In 1421 I shared my conclusion that Admiral Zheng He’s fleet reached the Azores. My principal evidence came from two pieces of information. Columbus reported Chinese bodies had been washed ashore at Flores Island in the Azores. Also, the statue of a horseman on a plinth “with writing [they] could not understand” was found by early Portuguese settlers when they arrived at Corvo Island in the Azores. A report by Jacome Bruges-Armas and his colleagues provides cogent genetic research that clearly bolsters my own analysis.
KANGNIDO
Another enigma surrounding the Chinese presence on the Azores involves the fact that the islands were shown on a map presented to Emperor Zhu Di by a Korean delegation in 1402, that is, thirty-seven years before the Portuguese arrived on the islands. There have been angry disputes with historians who reject the substance of what is found on this famous map, colloquially known as the Kangnido.
I decided it was necessary to establish further proof that Emperor Zhu Di’s map actually depicted the Azores, as I have claimed. Since the original map is stored at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan’s former imperial capital, I set off for Japan.
I traveled to Kyoto from Tokyo on the bullet train one beautiful spring morning, with snowcapped Mount Fuji over my shoulder, framed by cherry blossoms. The Ryukoku University librarian, Aoki Masanori, took me to the library vaults to examine the map. After passing through one locked door after another, at last deep in the vaults there was the map, wrapped up like a mummy.
Masanori and his assistant delicately carried the map up to an air-conditioned theater. There the swaddling bands were removed and the Kangnido was hung on a rail. Six hundred years later it is still in perfect condition, the Chinese writing as clear as crystal. There were the Azores, off Portugal, with Chinese characters describing them. Although these were written in classical Mandarin, there was no difficulty for Masanori to read them: “Islands with distinctive peaks.” Anyone who has seen Corvo from the sea could not expect a more pithy description. Volcanoes rise sheer out of the sea. So there we have it—the Azores on a Chinese-Korean map published thirty-seven years before the Portuguese “discovered” the islands. I had a splendid ride back to Tokyo—champagne all the way!
Obviously a Chinese-Korean fleet had reached the Azores and settled there before 1402, predating Zheng He by nineteen years.
EPIDEMICS, VIRUSES, AND PARASITES
The DNA evidence goes further, allowing us to extend our research into the transmission of epidemics, viruses, and parasites across the oceans before Columbus. We are left with further evidence of Chinese presence. Olympio da Fonseca’s magisterial study summarizes the evidence of parasites that are shared between South America and Southeast Asia, and I believe he makes an indisputable case that man brought the parasites from Southeast Asia and Oceania to South America before Columbus.11
There is other material as well:
• Ettore Biocca, in “Les Ancylostomas de l’origine des Indiens d’Amérique,” l’Anthropologie 55 (1950), explains that a species of hookworm that lives on dogs and cats occurs only in the Far East and America. Again, the Bering Strait cold would have killed this parasite.
• Adauto José Goncalves de Araujo, “Contribuição Ao Estudo de Helmintos Encontrados em Material Arqueologico dos Brasil,” 1980. “Establishes the existence of ancylostomides among the prehistoric population of Brazil. These originated in Asia and do not survive in cold climates—they would have been killed in crossing the Bering Strait ice bridge. They must therefore have been brought by sea from Asia across the South Atlantic to Brazil.”
• Samuel Taylor Darling, in “Observations on the Geographical and Ethnological Distribution of Hookworms,” Parasitology 12 (1920), surveys the distribution of ancyclostoma species and Necator americanus hookworms introduced to America in pre-Columbian times from Asia, Polynesia, or Indonesia. Cold in the Bering Strait route would have killed these hookworms. Again, they must have been brought by sea.
• Fred L. Soper, in “Ancylostoma Duodenale,” American Journal of Hygiene 7 (1927), describes this parasite introduced to South America from Indonesia or Polynesia—again, it cannot survive in cold climates.
DISEASES
With advanced abilities to analyze the nature of diseases and their transmission, we have additional tools to understand Chinese presence in the Americas. A number of diseases imported to the New World are localized as if specific travelers had transmitted the illnesses directly, rather than over the course of an eon, via a land route.
One prime example is Machado-Joseph disease, an often fatal, autosomal dominant motor disorder,12 which cripples and paralyzes while leaving the intellect intact. The disease is characterized by weakness in the arms and legs and general loss of control of movement—often manifest as being similar to drunkenness. It is named after the heads of two families, William Machado and Antone Joseph, whose descendants were first diagnosed with having suffered from the disease.
In such autosomal diseases, children of an affected parent have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the defective gene. People at risk who escape the disease will not pass it on to their children or to future generations, since the disease does not skip generations. The disease thus shows a direct link from parent to child, which makes hereditary tracing relatively simple.
I first learned of this disease from Jerry Warsing, who contacted me after reading 1421 and invited me for a visit to his home in Virginia. He had come to the conclusion that a great Chinese fleet had been shipwrecked in 1432 on the coast of Virginia and North Carolina and that the settlers had marched inland away from the swamps near the coast. They had settled in the Appalachian Mountains. In Warsing’s opinion, the Ming Ho, Wyo Ming, and Oceanye Ho (Shawnee) were the descendants of those shipwrecked sailors. Warsing came to this conclusion long before my book was published.
Warsing’s interest had been aroused when he was asked to carry out historical research into the Mingo and Melungeon people of the Southeastern United States. In his research he found that they had a very high incidence of Machado-Joseph disease.
The disease was first described in the West among immigrants from the Azores to North America, especially those from the islands of Flores and São Miguel. The prevailing wisdom was that the mutation originated in mainland Portugal and was carried to the Azores when the Portuguese discovered the islands in the 1430s. It was then supposedly carried by the Portuguese along the sea routes down the coast of Africa and around to Yemen, India, China, Japan, Australia, and subsequently to the Americas when the Portuguese began to settle in the sixteenth century.
When Warsing dug deeper, however, he found that in fact Machado-Joseph disease had been prevalent in the south-central Chinese province of Yunnan before the Portuguese reached China, and had also been found in places that Portuguese fleets never visited. As a result, he came to the opposite conclusion: that Machado-Joseph originated in Yunnan.
Scientific support for that view is provided by Manuela Lima of the University of the Azores and her colleagues in “Origins of a Mutation: Population Genetics of Machado-Joseph Disease in the Azores.” “It was thought that the MJD mutation represented a marker of the Portuguese explorations and discoveries. Beyond going for molecular confirmation of cases does not support this idea, because a large number of confirmed carriers of the CAG expansion typical of MJD have been identified in various countries, making the hypothesis of a unique Portuguese origin virtually impossible.”
Every country in which Machado-Joseph disease has been found was visited by Zheng He’s fleets; so I concur with Warsing: Zheng He’s fleets carried the disease from Yunnan around the world.
TOKELAU DISEASE
The principal work on which I rely is that of Dr. Olympio da Fonseca. His research shows that this highly distinctive infection was found in 1928 among native Indian people of the Mato Grosso area of Brazil. These people had been isolated from Europeans for many centuries. The endemic parasite disease has such a unique appearance that ancient navigators
and explorers referred to it even though they were of course not medical experts. The center of Tokelau’s sphere of affliction is the Malay Peninsula. It is also found on the southern coast of China, in Hunan province, on the coasts and hinterland of Indochina, in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, and Bangladesh. It is prevalent across the Pacific—Formosa, the Marianas, Moluccas, the Gilbert and Marshall island groups, New Caledonia, Fiji, the Samoa and Tonga groups, the Tokelau Islands, the Society and Celebes island groups, the Solomons and Loyalty islands, Sumatra, and New Guinea. Zheng He’s fleets visited all of these places and it is my contention that they also sailed up the Amazon and through the river network of present-day Bolivia to what is now the Mato Grosso state of Brazil. Olympio da Fonseca’s report on the spread of Tokelau is mirrored by the DNA findings of many other researchers.
ANIMALS AND THEIR DISEASES
A number of visitors to our website have contended that the kunekune pigs of New Zealand, noted by the first Europeans who arrived there, are a Chinese strain. Skeletons of Indonesian pigs have been found in pre-Columbian graves in British Columbia. The wild pigs of Kangaroo Island, off South Australia, are also Chinese. Regrettably, research on the DNA of pigs is in its infancy, but recently Kyu-Il Kim and his colleagues at Korea’s Cheju National University have carried out an investigation into H. M. Cooper’s (1954) article in the South Australian Naturalist about the origins of Kangaroo Island’s wild pigs. They say: “Finally, the feral pigs inhabiting Kangaroo Island have D loop sequences of Asian origin. More recent studies into fleas on these pigs have found that the fleas on Asian pigs differ markedly from the fleas on European pigs and that those on Kangaroo Island are indeed Asian fleas.”
DISTINCTIVE BENIGN PHYSICAL DISORDER
Professor Mariana Fernandez-Cobo and her colleagues have studied the urine of people with kidney disorders in Cuba, Colombia, and Puerto Rico. Her team has found that although the Timo Indians, the original inhabitants of Puerto Rico, are long since deceased, the type 2A sequence in the JCB genotype 2A from Asia lives on in their descendants. To quote the report:
While the genotypes of JCB present in Puerto Rico are those expected from the ancestry of the population, the proportion of these different types is surprising. The number of type 2A (Asian) strains, presumably contributed by the long extinct Tectino Indians, far exceeds that predicted by the tri hybrid model based on analysis of polymorphic blood groups and protein genetic markers. If Timo genes make up only 80 percent of the present Puerto Rico gene pool as others have calculated (Haanis et al., 1991) why should type 2A strains make up 61 percent of the JCV strains found in this study?
And in her abstract:
These findings indicate that the JCV strains carried by the Taino Indians can be found in today’s Puerto Rican population despite the apparent demise of these [Taino] people more than two centuries ago. Therefore, molecular characterization of JCV provides a tool to supplement genetic techniques for reconstructing population histories including admix populations. . . . In Puerto Rico the native Taino population, an Arawak tribe, were decimated by warfare and disease and had completely disappeared by the end of the 17th century, but the JCV genotype (type 2A) of their ancestors brought from Asia has not only survived, but has actually thrived in their living descendants. We suggest that JCB genotyping can be a useful tool to reconstruct human population history, even when the contribution of a founding population such as the Taino has long been obscured.
It seems inescapable to me that there was a massive migration of peoples from Asia to the Americas before Columbus. This does not mean that the DNA of these people or their diseases, animals, or animals’ diseases were from Zheng He’s fleet. In some cases they may have been carried by Chinese joining the California gold rush in the 1840s and 1850s. However, this argument does not stand up in those places where the first Europeans to reach the Americas found Chinese already there—which is virtually the entire Pacific, Caribbean, and Atlantic coast of North America. A further reason why the critics’ argument also does not stand up is found in analyzing the genetic tree produced by Novick and his colleagues. The tree shows close similarity between the natives of the far north of America (on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts), the Chinese, and the Incas of the South American Pacific coast and the coast of the Yucatán in the Caribbean—all thousands of miles apart, surrounded by different oceans. In my view, to have such close-linked DNA acquired at much the same time means that these people must have acquired their Asian genes from Asian sailors—male and female.
Once one establishes and recognizes the genetic markers in DNA of the ancestors of Native American populations, it is logical to look for the works that the human settlers left behind—culture, architecture, and even the remains of the vessels that brought them to the New World. This is a key part of our search. We now turn to a study of the Chinese people whom the first European explorers met when they first arrived in the Americas.
CHAPTER 7
In Search of Lost Civilizations
The best way to describe the extraordinary scale of the Chinese and Asian influence on Mexican and Central and South American peoples is to take the reader along in a chronicle of our tour of the region. It is not as if the odd piece of ceramic has been found, but instead a saturation of evidence from San Luis Potosi, in central Mexico, right down to Ecuador—an area much larger than Western Europe.
Throughout this huge area the people have Asian ancestors—96.5 percent have Asian DNA. What proportion of these people came by sea as opposed to crossing the Bering Strait will be a matter of debate for a long time. It is incontestable, however, that the peoples of Central America came from Asia, and I say the DNA evidence shows that they came by sea. The conclusion is based not only on the mutation argument, but also on the fact that many of the viruses and diseases they brought with them would not have withstood the cold of a Bering Strait crossing.
It is self-evident, of course, that the indigenous people of Central America are of Asian origin—in their Asian facial structure, bodies, mannerisms, and ways of life. As you will read in a later chapter, the fact that forty-nine acupuncture points are identical in Mayan and Chinese medicine says it all. One or two could be a coincidence, but forty-nine is billions to one against coincidence. Furthermore, it means the use of Chinese acupuncture must have been recorded and spread through written records—one cannot pass down such a complex plan of acupuncture by word of mouth.
Then there are the Chinese customs practiced across thousands of square miles of Central America: worshipping ancestors; killing black chickens; making paper ornaments; the children’s tale of the rabbit in the moon; the ceremonial use of jade; the same colors used to denote cardinal points of the compass; red clothes worn at funerals; making alcohol by chewing and spitting grain; the use of Chinese stills; using backstrap looms.
We will cite major archaeological finds, such as the work of Alexander Von Wuthenau, who depicts Asian faces in his book about pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas. Such visages are also seen in the striking Olmec statues at La Democracia and Monte Albán, which we will focus on later.
Olmec and Mayan art in its various glorious forms is almost indistinguishable from Chinese art of the Shang and Han dynasties in all manner of media—superbly carved jade; funerary objects; animal heads on human bodies; jade plugs between the teeth of the deceased; jade face masks made of small rectangular jade pieces; small axes used for money; lions with expressive teeth; Olmec pottery with Shang dynasty inscriptions; the feline cult; concave mirrors; tripod cooking vessels; superb pottery and decorated plates. One or two similarities could of course be a coincidence, but twenty, when coupled with identical customs, pyramid building, and DNA?
Olmec and Maya shared the same astronomy with the Chinese. Ephemeris tables for eclipses in the Dresden Codex are the same as Shang dynasty tables. Olmec and Mayan and Chinese calendars of that era were all based upon the moon, and months alternated between twenty-nine and thirty days. Both
civilizations arrived at the same period for Venus’s orbit of the sun. Both civilizations used the same (correct) 26,000 year precession cycle. Both estimated a solar year at 365.2422 days and both put the lunation of the moon at 29.53 days—calculations made at a time when Europeans were still hunting in forests.
The increasingly evident links between Chinese seafarers and Native Americans called for additional research. Marcella and I once again planned a journey with our “Cantraveler” friends to Mexico and Guatemala to look for clues about those early explorers and their heritage.
Our search for the lost civilizations of the Americas posed three major difficulties, not least their ages. First, we sought to discover civilizations that lived in tropical America more than four thousand years ago.
The Olmec (c. 1900 B.C.) are a prime example. They predated the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Mycenaeans of Greece, and by centuries the Assyrian Empire of Mesopotamia. The Olmec civilization’s age is probably only exceeded by the Shang peoples of China, the Vedic era of India, and the Minoan civilization of Crete. The Olmecs’ successors—the Maya and Zapotecs—were older than Macedonian Greece, and began at about the same age (600 B.C.) as the Roman Empire. No silk or paper documents are likely to have survived the tropical heat and damp, neither wooden carvings nor paintings.
The second problem is the extent of the lands of the Olmecs and the peoples they influenced, that is, the Zapotecs, the people of Teotihuacán, and the Maya, who flourished in an area ranging from central Mexico to Honduras and probably as far south as Ecuador—an area larger than the Persian Empire or Western Europe.
Our third problem is the destruction of records. The Spanish bishop Diego de Landa Calderón made a bonfire of Mayan and Olmec books in 1562 when he was the bishop of the Yucatán. Only four books are known to have survived, being saved by the conquistadors and taken back to Spain. Two of these, the Dresden and Paris codices, fortunately tell us quite a bit about their writing, numbers, calendars, and astronomy. Professional historians become apoplectic when Landa’s name is mentioned. In Mexico the Aztec people practiced cannibalization on a horrific scale, involving tens of thousands of captives. It had become a way of life. Landa was disgusted and sought to destroy all possible evidence of these revolting practices, the work of the devil. His big mistake was to equate the Maya and Toltec with the Aztecs. Mayan priests did drink the blood of their victims, but as a religious offering—they also spilt their own blood for the same reason, cutting their arms and penises to do so.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 7