Why We Are "Americans." The Birth Certificate of America.

[N2NH]

Columbus "discovered" the two major continents of the Western Hemisphere so why don't we live in North Columbia? Why isn't it the United States of Columbia? Why aren't we Columbians?

This is why:

A DECADE AGO, the Library of Congress paid $10 million to acquire the only known original copy of a 1507 world map that has been called “the birth certificate of America.” The large map, a masterpiece of woodblock printing, has been a star attraction at the library ever since and the object of revived scholarly fascination about the earliest cartography of the New World. The research has also rescued from obscurity a little-known Renaissance man, the 16th-century globe maker Johannes Schöner, who was responsible for saving the map for posterity.

We call ourselves Americans today because of the map’s makers, Martin Waldseemüller and Mathias Ringmann, young clerics in the cathedral village of St.-Dié, France. By incorporating early New World discoveries, their map reached beyond the canonical descriptions of Old World geography handed down from Ptolemy in the second century. On a lower stretch of the southern continent, the mapmakers inscribed the name “America” in the mistaken belief that Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus, deserved credit for first sighting a part of that continent, South America.

Interestingly there's this:

The map is also the source of an abiding mystery. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann already know so well the configuration of South America, before any recorded Spanish or Portuguese voyages around the horn to the west coast? How did they know of the Pacific before Balboa made his sighting in 1513? Hard to believe it was just a guess or futuristic vision of what world geography would come to be.

Were the cartographers themselves dropping a hint when they wrote on the map that “if you are not familiar with the new discoveries, do not be afraid of what it is you see on this map, for it is how you will come to see your world in the future”?

Why America Is Called America

[HUGH]

Just a point of order, Northern America was discovered by Vikings and then by Welshmen long before Columbus. There is physical evidence to back this up. There's a possibility that Viking maps were available quite widely as they were widespread travellers and settlers.

[KK4AMI]

Welshman and Vikings? Good grief, I would have had a hard time with calling us the United States of Angharad or Hjorvarth.

[N8YX]

tumblr_m2yp8vE2ww1qdefsno1_1280.jpg

"What's inon YOUR walletmap??"

[N2NH]

From an archaeology site:

Europeans and Africans BC (Before Columbus)?

In Atlantis In America: Navigators of the Ancient World Zapp and I documented the presence of Mediterranean and African faces sculpted into stone throughout MesoAmerica. The 3,000 year old Olmec carved faces at La Venta (Mexico) are unmistakably African, with broad lips, broad noses, braided hair and kinky beards. The 2,000 year old carved faces at Maya sites like Chichen Itza (Yucatan) and El Ceibal (Guatemala) are unmistakably Mediterranean as they display long narrow faces, long beards and bushy mustaches – features very unlike the Maya. Stone stelae at Copan (Honduras) display Chinese features, while the 15 foot tall statues at Tula (Valley of Mexico) display the features of Polynesians. It now appears that all these diverse people were coming to the heart of the Americas from 1,500 to at least 15,000 years ago. The complex origins of the first Americans has also been confirmed by DNA studies that have revealed the presence of haplogroup X among Algonkian-speaking tribes such as the Ojibway. Today, haplogroup X is found in between two and four per cent of European populations, and in the Middle East, but it has never been found in northeast Asian peoples.

The question is no longer, “Did navigators come to the New World before Columbus and Lief Erikson?” The question is when did they stop coming, and why did they lose all memory of man’s navigational past? In Europe the answer may be tied to the onset of the Dark and Middle Ages. We are becoming inured to catastrophic events of late. But what event caused the Dark ages to begin and the history of navigation and other knowledge to become lost?

Interestingly, some Indians have been DNA tested and found to be Caucasian, one case I am aware of was of a Seminole Indian.

In light of the inclusions on that map (and others), maybe there was more knowledge of the New World than was commonly known in the 16th Century.

"Europeans and Africans BC (Before Columbus)?"

[N2NH]

This would not only change when the Americas were first settled, but the way we look at migration.

Researchers commonly accept that humans came to the Americas some 11,500 years ago. But new dating of the Mexican find suggests that the features are in fact 1.3 million years old.

If the new dates are correct, the footprints could be among the most incredible hominid traces ever discovered—or, more likely, not footprints at all.
"One-point-three million years is a lot older than I expected," said Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center at University of California, Berkeley.
"I repeated the experiment nine times using different samples, usually single chunks of this basaltic rock, and they all gave the same unambiguous results."

It could be possible that mankind originally came from North America - but it would look a lot different than it does now 1.3 Million Years ago. Interestingly this was reported over 7 years ago and nothing?

There is this and it is good to see science keeping an open mind:

Gonzalez, of the English research team, responded to Renne's report with a written commentary released to the media.
She stressed that the layer of ash in which the features lie has been difficult to date, because it consists of many different materials that may be of different ages.
Her group used lasers to measure radiation in particles of the ash layer and dated them as being about 40,000 years old.
"[Those dates] now need to be explained in view of the new dates obtained by Renne's group," she wrote.
Gonzalez believes that the new dates spotlight the need for further research on the site by other techniques and by independent groups to establish a reliable timeline.
But even if Renne's ancient dates are correct, Gonzalez says, she isn't ready to rule out the possibility that the features could be footprints.
"Even if we are wrong and the … ash is indeed 1.3 million years old, as suggested by Renne et al., that is not automatically a reason to disregard interpretation of the features reported as 'footprints' simply because they are not in agreement with the established models for the settlement of the Americas," she wrote.

NatGeo Link

[NQ6U]

1.3 million years ago would be about the time of Homo erectus, long before modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) appeared. Someone is probably misinterpreting the data somewhere along the line.

On the other hand, this skull bears a distinct resemblance to what must have been in the head a guy I used to work with:



Notice the low forehead and small brain case? So, who knows, maybe there's something to it.

[HUGH]

1.3 million years ago would be about the time of Homo erectus, long before modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) appeared. Someone is probably misinterpreting the data somewhere along the line.

On the other hand, this skull bears a distinct resemblance to what must have been in the head a guy I used to work with:



Notice the low forehead and small brain case? So, who knows, maybe there's something to it.

Genetic research indicates that a fair percentage of Caucasian people today have genes from Neanderthal man. Curiously this occurs more frequently amongst redheads.

[HUGH]

This entire study depends on how far back you want to look and if man survived climate and continental changes. I was mainly interested in known map-makers.

[KG4CGC]

The original Knights of Templar actually placed markers in North America around the year 300.