Thursday, August 6, 2009

World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492

This recently published book is reviewed in the Gavin Menzies newsletter and it is certainly welcome in putting scholarly flesh on the strengthening hypothesis of extensive and continuous contact between the old and new worlds.

I have strongly outlined the support for a global Bronze Age trading network that included all points accessible to the Atlantic and have also fingered the city of Altantis at Gibraltar by Seville as the natural entrepot for the exact same reasons Seville became the gateway to the Americas. Scholarly work has pinpointed the actual remains under deltaic mud.

I naturally assumed that plant transfer and the like would be extensive between around 6000 years ago to about 3000 years ago. It is reported here that hookworms travelled from SE Asia and Brazil 7000 years ago. I suspect that was an unlikely but possible accidental voyage, but any further such evidence could change that.

Importantly we have a huge influx of borrowed plants from the tropics of the Americas to similar environs in the old world. A few went the other direction, but the majority went East.

That strongly implies that this is an artifact of Bronze Age seamen originating from the old world and been continuously engaged for centuries as we have projected in previous postings.

We can go a lot further with this new data. We can assert that such efforts were much stronger than anything we have imagined and certainly discovered so far. Just as only a fraction of Bronze Age canters have been discovered in the Middle East, the same is true for the Atlantic seaboard of the Americas. Few built in stone unless it was handy to do so and any scrap bronze was never thrown out.

Our only way to confirm a site is to find the metal forge with signs of a large settlement. With native populations in their million and the settlements of traders and their retainers likely a thousand at most, it is looking for a needle in a haystack.

World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book by Emeritus Professor John L. Sorenson and Emeritus Professor Carl L. Johannessen which seems to provide a series of smoking guns in relation to the subject of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic trade. In World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492 they postulate that "...124 tropical plants and animals were transported across oceans to and from tropical continents by early tropical mariners. This encyclopaedic volume summarizes the research of Professors Sorenson and Johannessen, opening up new avenues of research and challenging the current ideas of how species were dispersed across the world oceans.

A plant, especially a domesticated one, cannot evolve twice on two opposite continents; they require a DNA source. It takes finite time for it to spread. Eighty-four tropical plants were transported from America to the tropical Old World used now by us. The early mariners selected crops from highlands and shorelines, wet and dry climates, took them to the Old World, and planted them in the appropriate ecological locations. Only 13 plants came to America from Old World locations.

The sailing that maintained medicinal plants in Egypt and Peru during two separate 1, 400 year periods implies continual maritime trade. The most ancient exchanges by mariners were two species of hookworms originating from Southeast Asia. They were found in mummies in Brazil but not in North America. This indicates that diffusion of various types occurred in order to bring these parasites to Brazil over 7,000 years ago.

This research will allow scientists and teachers to openly reassess their current notions of the history of civilization and the interaction between peoples in ancient times..."

To purchase this book please visit the following link:

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