New England missionary society. Tudor Parfitt writes:

The society was active in trying to convert the Indians but suspected that they might be Jews and realized they better be prepared for an arduous task. Thorowgood's tract argued that the native population of North America were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes.^[181]

In 1652

The

In a 1998 letter to the Institute for Religious Research, the National Geographic Society stated that "Archaeologists and other scholars have long probed the hemisphere's past and the society does not know of anything found so far that has substantiated the Book of Mormon."^[183]

Some LDS scholars hold the view that archaeological studies of the Book of Mormon's claims are not meant to vindicate the literary narrative. For example, Terryl Givens, professor of English at the University of Richmond, points out that there is a lack of historical accuracy in the Book of Mormon in relation to modern archaeological knowledge.^[184]

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.^[185] His interpretations of the carving and its connection to pre-Columbian contact have been disputed.^[186] Since that time, scholarship on the Book of Mormon has concentrated on cultural parallels rather than "smoking gun" sources.^{[187][188][189]}

See also

References

Further reading

• Ashe, Geoffrey, The Quest for America (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971);
• Blench, Roger (2010). "Remapping the Austronesian expansion". In Evans, Bethwyn (ed.). Festschrift for Malcolm Ross (PDF). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 1–25. Retrieved August 5, 2013.
• Fagan, Brian M. The Great Journey. Thames and Hudson. (1987)
• Feder, Kenneth L. (2017). Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries : Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (Ninth ed.). New York.
  ISBN 978-0-19-062965-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
  )
• Fell, Barry (1984) America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984)
• William J. Hamblim Archaeology and the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: Maxwell Institute, 1993), Volume 5, Issue 1, pp. 250–272, Text ;
• Gerol, E. Harry Dioses, Templos y Ruinas.
• Guernsey, Julia (2006) Ritual and Power in Stone: The Performance of Rulership in Mesoamerican Izapan Style Art, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas,
  ISBN 978-0-292-71323-9
  .
• Hey, J. (2005). "On the number of New World founders: A population genetic portrait of the peopling of the Americas". PLOS Biology. 3 (6): e193.
  PMID 15898833
  .
• Howgaard, William (1971) The Voyages of the Norsemen to America (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1914, Kraus Reprint Co., 1971);
• Hristov, Romeo H. and Santiago Genovés T. (2001) "The Roman Head from Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca, Mexico: A Review of the evidence", Paper prepared for the 66th—Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans (2001).
• Huyghe, Patrick (1992) Columbus was Last: A Heretical History of who was First (New York: Hyperion, 1992; Anomalist Books, 2005)
• Ingstad, Helge Westward to Vinland (New York: St. Martins, 1969);
• Johnson, Adrian America Explored (New York: The Viking Press, 1974);
• Jones, Gwyn A History of the Vikings (Oxford University Press, 1984);
• Jones, Peter N. American Indian mtDNA, Y Chromosome Genetic Data, and the Peopling of North America. Boulder: Bauu Press. 2004;* Kowtko, Stacy (2006). Nature and the Environment in Pre-Columbian American Life. Bloomsbury Academic.
  ISBN 978-0-313-33472-6
  .
• Lawrence, Harold G. (1962). African Explorers of the New World. John Henry and Mary Louisa Dunn Bryant Foundation.
  ASIN B0007HV7US
  .
• Arlington Mallery and Mary Roberts Harrison, The Rediscovery of Lost America (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979);
• Marcus, G. J., "The Conquest of the North Atlantic" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980);
• Mowat, Farley (1998) The Farfarers (Toronto, Key Porter Books, 1998)
  ISBN 1-55013-989-4
  ;
• Frederick J. Pohl, The Lost Discovery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1952);
• Frederick J. Pohl, The Viking Explorers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966);
• Gary A. Rendsburg, "'Someone Will Succeed in Deciphering Minoan': Minoan Linear A as a West Semitic Dialect," Biblical Archaeologist, 59:1 (1996), pp. 36–43, esp. p. 40.
• Seaver, K.A. (1995) The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca A.D. 1000–1500 Stanford University Press
  ISBN 0-8047-3161-6
• Smith, Michael E. "The 'Roman Figurine' Supposedly Excavated at Calixtlahuaca", accessed December 2007.
• ISBN 0-8248-2884-4
• ISBN 0-934893-21-7
  .
• Sorenson, John L. and Johannessen, Carl L. (2009) World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492, Bloomington, IN: iUniverse,
  ISBN 978-0-595-52441-9
  ;
• Stirling, Matthew (1967) "Early History of the Olmec Problem", in Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec, E. Benson, ed., Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
• Von Wuthenau, Alexander (1975). Unexpected Faces in Ancient America: The Historical Testimony of Pre-Columbian Artists. Crown Publishers.
  ISBN 978-0-517-51657-7
  .
• Wahlgren, Erik (2000) [1986]. The Vikings and America. Thames & Hudson.
  ISBN 978-0-500-28199-4
  .
• Wauchope, Robert (1962). Lost Tribes & Sunken Continents : Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  ISBN 0-226-87635-7
  .
• Williams, Stephen (1991). Fantastic Archaeology : the wild side of North American prehistory. Philadelphia.
  ISBN 0-8122-8238-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
  )
• Man across the sea : problems of pre-Columbian contacts. Carroll L. Riley (ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. 1971.
  ISBN 0-292-70117-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
  )
• Report of Severin's trip in the National Geographic Magazine, Volume 152, Number 6 (December 1977).

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