If Columbus missed the bus by 71 years, US loses part of its history, and a holiday

Could Columbus Day, October 12, soon be history in the US? After all, if the Italian was not the first to ‘discover’ America, then the day Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas should hardly be cause for celebration. Over the years, there has been little local traction for theories and evidence that ancient northern Asians and Vikings crossed over to the American landmass from the west and east long before southern Europeans blundered across in the 15th century. But a retired American epigraphist’s recent discovery of purported Chinese writing on prehistoric petroglyph sites from New Mexico to Oklahoma may finally sink Columbus, especially if read alongside a largely ignored assertion by an amateur British naval historian in 2002 that Chinese mariners pipped the Italian to the New World by 71 years.

Naysayers will point out that some of the scrawls — allegedly in a 4,800-year-old Chinese script — are remarkably similar to Native American inscriptions of the time. But that may not be enough to deter future spirited contentions by China that US is the eastern land of Fusang referred to in Chinese texts, in the light of this new prehistoric ‘evidence’. Whether America will forsake Columbus and a public holiday and accept that it too was discovered by the Chinese along with diabetes and decimal fractions, remains to be seen.