‘It is altogether possible that the Vedic theory, if thoroughly researched, poses a threat to many of the concepts of modern civilization and the current worldview .’

When one considers the close relationship between the culture, legends of India and of North/South America,Central America,one is intrigued.

History tells us that America was discovered (?) By Columbus and later the Native Indians were brutally massacred and displaced by the Invaders.

Those who were considered to be primitive ,it transpires now,belong to a highly civilised society.

Their history was erased by the Invaders to propagate Christianity.

Considering the fact that these lands are mentioned in ancient Indian texts and the close resemblance of cultures and practices between Indian thoughts and Religion, I dug deep.

It is revealing.

The first settlers in the American Continent were the People of India,some 20,000 years ago.

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It is readily accepted that some twenty thousand years ago primitive Asians crossed the Bering Strait into North America and gradually moved south all the way to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Diffusionists maintained that after this occurred civilized Asiatic people distributed themselves via the Pacific, thereby bringing civilization to the Americas. Isolationists insisted that after the nomadic tribes crossed the Bering Strait, a homogeneous race of “Indians of the Americas” was formed, and the American tribespeople then went about reinventing all culture, duplicating in two thousand years what originally took about six millenniums in the Old World.

Henry Charlton Bastian, author of The Evolution of Life(1907), presented the concept of physicochemical evolution, which gave strength to the isolationists. His theory advocated that the development of civilized man was a result of “a psychic unity of mankind,” rather than social contact. Bastian’s theory of elementargedanke influenced many anthropologists, and today, although the theory is not accepted, it is tacitly acknowledged as far as the conformities between America and Old World civilizations are concerned….

No archeologist today would attribute to prehistoric Europeans the independent invention of bronze casting, iron work, the wheel, weaving, pottery, writing, and so many other cultural elements that were derived from the Middle East. Similarly, the industrial developments in Britain were introduced from elsewhere within the European continent, not developed independently. What then would cause one to insist that what was not possible for the Europeans (duplicating culture independently) was possible for the American Indians? Especially when at the same time we are taught that the Europeans were of superior stock!

It was in 1949 that these opposing views met head-on at the Congress of the Americanists held in New York, which was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. At that time, the diffusionists presented an overwhelming mass of Asiatic-Pacific-American parallels. Nonetheless, much of the diffusionists’ evidence continues to be ignored, and the isolationist view is more widely accepted. The reason for this may be more than empirical evidence or lack of the same. Indeed, it may be the faulty nature of the empirical approach, which depends on one’s imperfect senses and causes one to dismiss facts that do not conform with the prevailing worldview.

The Aryan civilization of India is a logical choice for the beginning of the diffusion of our planet’s civilization. American historian Will Durant, in his book Our Oriental Heritage , described India as the most ancient civilization on earth, and he offered many examples of Indian culture throughout the world. He demonstrated that as early as the ninth century b.c.e. Indians were exploring the sea routes, reaching out and extending their cultural influence to Mesapotamia, Arabia, and Egypt.

Reference and citation.

http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/who-discovered-america

Reprinted from Clarion Call Magazine (1988) with permission.

Image Credit. Wikipedia.