#bitch the native americans already knew about eurasia! ain't no discovery happening there the europeans were just really ignorant!

[hylianengineer]

Pausing in my anthropology homework to come scream at the internet about it, again. In a positive way this time!

Most of us have this conception that the Americas and the rest of the world were super isolated from each other prior to 1492, right? Well, that's not true. We've been lied to by our history classes and Euro-centric perspectives.

From about 1250AD to 1450, both the Norse and an Indigenous North American group called the Thule (predecessor to the Inuit) were both in Greenland. It's kinda uncertain whether they interacted directly, but Norse goods have been found at Thule archaeological sites. Either they were interacting and trading, or they got their hands on Norse stuff some other way - one possibility is by salvaging shipwrecks. Still very cool and mindblowing that the Eastern and Western hemispheres were meeting like that a couple hundred years before most of us are aware of!

But wait, it gets better. The Thule people lived all across the Arctic from Greenland to Alaska into Asia. On the other side of the Bering Strait! They were engaged in trade across the Bering Strait, using boats, for hundreds of years! Way before Europeans had any idea the Americas existed. That's huge. That turned my entire understanding of North American history and interconnectedness with the rest of the world on its head. Holy shit. That's fucking cool.