The History Channel had a special on it a few years ago. Some guy who is supposedly the world expert on ancient carved rock pronounced it hundreds of years old. Admittedly, I haven’t studied on it since then.
Here’s another thread on the subject. It’s highly questionable. The cumulative evidence says it isn’t true. It hasn’t proven to be a hoax, but there’s no other rational explanation for it. Interestingly on the copper show they look at a carving of a boat and the guy says it looks like a Minoan craft, even though it’s a dead ringer for a Viking Longboat. It’s always easy to find an interpretation to suit your pet theory, much harder to prove it.
I like these kinds of shows. I think the questions should be asked, It is what good scientists do. Anthropologists like Dr. Martin have been compromised by years of indoctrination by progressive pseudo-scientists, scientists who think asking any question about our past is a racist afront to the native populations. This kind of scientific approach is dishonest and hurts the progression of our knowledge base. We should seek facts , regardless of where they take us.
http://www.ramtops.co.uk/copper.html
It’s interesting, the Ojibwa tribe referenced by Dr. Martin just happens to be of unexplained mixed genetics. (as per finding by geneticist Dr. Douglas Wallace)
25% of the Ojibwa and a few other native populations in the area, carry haplogroup X - European genetics. This cannot be explained away by simply saying they are just mixed with post Columbian immigrants because the H-X in the native populations branched off from the modern European X 12-36k years ago.
The two current theories are that European ‘Solutrean’ hunters crossed the Atlantic via ice sheets(17-36,000 years ago), and were here already when the Asian populations crossed the Bering land bridge, 12-16,000 years ago. The other theory would be that mixed genetics European/Siberian/Asian Paleo hunters where some of the first to immigrate to the Americas, however, no H-X has been found any where between the European X group and the X group that now resides in the north eastern part of the Americas.
Lecture with additional links to Dr. Wallace’s lecture series on genetics at the DNA learning center are in the youtube video description.
Published findings below
Dr. Douglas Wallace recognized by Gruber Foundation for his pioneering work in genetics.
http://gruber.yale.edu/prize/2012-gruber-genetics-prize
Douglas C. Wallace, widely considered the founder of mitochondrial genetics in humans, began his research in mitochondrial biology in the early 1970s, at a time when few people thought the study of mitochondria and its DNA (mtDNA) would offer any significant insight into human health and disease. In 1980, he published a landmark paper that demonstrated that the human mtDNA is inherited solely through the mother. A few years later, using maternal inheritance as a guide, he identified the first inherited mtDNA disease, Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), which causes sudden blindness. Wallace subsequently linked mtDNA mutations to a wide range of other clinical symptoms, including deafness, neuropsychiatric disorders, cardiac and muscle problems, and metabolic diseases such as diabetes. Wallace also showed that mtDNA mutations accumulate in human tissue with age, and thus play a role in age-related diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, and dementia. In addition, Wallace’s research has made a major contribution to the field of molecular anthropology. Using mtDNA variation, he has reconstructed the origins and ancient migrations of women, tracing all mtDNA lineages back some 200,000 years to a single African origin—the so-called mitochondrial Eve.
Viking ships were “primitive”? Rubbish. They were one of the best seafaring designs ever developed. And the Vikings themselves were sailors without parallel in history.
The references in this thread are ‘more primitive’ and ‘primitive sails’. Viking ships are definitely more primitive than more modern ships, and their sails were primitive. They were one of the best seafaring designs developed hundreds of years ago, not ever. They may not have been paralleled, but they were surpassed. It’s not an insult to Vikings to point out the developments in sailing since their time long ago.
An interesting part of the copper episode was the carved image of a ship that the narrator described as resembling a Minoan craft when it was a dead ringer for a Viking long boat.
That “expert” was Scott Wolter who hosts America Unearthed. There’s no way to date a carving in stone, his approach is pseudo science. Wolter’s grasp of the scientific method is summed up when he asks, “can you prove it isn’t authentic?”
I agree that the KRS is possibly authentic. I think it is more plausibly a hoax. But if it was a hoax, it was a sophisticated one. Aside from the bogus dating of stone, the arguments for authenticity are that no-one in America could have carved it because no-one knew enough about the runes in use in 1362 (the date on the stone) to have done so, and that Olof Ohman would not have been involved in a hoax because he was too honest.
I’m addressing all of this in a short work of historical fiction that will be out soon.
The runes are not in the least like what runes looked like in the 14th century, and nobody accuses Ohman himself of having made the thing (at least not anymore, although he was accused at the time).