Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact describes alleged interactions between the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and peoples of other continents –
Africa,
Asia,
Europe, or
Oceania –
before the arrival of
Christopher Columbus in 1492. Many such contacts have been proposed at various times, based on historical accounts, archaeological finds, and cultural comparisons.
However, claims of such contact are often controversial and hotly debated. Only one instance of such contact&_160;– the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada c. A.D. 1000&_160;– is widely regarded as definitively proven.
A 2007 study suggests "that the initial founders of the Americas emerged from a single source ancestral population that evolved in isolation, likely in Beringia.... the isolation in Beringia might have lasted up to 15,000 years. Following this isolation, the initial founders of the Americas began to rapidly populate the New World from North to South America."[1]
In the late 1500s, the Jesuit scholar José de Acosta suggested that the peoples of the Americas arrived via a now-submerged land bridge from Asia as primitive hunters, later settling into sedentary communities and cities. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Thomas Jefferson theorized that the ancestors of Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, a viewpoint that came to prevail in the 20th century, as carbon dating and molecular genetics began to shed light on the origins of Native populations.
