Updates
News, Updates, and Resources for Who "Discovered" America?
Web Items
2011 Oct. Eratosthenes 2009/2010: An Old Experiment in Modern Times. “Eratosthenes 2009” and “Eratosthenes 2010 America” with countries in North and South America had more than 15,000 students at more than 200 schools determine the radius of the Earth using the method that Eratosthenes employed more than 2000 years ago. The result obtained was 6290 km in 2009 and 6375 km in 2010. Projects involve history, mathematics, and astronomy to create an exciting activity with accurate scientific results.
2009 December. Carl Sagan video on Eratosthenes' technique for determining the size of the Earth.
2002 Feb 4. A History Of The African-Olmecs. By Paul Barton - raceandhistory.com. Excerpt: Over the past year and up to today (February 3, 2002), many great discoveries have been made that greatly enhances information about the ancient world, particularly the ancient African world and ancient African civilizations. ... A few miles off the coast of Cuba, what is described as an underground set of Ruins has been found and is being studied by scientists. In Mexico, archeologists and scientists (see Sitchin, ancientamerican.com) have found the most ancient calendar from Mexico dating back to exactly 3113 years B.C. and connected with an African civilization of ancient Mexico called the Olmec or Xi (Shee) Civilization....
Fall, 2001, Ancient Navigators Could Have Measured Longitude! by Rick Sanders (Full text of article from Fall 2001 21st Century) -- http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/fall01/navigators/navigators.html -- "Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui [under the guidance of Eratosthenes] set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. ...One of the navigational instruments which Maui had with him was a strange looking "calculator" that he called a tanawa; such an instrument was known, in 1492, as a torquetum."
Building and Using Maui's Tanawa by Bertram Cooper (Full text of article from Fall 2001 21st Century) -- http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/fall01/Tanawa/tanawa.html
August, 1997 The Navigational Mysteries and Fraudulent Longitudes of Christopher Columbus -- A Lecture given to the Society for the History of Discoveries and the Haklyut Society by Keith A. Pickering http://columbuslandfall.com/ccnav/shd973.shtml
Celestial Navigation http://www.amtsgym-sdbg.dk/as/rw/seaandsp.htm
Books and Magazine Articles
Barton, Paul Alfred, A History of the African-Olmecs: Black Civilizations of America from Prehistoric Times to the Present Era. (Available as eBook.)
Sep-Oct 2002. Flattening the Earth, by Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mercury Magazine, pp. 34-38. Contrary to popular folklore, medieval Europeans knew Earth was a sphere, and, with the notable exception of Christopher Columbus, most had a pretty good idea of its true size.
Trefil, James, Rounding the Earth; Astronomy Magazine, August 2000, pp. 38-44. Centuries before Columbus, ancient astronomers percieved graceful curvatures in their universe.
Micronesian and Polynesian Wayfinding
Exploratorium site on Polynesian navigation - http://www.exploratorium.edu/neverlost