Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada?

Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by aaron-lebo on Friday February 02, 2018 @01:45AM (#16288867)

I think every old world civilization has attempted at one point or another to claim they were first. Outside of the natives and the Norse and maybe the Polynesians in SA, it's usually psuedohistory relying on circumstantial evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

It's weird how much we want it to be true though.

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by api_or_ipa on Friday February 02, 2018 @01:54AM (#16288905)

But we know Columbus wasn't the first. The surprising thing is that the Atlantic is less difficult to cross than you'd think. It's somewhat common for people to ride the current to the New World in just a few metres of boat[0].

The hard, and scary, part is planning to bring enough supplies when you don't know when you'll see land.

0 http://www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary-boats/undaunted-t...

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by vadimberman on Friday February 02, 2018 @03:08AM (#16289159)

> The hard, and scary, part is planning to bring enough supplies when you don't know when you'll see land.

That's today. Back then, they wouldn't know whether there is even land. Imagine what it means to sail without maps or equipment in time when what we considered basic general knowledge about physics was not even there.

It would take as much courage as sending a manned mission to the Outer Solar system today.

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by aaron-lebo on Friday February 02, 2018 @02:01AM (#16288927)

Accidental contact probably happened a lot. Those are the stories that would be fascinating, but we'll never know about them. Planned colonization and/or trading missions are the more dubious claims.

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by breakyerself on Friday February 02, 2018 @03:56AM (#16289308)

Unfortunately not enough to condition natives to the diseases brought from the old world.

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by singularity2001 on Friday February 02, 2018 @04:03AM (#16289335)

this should be the accepted common sense answer

> but we'll never know about them

unless Meso-american religion told us about white Gods with beards coming from the East

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by dalbasal on Friday February 02, 2018 @02:36AM (#16289054)

Vikings and Polynesians were considered pseudohistory not long ago.

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Re:Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? by westbywest on Friday February 02, 2018 @10:19AM (#16291149)

Mark Kurlansky's rather fascinating book "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" asserts Basque fisherman were working the banks off North America possibly even before Vikings began their exploration. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-cod-a-...

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