E.P. you wrote, “Paul, you need to see John L. Sorenson and Martin H. Riasch, Pre-Columbian Contacts Across the Ocean, An Annotated Bibliography, entry M-143, 2 African watercraft were washing up each year in South America for a hundred year period during post-conquest times.”
That’s interesting anecdotal evidence for the peopling of the Americas from Africa and Southern Europe. Over the deca-millenniums people used watercraft. In support of this idea, Science ran an article of human tools found in Flores 800 tya as evidence of a watercraft being used to transport a population from Africa far back.
IN: Ann Gibbons, Ancient Island Tools Suggest Homo erectus Was a Seafarer, 279:5357, pp. 1635-1637, Issue of Science, 13 Mar 1998.
And Minimalist’s map from Dec. 26 shows the permanent currents circulating between EurAfrica (Africa and Europe) and the Americas.
[EurAfrica to the Americas]: The scenario that excites me is that given the hundreds (thousands?) of daily boat-bound fishermen from tens of thousands of years back along the shores of EurAfrica (and the regular occurrence of storms along those tens of thousands of miles of shoreline) that storm-captured vessels must regularly whisk fishermen from EurAfrican shores and deposit them on American shores; and vice versa. The Solutreans may have made it from Europe to America this way.
[Japan to the Americas]: The following is not related to the purpose of this thread. But, regarding the peopling of the American Pacific, the same dynamics of nature acting on human activity that brought Africans to the Americas is on record of having brought Japanese to the Americas (which makes an interesting scenario for the peopling of the Americas from prehistoric times. I know most here are familiar with the following information. I’d like to include it in this post, though:
The plain fact is that due to natural currents, both trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic contacts were inevitable, if not by design, with certainty by accident. In the one century from 1775 to 1875 at least 20 Japanese junks were involuntarily driven by storms and currents to landing points from the Aleutian Islands to Mexico, an average of 1 watercraft every 5 years. (Robert Heine-Geldern,