The Padded Cell

A recent program on the History Channel speculating about Chinese discovery of North America 71 years before Columbus, was nothing but a pile of speculation without substance.

I have no problem with the concept, but you actually need evidence to backup the claims. One claim was that since 1421, when the Chinese supposedly first landed, North America, and presumably South America, was completely populated by the Chinese. The archaeologist making the claim had as his "supporting evidence" that DNA doesn't support the Bering Straight land bridge theory of emigration from Asia. Hmm, really? Ok, maybe it doesn't. But DNA also doesn't support a Chinese population of North America either. And to populate and spread across an entire continent in just 70 years? And into the Caribbean islands? And is this enough time for the now indigenous peoples to change dramatically from the Chinese?

And what does this mean for South American civilizations which we know existed a good thousand years before 1421?

To try and bolster the theory, one entrepreneur decided to go searching for an ancient Chines boat hull buried in the sands of the American west coast. His search tools? Divining rods.

Wow.

This is the state of science these days?

So, he takes his team to some point along the California coast, I think it was, and got out his dowsing rods, and proclaimed he had found a spot. They start "drilling" a hole using forced water through a series of PVC pipes and then when they reached the desired depth of approximately 40 feet, they used a power drill and very long corer to obtain a sample.

They came up with small bits of wood. Instantly the dowser proclaimed "That's it, that's part of the keel. That's Chinese wood there." Instant analysis. Don't need no stinkin' labs and such.

But of course, try as they might, they couldn't find any more wood. Guess it was a teeny weeny boat. They couldn't even get enough for carbon dating (50 grams).

Now, judging from the amount of wood that collects on the shorelines here in Washington state, chances are he bored into a piece of old driftwood, which is probably extremely plentiful.

And, as the one skeptic voice in the program pointed out, "Discovery means finding something, and communicating it back to other peoples." There is zero evidence of this happening in any Chinese historical record. The Vikings were more successful than the Chinese in this respect, having at least written about the discovery of Vinland and reporting back to their homeland. They just weren't in a position to exploit it.

Nice to see History Channel is keeping up their high quality programming, based on speculation and little fact.