Much ink has been split by countless authors on who proceeded Columbus to the Americas. Any number of books are readily available on the subject in Australian bookshops. Yet although the mass of evidence for pre-Columbian contacts seem indisputable, as an Australian historian I feel this subject is nowhere as relevant to Australians, as the more important mystery of who really discovered Australia.

I shall dispense with repeating certain, all too well known aspects of the Amerindian civilisations, in favour of their seldom mentioned and generally unknown, cross-ocean voyages to Australasian lands. Any readers wishing to refresh their memories on the architectural marvels of the Maya and Inca, or the Easter island stone statues, and other over-repeated, as nauseam subjects so beloved of American writers, can find any number of books to bore them!

Even so, America has a part to play in the discovery and exploration of Australia and its island neighbours. The evidence which I present here is startling, yet no more so than any other similar conclusions reached in this book. How long humans have been present in the Americas is a contentious issue. The consensus of opinion is that they were Palaeolithic hunters of Mongoloid stock, which migrated across the then Bering Strait land bridge which linked Siberia and Alaska in ice-age times, entering Alaska by 23000 BP, to disperse slowly southward and eastwards until they finally reached Tierra del Fuego by about 5,000 BP.

Future scientific datings of excavated occupation deposits or human remains, may yet exceed that period of earliest arrivals further back into ice-age times. As these stone-age hunters moved through the Americas, the Indian cultures that gradually evolved from them were influenced by the environments in which they settled. Thus in the western Great Plains of Canada and the Untied States, they remained nomadic hunters until, after the arrival of European settlement.

Further south, in Mexico, by 3000 BC, they became settled farmers, growing staple foods such as beans, squash and maize. About this time similar agricultural centres had developed along the Peruvian coast. Some authorities believe people reached America before 23,000 BP. They found an an eminent champion in the late Dr. L.S.B. Leakey, whose fossil hominid discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania are legendary.

Dr Leakey argued that these earliest human traces "could date back at least 50,000 years, and more likely 100,000 BP". This was the approximate age given him for some hearth stones and crudely flaked eolithic stone implements, recovered from an excavation site in California's Mojave Desert. At present, the earliest fossil relic from the Americas is a skull excavated near Los Angeles, California, dated in December, 1970 to around 22,000 years BP.

These finds suggest that Amerindian civilisation is very ancient and that room exists for the development of far earlier civilisations at present unknown. They also demonstrate that Amerindian Man had ample time to develop a maritime science, and undertake lengthy cross-ocean voyages.

Myans Earth