John L. Sorenson, Carl L. Johannessen. 2009. World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492. iUniverse. [here]

Sorenson and Johannessen conclude that coconuts were of Asian origin and were probably brought to the Americas by Pacific voyagers no later than 400 C.E. — 1,100 years before Columbus — based on findings of Robinson et al. in Guatemala and previous archaeological finds at Copan, Honduras. Dennis and Gunn (1971) showed that there is a limit to the distance coconuts can drift in the ocean and retain viability. There are no known cases of coconuts having grown on Australian shores or in the Atlantic/Caribbean region. Harries (1978) as well as Dennis and Gunn favor the intentional transportation and planting in the Americas by early transoceanic voyagers.

World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492 is a tremendous book that details the evidence of pre-Columbian world trade of nearly 100 species of plants. I highly recommend you buy it. You should ask your local library to purchase a copy, too.

If not, could you please cite a better authority. Thank you.

Scholars concerned with the ancient cultural history of the Americas have long professed a belief that there were no culturally or biologically significant connections between the “Old” and “New” Worlds as a result of transoceanic voyaging before 1492. Sorenson and Johannessen convincingly argue otherwise.

In a comprehensive appendix that is nearly 400 pages long, they list biological, anthropological, archaeological and historical sources of information to document their thesis that bi-hemispheric distribution of organisms via intentional voyages across the oceans took place during the eight thousand or more years preceding Columbus. They further contend that this inter-continental diffusion of plants, animals, and microorganisms was a direct result of purposeful travels on the part of pre-Columbian explorers, missionaries, businessmen, colonists, and fishermen.

Among the plants claimed by Sorenson and Johannessen to have been transported from the Americas to India, China, Africa, and the Mediterranean in the centuries and millennia before Columbus are: agave, amaranth, cashew, pineapple, peanuts, chili peppers, papaya, pumpkins, bottle gourds, arrowroot, basil, lima beans, kidney beans, and – surprisingly! — maize.

Asiatic plants transplanted to the Americas during the same time period include: marijuana, apazote, a cotton (Gossypium gossypioides), mulberry, bananas, plantain, and sugarcane.

In addition, they claim at least 19 species of micro-predators (such as ringworm) and seven other species of fauna, including dogs, were shared by the Old and New Worlds. The further suggest and list 75 other species of bi-hemispheric plants and animals deserving additional study, including: indigo, mangoes, tamarind, grapes, and sarsaparilla.

According to the authors: “The only plausible explanation for these findings is that a considerable number of transoceanic voyages across both major oceans in both directions were completed between the seventh millennium B.C.E. and the European Age of Discovery. Scientists’ growing knowledge of early maritime technology and its accomplishments increasingly give us confidence that vessels and nautical skills capable of the long-distance travels were indeed developed by the times indicated. These voyages put a new light on the extensive Old World/New World cultural parallels that have long been considered controversial.”

This book should be read and considered by anyone with an interest in pre-Columbian history, anthropology, archaeology, biology, botany, or agronomy. It should be of particular interest to other scientists who may dispute or disagree with its findings. If Sorenson and Johannessen are even partly correct in their assertions, this book has the potential to radically change most current paradigms regarding race, culture, and history.

Bob Zybach

Pine nuts, like acorns, have been eaten by Homo sapiens in many parts of the world since time immemorial. Today pine nuts are the indispensable ingredient in pesto sauce, along with garlic, basil, and Parmesan cheese. Good stuff. Of course people ate them.

And planted them. Native Americans were planters. The geographic distributions of pines and oaks are closely aligned with human cultural geography.

Mike,

Did you get what you need for the bio bit? Here are my high spots. They may sound unconventional, but I did the best I could given a lifetime of lucky breaks. Being the only child of college educated, farm raised, middle aged, Anabaptist parents and born at the start of the presidency of Herbert Hoover helped. Don’t underestimate Sunday drives along the Brandywine with cannon from the American Revolution left as monuments and gypsies and hobos in the Pa. piedmont. At age 40 my Dad retrained himself at the University of Pennsylvania’s Veterinary College; fellow students in their 20s called him “Pops.”

In 1946 I went to Cornell to study ornithology (zoology), hoping to get to the tropics as soon as possible. In my Sophomore year I served as a field assistant to E. P. (Buck) Edwards when he worked on his thesis on the birds of the Lake Patzcuaro drainage in Michoacan, Mexico. We collected ducks on Lake Patzcuaro with Charles Sibley when Sibley was still a grad student at Berkeley.

Through kindness of the Canadian, Frank (Pancho) Harrison, I spent a month in southern Tamaulipas collecting birds for George Sutton in the then unknown Rancho del Cielo cloud forest with Liquidambar (sweet gum) and endemic oaks over 100 feet tall in the canopy. This is at the northern limit of the tropical conifer, Podocarpus; the forest attracted brocket deer (Mazama), jaguar, tinamou, guans and singing quail (Dactylortyx). The U. of Texas at Brownsville owns a field camp up there. The bedrock is cavernous Cretaceous limestone which harbored then undescribed species of plethodontid salamanders.

At the University of Michigan I “dissertated” on reptiles and amphibians of the Gomez Farias region (sea level to 8000 feet in southern Tamaulipas) at the University of Michigan’s Department of Zoology; where I debated late Quaternary extinctions of American megafauna with paleontologist Claude Hibbard and modeled overkill with the invaluable statistical treatment of James E. Mosiman.

The book you mention summarizes most of what I’ve learned and modeled for vertebrate extinctions in radiocarbon time, thanks in part to a postdoc at Yale with ecologist Ed Deevey where I learned Pleistocene pollen analysis with help of J. Iversen then on leave from the Danish Geological Survey.

On a postdoc summer in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona I discovered that there were fossil mammoths in alluvial deposits in southern Arizona at (some thought after) the end of the Pleistocene and a year later I won a job in the Geochronology Program at the University of Arizona after a postdoc at the Universite de Montreal in Quebec, Canada where I helped Gordon Lowther of McGill with an inter-University (McGill-Montreal) seminar on the Quaternary.

By then I was married with two kids and a third on the way. With an NSF grant I found a real job (from which I’m fully retired) at the University of Arizona’s Geochronology Labs off campus on Tumamoc Hill where my new boss, Ted Smiley, showed me the most extraordinary thing I had seen to date, the dung balls of the extinct Shasta Ground sloth from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon. Some of my travel was to make trips when I could, given the prognosis of a post-polio residual.

At the Desert Lab I taught courses in the Geochronology Department and soon had students that knew a good deal more than I had managed to learn about fossil pollen, extinct ice age animals, Quaternary geology and environmental education. One of them, Dave Steadman, has a new (2006) book (Univ. Chicago Press) on bird extinctions on oceanic islands, especially in the Pacific. The extinctions of island birds correlate very closely with the time of human arrivals. Guam Rails raised in captivity would restart rail evolution on ever so many islands where they were eliminated by Polynesian Rats. Don’t miss it.

I aspire to be a good natural historian especially attentive to change within radiocarbon time (last 40,000 years). I enjoy bird watching in my back yard in Tucson, and still get caught up in fierce arguments among misguided peers about what caused continental megafaunal and island bird extinction in radiocarbon time.

I’m amazed at the number of gainsayers that can’t or won’t see the overwhelming case for prehistoric people as the forcing function for large and many small mammal and bird extinctions, especially in the Americas in the last 40,000 years. It may not be an idea whose time has come, but it is certainly coming. For good reading don’t miss Tim Flannery’s books on the extinction story, especially the one he copyrighted in 2001 about extinctions in the United States. He had the Harvard postdoc targeted for Australians and requesting simply that the recipient write a book in return for the Fellowship.

– Paul S. Martin, Emeritus Professor of Geosciences, Desert Laboratory, University of Arizona.

PS: All this folds naturally into unconventional ideas about introduction of Afro-Asian megafauna from other continents into ours. In New Mexico a ranch is establishing Bolson tortoises that once lived north of the border and as you well know wild horses and burros may be doing too well in parts of the west. I was blown away by a visit several years ago to the “Equid Sanctuary” in northern New Mexico a vision if there ever was one into the North American Pleistocene.

Any suggestions or counter-arguments to the idea of returning Proboscidea to this Hemisphere? American elephants checked out only 13,000 calendar years ago, which is just about right for the arrival of Clovis Paleoindians. A change in fire frequency around then can certainly be considered. Archaeologists rooting for much earlier arrival of Homo sapiens hate the proposition that the chronology of human arrival might coincide with megafaunal extinction. I expected rough reviews of my Univ. Calif. Press (2005) book but most look good.

The bottom line? I continue to study megafaunal extinctions in radiocarbon time and try to keep abreast of new developments and wild visions in related fields. Charles Kay’s e-mails definitely help. His summary accounts of wolves are intriguing.

PPS: I rarely visit my office anymore but I take calls on my home phone. None of the above is copy-righted if anyone wants to know. A few e-mail responses would be welcome, if on target. Finally none of this message would have been possible without the collaboration of my spouse, Mary Kay O’Rourke. — Paul