Sadly, pre-Columbian South America had JUST entered the bronze/copper age before European contact and they had been working gold for a very long time. No iron working though.
Likij: I’ve never heard of bronze technology in the pre-Columbian New World. Got a cite I can read up on that?
John:
World metallurgy emerged in the Andean region of South America between the Initial Period (1800 to 900 B.C.) and the Early Horizon (900 to 200 B.C.) (1). The oldest well-dated archaeological site containing metal artifacts is Mina Perdida (Lurý´n Valley) in coastal Peru, where hammered foils and gilded copper are preserved in contexts dating to 1400 to 1100 B.C. (2). The tradition of sheet-metal working (hammering, gilding, annealing, and repousse´) remained pervasive in the Andes throughout the Early Intermediate Period ( 200 B.C. to 600 A.D. ) and the Middle Horizon ( 600 to 1100 A.D. ) (3).* By 1000 A.D., large-scale copper smelting and bronze production is evident at sites such as Bata´n Grande on the northern Peruvian coast on the northern Peruvian coast (4 ). Beginning in the Late Intermediate Period (1100 to 1450 A.D.), intensive copper working became widespread on the Bolivian altiplano, with the production of materials of copper-tin alloy (i.e., bronze), in contrast to the copper-arsenic artifacts found in Peru** (5). By this time, silver and gold were well-established as precious metals among Andean cultures. Although silver was highly sought by royalty for symbolic and ritual purposes (6 ), the geographic distribution, intensity, and timing of Late Intermediate Period silver mining in the Andes remains unclear. Here, we infer a regional history of metallurgy from lake sediments retrieved adjacent to the largest silver deposit of the Bolivian tin belt. *
Emphasis added.
From the introductory paragraph of this paper:
http://faculty.eas.ualberta.ca/wolfe/UofA%20web%20page/Andes_paper.pdf
- Tamerlane
Oh and nicotine did exist naturally in the Old World. Belladonna ( Atropa belladonna ), widely used for the effects it produced ( the result of atropine and scopalamine, mostly ), contains trace amounts of nicotine.
- Tamerlane
Thanks, Tam!
Note also that Egyptians smoke like chimmneys, and so did all the early Egytologists- thus it is not surprising that everything was contaminated with smoke.
It is very probable that some early lost sailors got to America before Columbus, or even the Vikings. But it is also clear none got back to announce their “discovery”.
But if they did, they did not bring any significant technology with them. You’d think that sailors would bring shipbuilding long before they brought Pyramid building. Not to mention-early sailors could (and did) build a small ship from scratch- including finding ore. If someone showed me that the easterm South or Meso Americans had built ships that were build just like Roman or Phoenician, I might be convinced. The Egyptians were never known as great deepwater sailors in any case. Long before them, I’d expect the Carthaginians- who were a Phoenician/Greek/north african people. But in any case, I would expect shipwrecked/lost sailors to either be killed/enslaved or simply assimilated, rather than bringing about any technological changes.
Besides- not even counting Cleo and the Ptolomies, the Egytians were more of a Middle eastern People than a Sub-saharan african people, altho they were decidedly cosmopolitian.
All we have to do is look at Madagascar for evidence of what we would see had the Americas been colonized prior to the Vikings and later Columbus.
In Madagascar we find linguistic similarities between the Polynesian languages and Malagasy. We find non-native crops such as taro root. Some natives retain phenotypical features of Polynesian people.
We have virtually nothing of the same between the Americas and anywhere else. Hell, human exchange between North and South America is pretty minimal.
Implicit in the idea of “discovery” is cultural, technological, and biological exchange. Prior to the 1500s there was practically none at all between the Americas and anywhere else. Sure, people might have washed up from time to time, but they didn’t bring enough information or goods to permanently influence the culture in the Americas, and they didn’t take much back, either (except maybe an armadillo). The example of the Vikings is a pretty decent one: we know for sure they were here, but they contributed little, brought less back, and became a footnote in history.
Whatever happened prior to sustained contact in the 1500s is something so insignificant to the Americas that it doesn’t register when we use some of the most dependable historical tools we have for plotting cultural exchange. Therefore I think it’s fair that we give Europe the credit for America’s “discovery.”
Hmmmm, all Africans speak the same language, have the same culture, and look the same right?? Were these Wolof, Fulani, Kongo, or what??
“Africa” is a huge place, and just because Egyptians built pyramids doesn’t mean “Africans” can take credit for their spread, or identify with them. Continents and cultural areas simply do not correspond, to each other- except for Europe - which is an artificial construct and not a continent at all.
Are there any pyramids in subSaharan Africa?
The fact that there aren’t any, as far as I know pyramids never diffused throughout Africa. In that case even if Africans did reach America before 1492, it is unlikely they would have spurred on cultural trait that is apparently limited to one corner of Africa.
What annoys most about “Afrocentrism” is that by trying to take credit for things that are marginally or non-black African (“Ancient Egypt”, “The Moorish Conquest”), it actually reinforces the pervasive idea that “true” black African people were comepletely without civilization before European contact- which is very untrue (Ancient Zimbabwe for instance).
I am not trying to argue that Egypt was “white” either. Actually it was probably from the beginning a composite of Asian, African, and Near Eastern peoples.
And we are just going to have to accept that those plucky Mesoamericans somehow figured out pyramids on their own.
As for the Olmec heads, I read an interpretation once that they represent decapitated warriors or defeated sportsman (in later MesoAmerican games, the loser was often killed). The puffiness or fullness of the features are to represent incipient decomposition.
Nicotine was “discovered” by the same doc who “discovered” the cocaine, Belanova (sp?, but I don’t care). Nobody was able to reproduce either result.
Huh…first time we’ve had mummies…
I see it’s a decade or so late (about right for us procrastinators), but the best reply would be to agree that “Africans” pretty much discovered the entire world and invented or discovered everything.
More precisely, post-L3 M/N-split haplogroups (using mtDNA divisions for ancestral lineages) did the heavy intellectual lifting for pretty much everything ever invented or discovered beyond fire and the like for the sub-saharan L1 and 2 clades.
The claim that Egyptians were black always bugged me, cuz there’s a decent amount of evidence they were not.
Egyptians were ‘Egyptian’, different from African blacks. The people living in Ethiopia at the time were black, and the Egyptians wrote about it. Their description of the queen of Punt describes her as very dark, almost black. On Egyptian carvings Egyptians always colored themselves red, and Ethiopians (who they fought with a lot) dark brown or black.
I’ve argued with an Afro-centrist before, and it’s almost a religion. Declarations of special truths when presented with evidence, cries of persecution when disagreed with, etc.
Are Savannah elementary schools still teaching kids that the Egyptians discovered America?
In other words, they were Middle Eastern. They probably didn’t look all that different from the people who live there now.
Yes, yes, of course Africans built the American pyramids . . .
Did Africans build the Chinese pyramids?
I think this owes as much to artistic convention as it does to actual skin colour - it’s nationalistic colour-coding. Some Egyptians were, no doubt, Black as we would understand it - the Nile Valley was a conduit, not a barrier, to the rest of Africa. There is even the reign of the Nubian Pharaohs of the XXVth Dynasty - ethnically Kushite, but completely, even conservatively, culturally Egyptian. And you can’t tell me their followers didn’t intermingle with the brown Egyptians.
Which has got jack to do with the better-known Egyptian pyramids, of course (Kushites made their own, though) but does go to show that there were no hard-and-fast absolute ethnic divisions between “Egypt” and “The Rest of Africa” - it was a continuum.
I’m thinking it’s more 6 to 8.
They’ve since moved on to describing how Africans colonized Mars.