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Review of America Unearthed S03E07 "Marco Polo Discovers America"

12/20/2014

109 Comments

 
Just in time to coincide with Netflix’s release of a new Marco Polo television series, America Unearthed plans to investigate whether the Venetian traveler to China learned of America from his hosts in the Middle Kingdom during his Asian travels from 1271 to 1295. While some mainstream historians have questioned whether Polo ever actually traveled to China (or just collected traveler’s tales), fringe historians have cited Polo in support of a plethora of interesting and unusual ideas. 

Background

The subject of whether the Chinese came to North America before Columbus is so well worn that I’m not entirely sure how to summarize it without turning this background section into a book. The story begins, more or less, with European speculation that crossing the Atlantic would eventually cause someone to reach Asia. Columbus originally thought that he had reached India when he landed in the Caribbean. From this idea came the conclusion of some early Iberian explorers and writers that the peoples of the Americas seemed Asiatic and therefore likely came originally from Asia. By the eighteenth century this idea was widely accepted; Thomas Jefferson described it in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former.” Because in those days, the reigning history texts claimed that the Flood of Noah was the starting point for discoverable history, the incursion couldn’t have happened that long ago, perhaps within five hundred years (c. 1200 CE) according to scientific literature of the time.

Now here is where the trouble starts. If East Asians came to America, then it stood to reason that various Asian peoples could have come to America at various times. The most famous of these claims is among the earliest. In 1761 the French orientalist Joseph de Guignes proposed that a myth from the Chinese Liang Shu of Yao Silian (c. 635 CE) about the journey of a Buddhist monk to a far eastern land called Fusang in 499 CE was actually an account of a voyage to America, particularly the area now known as British Columbia. He also argued that the Chinese were really Egyptians and that therefore Egypt discovered America. So persuasive were his claims that Fusang appeared on many European maps of America in the late 1700s. The claim fell out of favor until 1875 when Charles Godfrey Leland revived it in his book Fusang: The Discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century. Leland placed Fusang in Mexico on the strength of the now-discredited idea that the Maya religion was pacifist and similar to Buddhism. I’ve covered Fusang in more detail here, but the bottom line is that Gustaaf Schlegel pointed out in 1892 that the story cannot be taken literally and that earlier authors ignored crucial disconfirming details like the presence of horses, not seen in America before the Spanish Conquest. Nevertheless, in 1913 Alexander M’Allan wrote Ancient Chinese Account of the Grand Canyon to argue that the Fusang text and an analysis of Chinese language proved that the Chinese explored the Grand Canyon. Today, John Ruskamp advocates the position that geometric Native American petroglyphs in the Grand Canyon are remnants of this Chinese incursion into America on the basis that they bear a slight similarity to random Chinese pictograms. Chinese writing relies on precision, yet none of the petroglyphs is an exact match.

While some people still promote the Fusang legend as a true account of an American voyage, by and large the story has faded into the recesses of fringe history due to a lack of supporting evidence. The Chinese seem to have had no record of the New World; two of the most important geographic works written in the century before Marco Polo—the Ling-wai tai-ta of Chou Ch’a-fei (1178) and the Chu-fan-chi of Chau Ju-Kua (1225) make no mention of the Americas, and the references to them to Mu-lan-p’i (likely southern Spain) claimed by fringe theorists and the president of Turkey to be references to the Americas are attributed not to Chinese prowess but to Arab sailors. It’s quite clear this land isn’t America since Chou Ch’a-fei talks about how the country’s “ships are the biggest of all. One ship carries a thousand men; on board are weaving looms and marketplaces” (trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill).

On a separate track, in 1827 John Ranking proposed that America had been conquered by “the Mongols, accompanied with elephants,” during the thirteenth century, and that these hordes of the Khan had sailed the Pacific, ravaging American and taking over Mexico and Peru, thus accounting for the “Chinese” characteristics of Central America. He claimed that the Mongols had conquered as far as Rhode Island. In terms of evidence, he suggested that the remains of the mastodon and mammoth, so recently a sensation in America, were in fact the historical remains of the Khan’s elephant army. Further, these elephants were carried on Chinese junks. After reading Marco Polo’s claims about the failure of the Mongols to take Japan, he said it was probable that they continued on to America. He cites Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Inca (9.9) to the effect that the Peruvians retained a memory of the Chinese or Mongols arriving.

This is an interesting case and worth a brief note: Ranking used the non-literal 1688 translation of de la Vega by Sir Paul Rycaut, and in it, the translator states that the story tells (in modern spelling) of “men of an extraordinary size, which arrived at that country in great junks.” Here, though, the “Chinese” junks are an artifact of translation. De la Vega was quoting Pedro Cieza de Leon (Chronicle of Peru 1.52), and in more accurate translation by Clements Markham (which I confirmed with the Spanish original) gives it as “boats made of reeds, as big as large ships.” And the Chinese disappear. (If you’re interested, these “Chinese” giants are the same giants used to support Nephilim theories and famously executed by God for public sodomy; Rycaut, unlike Victorian translators, kept in the sodomy.)

In 1831 the Asiatic Journal summarized Ranking’s book succinctly: “we can only express our utter astonishment that a person capable of appreciating the nature of evidence of any kind, could have ever imposed upon himself so far as to imagine he had adduced one single fact in support of his theory.” Nevertheless, the idea of the Mongols being involved in an Asian incursion to America did not entirely die. The anthropologist Alice Kehoe supports a version of this idea in part with her belief that that the Athabaskan language is Chinese and came to America as a result of the Mongols pushing the Western Xia dynasty out of China. These Chinese, she says, became the Navajo and other Athabaskan-speaking peoples.

All of this is prologue, of course, to the big gun in the field, Gavin Menzies, who has made his career arguing that the Chinese visited America in the fifteenth century, starting with his 2002 book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. In it, he (or, rather, the 130 [!] publisher’s staff members who according to Australia’s ABC rewrote, revised, and produced the book under his name) claimed that between 1421 and 1423 Admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the world and his crew impregnated women worldwide. Menzies’s evidence was paper-thin, relying on a fanciful interpretation of maps (involving “decoding” them to reveal America, Australia, and Antarctica), an argument from ignorance, and (frankly) racist assumptions that “slit-eyes” indicated Chinese people anywhere in the world and that Victorian descriptions of “Mongoloid” bones represented actual Mongolians. Menzies then asserts that the whole expedition was covered up and evidence destroyed to protect imperial China’s economy. I wrote about some of the exasperating efforts to evaluate Menzies’s rapid-fire mistakes back in 2003 and 2004. No documents exist and no artifacts have ever been unearthed to support Menzies’s theory; however, last year Menzies tried promoting anew an eighteenth century Chinese map showing the Americas as a genuine copy of a fifteenth century original. As I pointed out at the time, the map shows the mythical Island of California, a Spanish mistake made in 1510, and therefore cannot be the result of an actual Chinese navigation of California in 1417-1418. Experts, in fact, declared the map a fake made within the last 50 years.

Anyone interested in why Menzies is wrong can visit the very detailed 1421 Exposed website.

Most recently, as I wrote about earlier this week, the historian Benjamin Olshin has revived interest in a map he believes might be an eighteenth century copy of a depiction of the Pacific Ocean and Alaska brought back from China by Marco Polo. Olshin was unable to authenticate the map even after extensive analysis, and the fact that it was delivered to the Library of Congress by Marcian Rossi, a science fiction writer with a track record of creating apparent hoax documents (including Pliny the Elder’s map and manuscript depiction of the Caribbean!), casts serious doubt on the authenticity of the chart. I’ve outlined some other objections to the map’s authenticity in my review of Olshin’s book on the subject. Interestingly the supposed Marco Polo map makes use of the same Fusang claims that were all the rage around the time Rossi first began exhibiting the map in 1904.

Our specific claim tonight on America Unearthed involves the question of whether in the time of Marco Polo the Chinese and/or Mongols built the Berkeley Mystery Walls (also known as the East Bay Walls), a series of disconnected, low, and crude rock walls in the Bay area. Reaching a maximum of five feet in height, these walls all together run at least twenty miles. The only archaeologist who has commented publicly on the walls, Russell Swanson (of whom I can find no information), connected them to rock walls as far as San Jose, fifty miles away, according to fringe history books, suggesting that there was a widespread wall-building effort. In 1997, Swanson wrote in Bay Area Rock Art News (15.7, June 1997):
In the past twelve years, I have visited over forty miles of these stone structures. To call them walls is something of a misnomer. Some do go in a straight line, others twist like a demented snake up a steep hillside, others come in a spiral two hundred feet wide and circle into a boulder with a six-inch knob carved on the top of it. Some are massive, over six feet tall and run for miles.
Virtually no work has been done on them, and little is known about them except that fringe history sources say that they have been reported since the earliest European visits to the San Francisco Bay area. The description Swanson gives, though, suggests that they had some symbolic religious or astronomical purpose; however, while some walls may be Native constructions, local history and legend says many are from the colonial period nd were used to mark land grants and to help clear ranch land.

In 1904 Oriental languages professor John Fryer of UC-Berkeley proposed that the Chinese built the walls, while others attributed them to the Mongols, mostly by comparison to the Great Wall of China. America Unearthed says in its promotional materials that “The only historical precedent for a miles-long, manmade, ancient wall is the Great Wall of China,” which must be quite funny to the people who live near the Long Wall of Quảng Ngãi in Vietnam (16th to 19th centuries), which is almost 80 miles long; the Antonine Wall (40 miles, c. 150 CE) and Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland (73 miles, c. 122 CE); the Roman limes of Germany (353 miles, 1st to 3rd centuries CE); the Walls of Ston in Croatia (about 5 miles, 15th century); the Classical “long walls” of Athens, Corinth, and Megara; etc., etc. There were a lot of walls all around the world. In fact, some of you might even remember (as the show does not) that Wolter “investigated” a supposedly miles-long dry-set stone wall in Hawaii last season, the Menehune Ditch, or Kikiaola.

Is it so difficult to think that the native people of California could also pile rocks into a wall? The argument against it is that the native people built no other permanent structures. Yet in the Old World, the people of Göbekli Tepe and other prehistoric sites in the Near East worked monumentally in stone while living in non-stone buildings, or none at all. 

The Episode

Segment 1
We open with the claim that in 1433 “a powerful empire” launched a fleet in search of “new lands” and that “some” believe they reached America all the way from China. I have no idea where this date comes from since Zheng He died in 1433, at the end of his seventh and last voyage. Then the opening credits roll. After the credits, we travel to San Francisco, California, to view the East Bay Rock Walls (Berkeley Mystery Walls). Wolter says he received a tip about the walls, he wonders why we know so little about these walls. Wolter destroys part of the wall with an hammer (with permission from the same National Park Service he last year accused of conspiring against him) and then examines the damage with a loupe to determine that it was limestone. He then talks with Olav Phillips, who tells Wolter that no professional has studied the wall. (This is true: I asked several archaeologists, and I couldn’t find one who had even heard of the wall.) Wolter concludes from the weathering on the rocks that it is at least 200-300 years old, which is actually somewhat younger than documents suggest that the wall might be, if we can trust 1980s newspaper stories that say that Spanish mission records make mention of it in the colonial period.

Phillips tells Wolter that there are many hypotheses about the walls’ construction. These include Native American builders, the Lemurians of the island of Mu (this is connected to ancient aliens, Mt. Shasta, and Theosophy—don’t ask), and the Chinese. At least Wolter admits Mu was not real.

Wolter suggests that the East Bay walls are “similar” to the Great Wall of China, though to what end I can’t imagine. Wolter says he tested stone boat anchors in San Francisco Bay to see if the Chinese left them “thousands of years ago” but he couldn’t prove they weren’t what they seem to be, Victorian.

Then we go to commercial. 

Segment 2
After both an on-screen and verbal recap, Wolter goes back to Minnesota to study Chinese navigation with (Joe) Gunnar Thompson, a fringe theorist described here as an anthropologist. He holds a PhD, but his dissertation was on affirmative action compliance systems, and his PhD is in rehabilitation counseling. (He did work for his master's degree on speech symbols in aboriginal art and has a 1968 bachelor's in anthropology.) Thompson believes Marco Polo visited Seattle. I studied one of his books years ago, and it’s crap. Just dumb, dumb, crap. His modus operandi is to misinterpret texts and maps to conform to speculative hypotheses and then ignore any contrary evidence. He gives Wolter a history of Zheng He’s expeditions, and he shows Wolter a map of the Chinese view of the world, and he claims that the mythical ring of land around the ocean is assumed to be the Americas. It’s a stretch. He shows another Chinese map of the Americas made in the 1600s, but Thompson falsely claims that it is from the 1400s. The reproduction map is clearly labeled as being from the 1600s on the damn map.

Segment 3
After a recap, Wolter misunderstands the Chinese map as mentioning Marco Polo, whereas Thompson claims that the map is based on Polo’s work. Thompson thinks that the Pope assigned Marco Polo to spy on the Chinese and map North America. This would be a neat trick considering that the Chinese neglected to do so.

Thompson believes that the Ortellius map shows the west coast of North America, but neither Wolter nor Thompson cares to mention that Ortellius drew his maps in the late 1500s—after the exploration of America and 300 years after Marco Polo! Most of his world maps show California, and that is no mystery. Here is the map Thompson shows. It is a 1603 printing of a 1570 original. You can clearly see that California and the “Red Sea” (the Gulf of California) are labeled with their correct Spanish names (while the rest of the map is in Latin), an obvious indication that the American portion was drawn from Spanish—not Marco Polo’s—data. Oh, yeah: The continent is also labeled America. (Full size here.) 
Picture
There is no evidence whatsoever that Polo—who brought no known maps back from China—had anything to do with these maps.

Based on these lies, Wolter travels to China to visit the Ming-era sections of the Great Wall, constructed 200 years after Marco Polo. The earlier walls, from before the Mongol invasion, were located elsewhere. There is, of course, the logical question of why the Mongols would build a Great Wall in America modeled on the one they overran to get into China in the first place. Surely they recognized that it wasn’t very effective! 
Segment 4
After an on-screen recap and a verbal recap, Wolter asks about the less beautiful sections of the Great Wall of China, the sections from before the Ming dynasty. The oldest sections of the wall, from 200 BCE or so, are also built of piles of dry set stones—but Wolter calls his “hard evidence” when it is not hard evidence at all. It’s a stylistic comparison, and one could equally well make the same comparison to the Vietnamese Long Wall I referenced in the background section, which uses the same technique. Wolter visits a restricted area of the Great Wall by special permission of the Chinese Communist government, which means that even dictatorships are actively not suppressing his work, contrary to his repeated claims that governments around the world are in cahoots with his enemies.

This trip to China, however, produced no results other than a few glamour shots of Wolter on the Great Wall, so Wolter moves on to learn about Zheng He.
Segment 5
After yet another on-screen and verbal recap, Wolter now asserts as fact that Marco Polo was a spy for the Pope, and announces his belief that Polo reached America. Wolter emphasizes the “map evidence” that doesn’t really exist, and he then tries to learn about Zheng He and his alleged voyage to America, a voyage fabricated from spare parts and chutzpah by Gavin Menzies in 2002. “All that’s missing is physical proof!” Wolter says. As though that’s a small thing! In real life Zheng He traveled to Africa, which would be amazing enough on its own, but Africa just isn’t sexy enough for American television. A Chinese admiral tells Wolter that he thinks Zheng’s fleets might have made it to America around 1433, but even he admits there is no evidence for this. Wolter says that it’s a “good point” that there is no physical evidence, but he is “more convinced than ever” about Chinese voyages because “the map evidence is strong.” He is still unaware that he hasn’t actually seen a pre-Columbian Chinese map of America

Back in the United States, Wolter travels to Columbus, Ohio’s Heartland Bank to follow up on a tip about a piece of physical evidence. In a safe deposit box, Wolter views an artifact owned by a Dr. Lee. And then we go to commercial.
Segment 6
After a verbal and on-screen recap Dr. Siu-Hueng Lee shows Wolter a disk with Chinese characters of the Emperor Xuande from the fifteenth century. According to Lee, the medallion was found in the Appalachian Mountains in 1993. But with no provenance, there is no way to prove the claim. Lee shows Wolter another piece of evidence, a 1602 map of the world by Kunyu Wanguo that is traditionally believed to have been based on European knowledge gained from the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. (The copy seen on the show is a later Japanese copy.) Lee believes that the absence of Florence and the Papal States on the map proves it had to have been drawn long before, and consequently North and South America (which appear on the map) must have been known centuries—or even thousands of years—earlier. This is frankly ridiculous. The text on the map, written by Ricci himself, reads: “In olden days, nobody had ever known that there were such places as North and South America or Magellanica, but a hundred years ago, Europeans came sailing in their ships to parts of the sea coast, and so discovered them.” Somehow the Chinese were OK with adding that coda to their great discovery! Wolter ignores this and declares the map conclusive proof that the Chinese discovered America before Columbus and then waited until after Columbus to tell anyone about it.

109 Comments
Clete
12/20/2014 02:27:11 pm

What a load of crap. I have a theory myself who built the East Bay Rock Walls. They were built in the eighteen hundreds by Viking from Minnesota, with help from Indians from Cleveland, Pirates from Pittsburgh, Giants from San Francisco, Padres from San Diego and blessed by Angels from California.

Reply
Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/20/2014 04:43:03 pm

Good one.

Reply
Steve StC
1/9/2015 04:37:13 pm



One of the favorite tactics of liberal academics - like Jason - is to attack their fellow academics’ “credentials.” When Jason-and-his-keyboard run up against an academic (and keep in mind Jason Colavito has ZERO initials on the ass end of this name) then they resort to the same attack you see Jason doing here.

However, have you seen jason mention or point to Gunnar Thompson’s participation in the Atlantic Conferences of 2008 in Halifax, or the online conference in 2009 ??

You can see Gunnar’s fascinating paper here -
http://atlanticconference.org/2009/presentGunnar.html

Somehow, Jason has failed to attack the Atlantic Conferences.

Why?





















































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Shawn
5/10/2015 07:31:24 am

If Chinese alien giants could build this wall in northern California 14,000 years before the pyramids in Egypt; why can't we build another wall at our southern border in California today?

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geologuy
7/22/2015 01:30:46 pm

Once again a brief comment on the geological reasoning or lack thereof. It appeared that lichen on the stones was facing a variety of directions. It should be oriented in similar directions for adjacent boulders, as lichen prefer to grow in certain orientations to the sun. Lichen grows relatively slowly so it suggests that the wall is quite young. Additionally there are methods to actually date the lichen that would also help to establish the age of the wall.

The limestone cobble cut in half with weathering appeared to have thicker weathering (brown color) along the long faces of the stone and thinner weathering at the edge. That suggests the stone was weathered, then rolled (by people, rivers, waves etc), that resulted in wearing down of the weathering rind at the edges. The weathering took place long before the stone was put into a wall.

The rest of the episode merits no comment as no science takes place.

He sure gets to see the world on bad science though. It's a good gig.

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John Campbell
7/23/2015 05:14:54 pm

With regards to the Berkley Walls, even seeing them from the comfort of my armchair, I can see they are typical of the dry stone walls seen all over Scotland... walls which I myself have helped to maintain There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that these are of that construction type, but that due to the earthquake-prone region, they have crumbled down much quicker than would be the case in Scotland. The Berkeley Walls have nothing whatsoever to do with the Chinese, who I have no doubt had information on the Americas, whether directly or indirectly. But those walls are of European colonial origin... definitively. The Vikings never reached in to North America to any notable degree, nor indeed the Chinese. Those who build walls are settlers, not visitors.

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Manfred
12/20/2014 02:27:21 pm

I've seen that Gunnar Thompson before on some other show.

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Steve In SoDak
12/20/2014 02:29:58 pm

after reading this I've decided to come out and tell everyone that I'm over 3,000 years old, I "discovered" North America, I'm not an alien or a giant, there is no "big foot" (unless you count Shaquille O'Neils feet) Marco Polo is a game played by kids in a pool so History Channel lets get back to basics and do WWII week, maybe hit some Vietnam Conflict stuff and by all means lets do some ancient history....Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians minus the aliens.

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EP
12/20/2014 02:46:27 pm

"I'm over 3,000 years old"

So am I! I also circumnavigated the world and impregnated women worldwide! Circumnavigated... heh... :)

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Embe
12/27/2014 12:54:03 pm

I'm watching the episode on History Channel now, and all I can say is that Marco Polo may well have gone somewhere beside a pool, but NoAmerica seems pretty unlikely. Also, to Steve in SoDak... there is no history without Ancient Aliens, dude. Listen to those guys. After all, they've got evidence. *G*

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Kaoteek
12/20/2014 02:49:39 pm

I dropped out of History's recent "Who Really discovered America ?" special as soon as Wolter appeared as an expert talking head, repeating his same flawed analysis on rune stones, and such. (So I gave up around the 15 min mark, IIRC, out of the 80+ min running time)

I haven't been able to watch more than 5 minutes of the recent "Wolter hunts a treasure he'll never find" AU episodes.

But somehow, despite my developing allergy to everything Wolter, I'm weirdly tempted to watch this one. Not sure why.

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Zach
12/20/2014 02:57:56 pm

It's sad when the only rational thing that Wolter has said, is that Mu is not real.

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Lost Templar Freemason Giant Pirate
12/20/2014 03:04:51 pm

I can't believe he just whacks an ancient wall with a hammer. No self respecting archaeologist would ever do that, permission or not. Right then and there he exposes that he will do anything for attention/$$ with little respect for science or method.

Then, iirc, he is thwarted by the large rock in the ground. Instead of moving over a few feet and trying again, he exclaims they have learned "all they can learn here". Really? Not that I agree with his destructive methods, but if you are trying to rewrite history, you may want to put in more than 5 minutes with a folding shovel.

It reminds me of the time he dove for treasure a few weeks back. Was it the dutchman's treasure? he hired "experts" to dive with, yet goes down to the "tunnel" alone whilst experts wait up top. (probably laughing their asses off). A little silt stirs up, and he declares that the tunnel is impassable. No one else comes down. But, nevertheless the treasure is back there. He pulls that same crap every week.

He has made a career out of "almost" finding something amazing, with only hoaxes to prove it.

I like how after he learns Zheng He dies on the 7th voyage, he just ignores it and insists his fleet turned around and sailed merrily to North America. And he wonders why mainstream science laughs at him.


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Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/20/2014 03:08:00 pm

Yeah, duh …

By now everybody knows or has reason to know that (A) nobody went much of anywhere until 1492 (or so) … and that (2) anybody who thinks otherwise is some kind of European supremacist racist …

duh ...

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EP
12/20/2014 03:29:33 pm

Yep. Nobody believes that the Vikings came to America before Columbus.

Save your smug sarcasm for your sermons.

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Roger
12/20/2014 04:31:26 pm

Great. Way to go EP, you conjured his ass up.

EP
12/21/2014 05:40:19 am

Couldn't have been me. I've been silent about the Nazis :)

Only Me
12/20/2014 04:39:13 pm

With your history, Phil, I'd suggest NOT bringing racism into the conversation.

Also, as Andy White once wrote:

[ NEWS FLASH: until you begin to play by the rules of science, you will never be taken seriously by science. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.]

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EP
12/21/2014 05:35:36 am

"until you begin to play by the rules of science"

Teh Rev likes to think he has a really scientific mind. You know... because he likes to play with colorful rocks...

.
12/26/2014 04:15:12 am

luv... he may have more of a grounding in the hard sciences
than you or i. you are trying to sound "soft" science as you do
a "put down" on his good friend's actual expertise! be nice!

EP
12/27/2014 06:31:24 am

Get lost, "."! You know nothing of my background and aren't qualified to speculate.

Shawn
5/10/2015 07:13:27 am

Well, except the Polynesians… they went everywhere.

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Kal
12/20/2014 04:23:01 pm

Oh, had I known SW was not 4 miles from my current location messing with Ed Levin Park I would have had to go and pester his film crew! But it looks like he was pretending he was there, because that park is on county land above Milpitas and Fremont, not in San Jose, which is the other side of the valley, (and the greener foothills) and 40 miles from San Francisco. On the Mt. Diablo and Mt. Hamilton side you get the dry hills. (San Jose is actually larger than San Francisco, but we call it 'the city' anyway). The Ed Levin park people know who built the rock walls behind the park. Settlers. As for the ones in Berkeley, probably other settlers. Milpitas has over 74,000 people. San Jose has over half a million. The whole county has a million.

The walls were not there before the Spanish. The early settlers included Portuguese and Spanish ranchers. Since they were in an arid place with little trees they used stone to mark the edge of their territories. The valley and the opposite side, Santa Cruz and all, had a lot more trees being closer to the ocean. They didn't need rock walls. So at least at the county park they're just settlers' walls. They're not that old. It's also possible Ohlone helped to mark the walls but settlers were more common. The walls likely were erected between the 1700s and the 1900s. They are...colonial. Sorry SW. Wrong again. California under the Spanish was settled even before it was an official state, and was a territory of Spain and Mexico. SW doesn't recall that. The city names and trails that lead to San Francisco were all part of a massive mission trail going all the way to the city and up north a bit.

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Kal
12/20/2014 04:28:58 pm

Actually there are some walls in the Santa Cruz hills too and some on the other side of San Jose, so technically if he went to Alum Rock first it would have looked a little like the Ed Levin region. I suppose he thinks Alum Rock refers to some kind of mythical group called the Alum. Lol. It's named after a special rock, but not the KRS. Maybe SW should have went in search of the rock. It's interesting looking up close, but hardly left by giants or aliens.

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Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/20/2014 04:53:39 pm

What do you guys have against Asian people, that you are so dead certain that The Chinese DIDN'T (because they COULDN'T ???) reach North America … ???

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Only Me
12/20/2014 05:11:31 pm

What do YOU guys (you and Scott) have against Native Americans, that you are so dead certain they DIDN'T do a goddamn thing in North America...because they COULDN'T?! Why must it always, always, always be someone else, from another part of the world, who left their mark on the continent?

Better yet, why are you so dead certain mainstream science is WRONG? Don't bother saying you don't follow this belief. Your unwavering support of Scott's crap is proof enough.

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Jason D.
12/20/2014 05:22:05 pm

I have nothing against the Chinese or any other group reaching America pre-Columbus or even pre-Viking. But I have this nasty bad habit of insisting on a thing that some people would refer to as 'evidence'.

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Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/20/2014 05:27:39 pm

They could have, if they'd wanted; Zheng He's ships were more sophisticated than those from the early Age of Exploration. But why would they have wanted to sail across the Pacific? Zheng He sailed the Indian Ocean because the Chinese already knew there were lands there to trade with, and possibly because Zheng He himself, a Muslim, wanted to perform the hajj. The Chinese had no inkling of the existence of land in the eastern ocean beyond Japan, so there was no reason for them to go that way. And, of course, the only reason Europeans wanted to make the reverse voyage is because they thought they could get to Asia that way.

It is still conceivable that the Chinese could have reached the Americas, but the burden of proof is on the more unlikely claim. To demonstrate that the Chinese reached the Americas, you have to have very strong evidence that they did. That's why the Norse settlement of Newfoundland was often disbelieved until the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows. But even before that discovery, the Vinland sagas were stronger evidence for Norse expeditions to the Americas than anything we have for Chinese activity in the Americas. If a genuine 14th-century Chinese account of exploration of lands across the Pacific were to surface, such claims would be taken much more seriously. Instead, all that the fringe advocates seem able come up with is speculation and habitual misreading of maps.

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Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/20/2014 05:38:42 pm

Sorry, I meant "15th-century Chinese account."

EP
12/21/2014 05:33:54 am

Rev., now you're just trolling. You're not *that* retarded.

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Roger
12/21/2014 07:20:53 am

If your going to decide one day that trolling a blog is something productive in your life. Then make a damn effort to be a good troll, and not just the same old boring ass simplistic troll that even the people who agree with you can spot.

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Shane Sullivan
12/21/2014 02:17:44 pm

Rev. Gotsch, I'm pretty sure most of the people who regularly comment on this blog share the (scientifically sound) belief that "Asian people" came to the Americas millennia before any hypothetical fifteenth century Chinese voyage, so I don't really think the race card is appropriate here.

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ScrabblePlayer
12/23/2014 01:17:54 pm

Folks might have gone across Berengia prior to 200,000 B.C
from Siberia if the Calico California area flints and certs got
their shape via a pair of human hands and a sapient brain!!!
Like the Red Sea vis a vis the exodus out of Africa, Berengia saw travel in both directions, and in waves perhaps contingent
on coastlines, and the climate. We must not discount the very
obvious route, even if highly speculative about all Solutreans.

http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/barstow/calico.print.html

EP
12/27/2014 06:33:08 am

Hey, ".", remember what happens when you shitpost?

S.H. link
12/20/2014 05:56:17 pm

Good catch Kal, I'm in the bay area also, Sonoma to be exact and there are walls up here also. One stretches across a good part of a friend of mines ranch, the ranch is from his mothers side of the family. His ancestor come here in the 1790's with the Mexican Army and when he mustered out in about 1810 or so the land was deeded to him by the government. The wall, and you can, if you know where to look, can find small piles of stones that were other walls encompassing the exact area of the land grant. According to the family the other walls were knocked down over the years when more land was purchased and added to the ranch.

I've seen more ( or parts ) of more in Marin , Napa and Solano counties.In this part of California it's not really uncommon and as Kal says, most people (who are aware of them) know where they came from, of course had Wolter bothered to actually bother to contact the county Archaeologists he could have found this out. Or maybe he could have tried UC Berkeley , but of course that would screw up his episode and we cant let facts get in the way ratings can we.










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brian j.
12/20/2014 06:05:36 pm

We used to drive pass the walls between Oakdale and Sonora, every Summer, during my childhood, on our way to theSan Joaquin Valley to visit friends. I'm over sixty, now, but it was common story that the walls were created by indentured Chinese Laborers, in the 1800's, to clear the fields of the massive numbers of large rocks, to facilitate farming/Ranching. I always thought this was common knowledge.

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Kal
12/20/2014 06:11:21 pm

The clear genetic evidence of Asian looking Native Americans from several instances of either island hopping through the Pacific, or polar ice and land bridge hopping from Siberia, at the end of the ice age, point to there being Asians in America long before Columbus. Whether or not they sailed in stone age times or after is not well documented. Also there would be a reason for there not to be records in China of later voyages, before the settlers in colonial times, that most of the voyages to America before it was called that would have bee one way. They never went back. They kept going. They settled here (and in South and Central America). It wasn't until colonial times that ships were built well enough to come and go if they wishes.

It's not like the Scandinavians though as the colonial ones that settled Minnesota and the like were much later. Those colonials wanted to feel at home and carved stones.

Yep, the rock walls of California are colonial. Sure there are also native walls too. Those are older. Alum Rock Park even has some interesting pre-colonial things, which SW apparently ignored, because it doesn't prove his shoddy points.

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Sacqueboutier
12/20/2014 09:09:25 pm

Well, Scott jumped into the pool to relax, got water on the brain, and started playing Marco Polo.

Now we know why Scott has been using so many episodes on cheesy toss-off topics in the past few weeks....to save his precious H2 budget for his trip to China.

The only one on this episode with any credibility at all is the man in China. He seems to know what he's talking about....assuming Scott's translator is being honest.

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Clint Knapp
12/20/2014 11:50:53 pm

Whatever Scott presents, it's worth remembering that he is not in any sort of control over this show. He is not a producer. He is not a writer. He is the host. Nothing more. Budget concerns and materials presented in the show are not his to arrange.

The only thing Wolter has to worry about is how he is presented in conjunction with these ideas and claims. That he does not end his affiliation with the show, however, is rather telling of his unscrupulous nature and inability to be concerned about presenting fictional material as fact.

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Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/21/2014 04:52:50 am

Yes … duh … "America Unearthed" is a TV show

tm
12/21/2014 06:02:35 am

"60 Minutes" is also a TV show. What's your point?

Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/21/2014 06:46:02 am

Excellent point well made … TV shows are NOT all the same, are they … ???

tm
12/21/2014 07:11:35 am

And therefore your point is ... ?

Clint Knapp
12/21/2014 08:54:46 am

Doing some day drinking, Phil?

None of this by any means excuses Scott Wolter from making the conscious decision to lend his face and voice to the show for nothing more than a little exposure for his fantasies (oh, and how exposed they've been...) and money. He may not be in control of the show, but he is in control of his own public image and obviously had the poor judgement to sign a contract to do the job in the first place.

Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/21/2014 09:05:05 am

Well, again (and again) … tTe H2 "America Unearthed" TV shows have a positive value in stimulating and encouraging interest in and discussion of North American history and prehistory ...

tm
12/21/2014 09:35:36 am

Cancer has stimulated a lot of interest in and discussion of the meaning of life and the stages of death. That doesn't mean we wouldn't be better off without it.

Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/21/2014 10:02:13 am

"Bullying" has stimulated a lot of interest in promoting healthier Human interactions ...

Only Me
12/21/2014 10:12:20 am

And your point would be, Phil?

It's become extremely boring watching you play the racism and bullying cards--in the name of fake outrage--just because you're incapable of upholding your side of the discussion.

Matt Mc
12/21/2014 10:37:59 am

The biggest irony about Rev is the fact the he fails to see that this is just a blog and that he has been known to make comments that are mocking peoples ethnic and racial backgrounds.

I can understand why he and Wolter are friends because they both seem to fail to see the truth in things and the hypocrisy in their actions. And both have proven through either the mass media or statements on the internet that they have little to no ethical or moralistic values at all. Additional both have ties to Nazism in the US, Rev was just curious and Wolter likes long car rides and conferences with them, as they say birds of a feather.

I still find it very sad that a person with such questionable ethnic and moral values servers the community in the role of a preacher. For if acts and behaves the way he does on this blog out in the world whatever good he can bring to the community is lost.

tm
12/21/2014 11:05:38 am

Make a list of terrible things, any you like. It would probably be accurate to say that any of them have provoked interest and discussion. That doesn't justify any of them, nor does it acknowledge or address the problems they cause.

As to bullying, one of the most toxic forms of bullying is the act of making unsubstantiated insinuations about another person's character.

Matt Mc
12/21/2014 11:22:56 am

I am not making insinuations, I know for a fact that Rev, saw fit to make fun of both my and Jason ethnic backgrounds, in my cause using a well known slur that is directed at the Irish and making jokes about potato eating, and in Jason's case making comments about the stereotypes of people who are descended from Sicilians.

As for the Nazi comments, Rev freely told us how he attended a speech in the 60's from the then leader of the American Nazi Party because he was curious. Wolter is published by and has worked with Frank Joseph another leader of the American Nazi Party and convicted child molester along with appearing at conventions that have close ties to the American Nazi Party and the stormfront website.

While I do not believe either one of them are Nazi's, I do however question their moral and ethical reasoning. I understand more from Wolter's side, he just wants to sell his books and theories and perhaps Nazi's and White revisionists are a group that buys a lot of his books. In Rev's case I think he just wanted to insult people and did so in a manner with racial attacks, now he could of chosen this manner for many reasons and those are his own, but I do think it is sad that a man who preaches Christianity to a congregation behaves in a manner like that, even if it is on this small little corner of the internet.

So I am not bullying I and stating what happened, in fact I told Rev several times that I would not make comments like this if he simple said "I am sorry I made a mistake", something which he has chosen not to do. In fact I bet if he replies to my comments he makes some kind of snarky reply saying I take thing to serious.

tm
12/21/2014 11:40:37 am

Matt, my last post was directed to Mr. Gotsh, not you.

Matt Mc
12/21/2014 11:50:04 am

My apologies then tm.

Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/21/2014 11:58:39 am

See, "bullying" includes deliberately attributing ideas or connections to another person -- falsely …

It just makes the bully look bad ...

tm
12/21/2014 12:04:46 pm

Yes, it does.

EP
12/21/2014 01:33:23 pm

Rev, your performance in this thread has been quite pitiful. You really need to come up with better material. Or at least delight us with the golden oldies. Everyone loves to be told how long you've known Scott Wolter and that he's not a Nazi :)

Harry
12/21/2014 02:27:18 pm

Phil,

Here's what your "it's only a TV show" line sounds like to me. It sounds like you are saying that no one should criticize it because it is not really worth taking seriously. If you did think that it has serious ideas, then you ought to accept that others will analyze and, where they think appropriate, dispute his claims.

Of course, one need not necessarily believe it has serious ideas to criticize it, because it can still seriously mislead people into false beliefs and must be disputed for that reason, but I do not see how you can say it is "only a TV show" and that it is a serious investigation of history.

Either (1) quit saying that it is not a TV show or (2) go one record saying that it is not a serious investigation of history or (3) explain why those two statements are not mutually exclusive.

Rev. Phil Gotsch
12/21/2014 02:40:03 pm

Harry --

The H2 "America Unearthed" TV shows are commercially produced to attract and hold the attention of a viewing audience, such that viewers will see at least some of the paid adverts … and maybe come back for later shows in the series ...

Obviously, the H2 "AU" Episodes are not of the same character as say, "NOVA" or "Frontline" … But thy have -- IMHO -- a positive value in encouraging interest in and discussion of North American history and pre-history ...

Matt Mc
12/21/2014 03:06:54 pm

There is no positive value when the program knowing uses falsehoods and half truths to make money while at the same time says serious research and institutions are lying and wrong. Much like a person lying about having a masters degree until he is challenged on it and then a few months later he lies that he even claimed to have the masters degree.


What Revs statement further illustrates is that he and his long time friends have no sense of ethics and the truth only fits when it suits there own personal needs. It is not about encouraging thought but rather making money because as demonstrated time and time again from Wolter and co is that selling advertising, books, and personal appearances are more important than the truth.

tm
12/21/2014 04:19:13 pm

Mr. Gotch is interesting with his repetitive posts. I don't think I've ever seen a Gandhi troll before.

Only Me
12/21/2014 04:38:33 pm

Since we're always hearing from Phil, let's revisit the insight of Lynn Brant, former friend of Scott Wolter.

Phil says:

[The H2 "America Unearthed" TV shows are commercially produced to attract and hold the attention of a viewing audience, such that viewers will see at least some of the paid adverts … and maybe come back for later shows in the series ...]

Lynn's insight:

"The goal of this program is not to show that there was pre-Columbian activity in the US. The goal is to entertain the ill-informed, and to make money!"

Phil says:

[Obviously, the H2 "AU" Episodes are not of the same character as say, "NOVA" or "Frontline" … But they have -- IMHO -- a positive value in encouraging interest in and discussion of North American history and pre-history ...]

Lynn's insight:

"Scott believes some truly crazy stuff, but most of what we've seen on this show he knows is nonsense. He vowed on multiple occasions that he would never do something like this. He's the ultimate sellout."


Joe D.
12/22/2014 01:00:16 am

Rev. Phil,

Of course everyone here understands that AU is a television show, but that doesn't mean that the show, staff and host could not provide an honest and researched look into a specific historical point. Which non of these people attempt to do. Also your entire argument comes off as immature.

Quoting you "But thy have -- IMHO -- a positive value in encouraging interest in and discussion of North American history and pre-history". Well we are here discussing per your point so why are you constantly complaining about this blog. It is the exact reaction from the show that you state is a positive point.

Based on this logic we would say that AU has a similar value as Ancient Aliens because no matter the ridiculous claim it helps encourage discussion. Even if that discussion is misinformed or straight out false it is all good in getting people to talk about history.

But then again you are a Rev., it has been my experience that those of a religious profession tend to believe in what they believe in and ignore any argument that counters them.

EP
12/27/2014 06:34:11 am

Hey Rev., you're not the "third party" in Scott Wolter's agate lawsuit, are you?

RLewis
12/21/2014 02:50:22 am

“All that’s missing is physical proof!"
- Signed:
Scott Wolter
Ghost Hunters
Ancient Astronaut Theorists
Alien Abductees
Big Foot Hunters
Loch Ness Hunters
Bible Giant Hunters
Paranormal Researchers
Atlantis Researchers

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RLewis
12/21/2014 03:08:49 am

So China spent hundreds of years exploring and mapping the Americas, and - being extensive traders at the time - kept this secret to themselves. AND, when the Europeans many centuries later try to claim this "new" land, the Chinese never mentioned that this was in fact their land - or if they for some reason did not want to claim it - could have least offered to sell their maps and deep knowledge of a vast area where they had spent valuable resources exploring.

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cmoon
1/3/2015 01:32:03 pm

why does anyone think old-tyme explorers came here to do hard work making rock walls, my grandfather tells of the construction on our family land, his great uncle paid Chinese laborers to clear the land, our land surface was 20 to 40% covered by small rocks, the laborers used carts to remove the rocks to a good spot, ridgelines, or property lines, now our land is safe for cattle to graze, this is proven calif. history, the landowners were never broadcast in interviews, because we,(our family founders), and other locals know those walls are there, who put them there, when and why they put them there, also it took decades to build those walls, how long does rev. phil think marco polo spent constructing walls for my grandpa, talk about stupid!

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Ragnar
12/21/2014 03:41:29 am

This show is the pits! I had to hell of a time just remaining interested enough to finish watching the episode! It sure seems like SW is burning out. I wonder if they will get another season out of AU?

I'm fairly confident that knowledge of America was around long before Colombus was born. I'm sure the Polynesians made it to the Americas and they had settlements that traded with a lot of Asia. Whether the Chinese made it, there's so much disinformation and suppression, thanks to the Powell Doctrine, that I doubt the truth has come out.

China has existed, as a culture, for much longer then the Europeans and so much of what they've done has been lost to history.

Why hasn't anyone asked the Indigenous people of America about the rock walls? Surely they would know something about them?

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Jason D.
12/21/2014 08:35:16 am

I can't see them doing another season, you are right that Wolter is burned out, he seems obviously unsatisfied with what he is doing, he just can't say so publicly. H2 and the production team has taken a show that was interestingly crazy and just made it boringly crazy. Let Wolter be Wolter and make a show more like Season 1, just as fringe crazy but at-least interestingly so.

As for other contact with North America, hopefully some day we'll know. America Unearthed however just hurts the case by associating the idea as a whole with at-best unsupported and at worst ludicrous claims.

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tm
12/21/2014 03:59:08 am

During my four trips to China I don't recall seeing any native American artifacts in any of the museums I visited. My Chinese friends are justly proud of their culture and long history. They have never been hesitant to brag about China's historical accomplishments. If there was any remotely credible evidence that Chinese discovered the Americas, China itself would be shouting it much more loudly than any of the nitwits on AU. Just look at the claims they are making about their "nine dash line" in the south China sea.

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Mark E.
12/21/2014 04:18:13 am

If the Chinese had expeditions going to the Americas why did they end up purchasing New World food items from the Spanish? Sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts were introduced to China around 1560.

Shouldn't there have been a "Zheng He Exchange" instead of a Columbian Exchange? Wouldn't they have brought back the unusual plant and animal species they encountered? Potentially also leaving some invasive Asian species behind?

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dlefhcie
12/21/2014 04:28:15 am

I'm not opposed to the idea of the Chinese reaching America before Columbus. In fact, I would find that an interesting topic to watch a show about. Unfortunately, all I get is America Unearthed, which manages to make a hash of it. Even the title of the episode, "Marco Polo Discovers America", feeds into the underlying eurocentric racism in this show by suggesting that if the Chinese got here it was only because an Italian led them.

If the Chinese were traveling to America for long enough to build the East Bay Walls or for hundreds of years, as Wolter suggests at the end of the show, then why is there no mention in Chinese history at all other than some maps with suspicious provenance? Why is the only physical evidence one little medallion found 4" below the ground? If that medallion survived hundreds of years, then why didn't anything else?

The sophistry of Wolter's arguments was never more obvious than in this episode. Oh, the East Bay Walls look similar to segments of walls in China, well they must have been made by the Chinese, because they are the only ones who ever stacked rocks on top of other rocks. What, the Chinese used fire to send signals and the Native Americans used smoke signals, then they must be related.

When Wolter was told the East Bay Walls looked like portions of the Great Wall built in 200 BC or CE (I can't remember which one), was anyone else concerned Wolter was going to decide the Chinese must have been visiting America since that time? I actually had to pause the show and mentally prepare myself for Wolter's Jump-to-a-Conclusion Syndrome to kick in, but just this one, he didn't take the bait.

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RLewis
12/21/2014 04:53:21 am

Also, WTF with all the "Marco was spying for the Pope" references? Even if true, I fail to see the relevance in this China-discovered-America myth. I get the feeling we'll be hearing more about this supposed catholic conspiracy in the future.

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Jason Colavito link
12/21/2014 04:59:41 am

It's Gunnar Thompson's hobbyhorse. He wrote a book about it called "Marco Polo in Seattle" or something along those lines. I haven't read that book, so I don't know what is evidence is. He's cagey about it (along with the actual subject of his PhD) on his website.

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Manfred
12/21/2014 02:55:20 pm

I saw a comment on Wolters blog that indicated that the last episodes will be full of Templars. Since I'm still in school, I'm not up to date with the complete Templar history, so I did a little bit of looking and there is a supposed link between the Templars learning to fight from the Shaolin Monks in China. So Wolter might be filming another episode while in China. But he also mentioned not having anymore treasure hunting episodes, so it will be interesting what physical evidence he ties to it.

On another point, I feel compelled to tell you that what your doing here is good. Its the closest thing to a peer review of what the shows on H2 are putting out. I work around scientists and the amount of peer review they seek out is daunting. They welcome it. And their papers are so technical in nature that it's tough to see the errors without considerable effort because they are so minuscule mathematically. And relatively few will read the paper. Then comes Wolter with 500k-1m viewers using questionable techniques jumping to conclusions with little or no evidence and some people and Wolter are mad because one person wants to review the info? You keep doing what your doing, if real scientists can welcome unlimited peer review then Wolter should welcome it as well from ONE person.

Denise
12/21/2014 05:17:25 am

I love how when first examining the wall SW's guest/expert talks about the theories on who built the wall, why is there never any mention of the Spanish and Mexicans? When SW talked about the age of the stones I got really irrate then....hello haciendas, missions, ranceros, etc? 200-300 years ago would be right during the time of hispanics moving north to colonize and settle.

Once I read here via Jason that the real maps were basically Spanish in origin....I got mad. thefirst wave of Spanish exploration on North America was all done prior to their attempts to colonize it: Cabrillo on the western coast, Coronado in the west; de Allyon, Narveaz, and de Soto in the East all done by 1539. Now people are perverting the maps made from these explorations to be Chinese? My conclusion: either everybody related to the show are complete liars, or have no basic knowledge of history in general, or not only racist against Native Americans but also against the hispanics (of which America seems to be caught up in now, sadly).

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Kal
12/21/2014 07:50:17 am

SW has done this before when he has found mounds and old grain mills and said it must have been someone other than natives. He's making it up.

In the case of the walls, they are documented. The Spanish settlers and the locals built them as part of the rancheros and missions. Everyone here knows that. It's not even legend or folklore. The evidence that SW seems to completely ignore the Spaniards in favor of in Italian is hilariously silly. After this one nobody should take them seriously. The place is called California, a Spanish word! Most of this stuff is colonial. The natives also piled rocks. One of the tribwes is called the Ohlone, so they could have asked their tribal club. It does exist to this day. Then that would require actual research, which they don't want, so they go for the most obscure idea ever.

I still like the one way trip theory for the Chinese pre colonial groups. Even though ancient China after the dark ages (only in Europe) were more advanced, their boats were barely strong enough to make the journey, and it's a larger ocean. Island hopping occurred to them as it did the other unrelated groups. They kept no records we know of because those voyages were lost. They never returned. Once colonials started coming and going centuries later, they kept records. Did the Columbus people even have translations for Chinese characters? Only for trade. They knew about the Orient and were looking for it. Chinese is a picture writing language. A symbol means something instead of a letter. You see the character for ship and for water and can interpret that differently if you know the context.

The Chinese and India did trade with Europe during the colonial times and they did know of each other. Just because SW didn't find any evidence doesn't mean it wasn't there. He likely doesn't even speak Chinese.

The show AU mixes colonial times with ancient times frequently based on bad evidence, hoaxes, and made up stories. Attempts to ask the right questions of actual knowledgeable people are few and far between.

The genetic facts prove that the Native Americans were here thousands of years before the colonial Europeans ever were there. But since then they are so intermingled they're finding mixed groups with combined cultures.

Marco Polo did not come here.

The Spanish did in colonial times, and they added rock walls, state, city and street names, and even a road that runs through San Jose called the King's Highway, (El Camino Real), implicating they wanted the king of Spain to come and visit the ranchers.

Alum Rock marks the site of a colonial quarry near the site of a pre colonial settlement.

Ed Levin lake is man made from the 1950s or so. The park was on this old ranch land. They had peach orchards. Some of the orchard is still off Piedmont Road, named for many other Piedmont roads, including one in Duluth, Minnesota. I suppose SW will think that thus vikings settled California! Nope. Piedmont is Latin for foothill, and we use the English word 'foothill' to describe the low rolling hills the road is on.

By Colonial times the Chinese could come and easy did come to the Americas. Most of the current Chinese settlements are colonial, as they were laborers and ranch hands. The settling of San Francisco Bay is well known.

The colonials also made it up to Seattle but not Marco Polo or that alleged admiral.

Milpitas is a combination of Spanish and local dialects and means either land of a thousand gardens, or land of a thousand cornfields.

Since it's also Silicon Valley and we're all extremely OCD about detail, we know quite well about the old history of the place.

Sure there are Chinese people who have records of their colonial voyagers, and if you asked properly, have records of those one way trips centuries before that.






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John Ruskamp link
12/21/2014 10:17:50 am

This reference to my ongoing research study is totally erroneous. First, I have never studied anything near the Grand Canyon. Second, the items of my research, some of which are exact matches with known oracle-bone and Bronze era Chinese scripts, are not based solely upon statistical comparison. Rather, the findings of my study are established by independent EXPERT EVALUATIONS WHICH CONFIRM THAT THESE SYMBOLS ARE, IN FACT, READABLE ancient Chinese symbols and writings.Additionally, National Park Service senior personnel state that the age of the most important of these items agree with the known age for use of the script symbols in Asia, and that their forms are not known to be associated with any Native American tribes. In short, this reference to my work by Jason is simply wrong, misleading, and calls into question the credibility of the article.

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Jason Colavito link
12/21/2014 11:47:45 am

I'm surprised it took you a whole day to Google yourself and find this. My comments were based on your published articles and the Chinese characters you compare to petroglyphs there. Your analysis is rather like the people who see straight lines anywhere in the world as Irish Ogham. You need more than one character here or there to make an intentional set of symbols.

Of course anything thousands of years old isn't associated with "any Native American tribes." We can't trace back that far because the migrations and the huge shifts caused by the Contact period make it difficult to trace affiliations back that far in many parts of the country. Your points, in short, are sophistry and imagination masquerading as science.

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dlefhcie
12/21/2014 12:29:04 pm

I went to check out your website. Some of your petroglyph to Chinese alphabet comparisons do look similar to me, but it is obvious others are just wishful thinking. Even the ones that look close lose something when you pull back and see the doodles that are obviously just stick figures of people and animals, mixed into the middle of what you suggest is a complete sentence. Does it really make sense that someone recorded a ritual offering to Da Jia but stopped to draw what looks to me to be a buffalo, a face, a person, a turtle, a snake, another turtle and lets say a deer between and around the Chinese letters? Then in other places, a rock might be "literally adorned by hundreds of other petroglyphs", but you can only identify one of those petroglyphs as Chinese. I hope you also recognize the incongruity in the way you emphasize how some of the petroglyphs are spot-on to the Chinese letters and use that to prove your point, but then accept the ones with only a circumstantial resemblance using...artistic license?...honestly you don't really explain it.

The principle of Occam's Razor says that when there are multiple possibilities, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. To my engineer's mind, that tells me that without more evidence, I will air on the side of assuming these are simply doodles that happen to occasionally match Chinese letters. That being said, I won't stop you from continuing to ply your craft. Shine on, you crazy dreamer.

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EP
12/21/2014 01:36:20 pm

An Ed.D. *and* an MBA?! John Ruskamp must be a genius or something!

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Kal
12/21/2014 10:32:10 am

A scholarly journal, magazine, officially published large market work or news source would not print these opinions, and certainly not mine, for instance. This blog is an editorial op ed review and commentary forum, by the looks of it, never claiming to be a high profile scholarly journal. It may have mistakes and questionable facts, ideas, fringe theories and other forms of 'editorial content' and should not be judged as any kind of high profile peer review, magazine or news source.

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FrankenNewYork
12/21/2014 11:11:00 am

I had so much fun watching this episode. I was laughing out loud. Somebody piled up rocks to make walls? It must be the Chinese! They make walls! I just wish I could get someone to fly me to China , and Hawaii, to chase down nonsense. I'd say Leif Erickson discovered water skiing if you would fly me around the world to do it. But this episode was a great relief from the lost whatever of wherever episodes of late. Bad science can equal great fun.

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John Dunham
12/22/2014 02:08:26 am

I guess I should not read Jason's review first. I literally fell asleep while SW was poking around the great wall. I have bluestone walls just like the California ones on my property in Pennsylvania. Maybe I can get AU to come over to my place and declare that they are old, and must have been put there by Templar Alien Egyptians.

Jason - one question if you have a minute. With all of the fact-free drivel out in the popular press, real science and discovery disappears. Is there actually any evidence (or at least something that a reasonable person might interpret as evidence) to show Eurasian landings in the Americas other than L'Anse aux Meadows, and the post 1492 stuff?

Unless one accepts the Ancient Aliens crap that earlier civilizations could not rub two sticks together and were a bunch of monkeys it would seem unlikely that someone did not stumble on at least northern Canada or Alaska.. Earlier civilizations had amazing technology and one would believe that these people were as curious as the Spanish/Italians of the latter 15th CY. So why would they not go for an explore as Winnie the Pooh would say?

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Jason Colavito link
12/22/2014 04:15:13 am

I supposed it depends on what you mean by Eurasian. There were many migrations into America, the last being the group that became the Eskimo and Inuit, around 1500 years ago. There is some very tenuous evidence that might indicate an occasional ship that blew off course and ended up in the Americas, but none of the artifacts (coins, amphorae, etc.) involved has been conclusively shown to have been brought to America before Columbus. There have been a number of scholars, including Michael Coe in his classic text on the Maya, who have suggested Chinese or East Asian influence on Mesoamerica, though again no artifacts support this.

John Dunham
12/22/2014 04:33:18 am

Its interesting that they don't look into those artifacts or the Maya connections. I know the Inca's had a large seafaring trade up and down the coast but were not really known to travel great distances away from land.

Maybe this is a good Jason pitch - look a the real artifacts and at the real source mythology and do real analysis

Dan
12/24/2014 06:56:55 am

There is also significant evidence of Norse exploration onto Baffin Island in the Canadian arctic.

Kal
12/22/2014 06:16:11 am

SW should not be hitting rocks with a hammer on a county park land on TV. No wonder they keep kicking him out. His forgetting entirely the Spanish heritage of the valley, or ignoring it, is extremely messed up, not scientific, and utterly baffling. Forensic geology. Bah! The Ohlone and the Mexicans are probably laughing about this episode.

Alum was allegedly a precious element the later Gold Rush settlers thought was on Alum Rock and so they built a resort there, not just a quarry, where they had bath houses through natural springs, and a brothel. Some of the natural springs still remain even after the water table fell in more modern times. The remnant of the warm springs and mission trails run through the valley to other settlements.

The area is rich with relatively modern history, after the Mexican history, but SW ignores both in favor of tapping on 300 year old stones. Actually they're from about the 1600s so that's a little off. Some of those stone markers are still land boundaries, (the never ones by Caucasian settlers), had he looked in the freaking county records, which he didn't.

I would recommend Ed Levin and Alum Rock parks not let him back in. Good day. (I'm not actually going to call them, as I';m sure they've seen this mess already, but it was fun to watch).



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John
12/23/2014 11:44:33 am

Discussion and opinion is one thing, scientific proof is something else. I suggest reading Nancy Yaw Davis's "Zuni Enigma" and Dennis Stanford's "Across Atlantic Ice" for starters.

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Jean Stone
12/30/2014 02:35:50 pm

I can't speak to Stanford's book but I have read Davis and wouldn't hold her up as a model of 'scientific proof'.

Her argument consists of claims of various linguistic similarities (which doesn't mean much when you cherry-pick) and some similar customs (which also doesn't mean much when you ignore all the misses).She also claims blood types suggest a link because Type B is rare in other tribes; true in general but she fails to discount other ways the Zuni could have gotten a higher percentage and ignores that there's nothing about the Japanese that makes them any more likely than any other Asian group to have contributed it. She admits that no DNA studies have been done, which is a pretty huge flaw in her 'proof'. She also admits that she can't provide a single example of a 13th century Japanese artifact or other evidence of passage between where her hypothetical pilgrims landed and where they ended up, which is another rather glaring omission. And then there's the question of why literate monks wouldn't pass the knowledge of writing on to the population they allegedly intermingled with...

Other similarities between the Zuni and whatever East Asian group you care to pick don't mean all that much for the same reason that Gavin Menzies' 'evidence' fails to prove anything: When you're looking at two populations that didn't diverge all that long ago (relatively speaking) there are going to be similarities. What she has is a collection of amusing and sometimes strained coincidences.

I'll let someone more familiar with maritime navigation address her arguments that a group of ships could have made it all the way across the Pacific (possible sure but likely?) but will point out that her argument is based on the known fact that Japanese ships traveled to China and Korea, a distance that is only slightly different from, say, the entire ocean that lies between Japan and California where she assumes they ended up. And the Japanese have no history of long feats of navigation in that period. Menzies arguments may be deeply flawed but at least we know the Chinese actually did engage in truly long-distance sea travel during the time period he wrote about.

Since this falls within an area of my interest, let me deconstruct some of her linguistic arguments in a bit more detail:

First off, her work with Japanese is done through translations. This is a problem because it leads her to make elementary mistakes.

She consulted (as near as I can determine) exactly one book on ancient Japanese, an English translation of a Russian original. This Is A Problem. I can read modern Japanese passably well but I can't read the Japanese of the thirteenth century which her hypothetical pilgrims would have spoken. Davis can read neither and using as a reference a text that has gone through several languages first doesn't fill me with confidence.

She cherry-picks words that sound close when transliterated even when she has to distort the meaning to do so. For example, she compares the Zuni Tonashi and the Japanese Tanuki, claiming both mean Badger. The Tanuki is an entirely different sort of creature (whether you mean the real raccoon-dog or the mythical trickster-spirit) and there are entirely different words that actually mean Badger in Japanese, none of which sound a damn thing like the Zuni word.

She also ignores long vowels, such as when she compares Yato to the Japanese 'Yoko' as words describing travel. Unfortunately for her, both of those vowels are long in Japanese, meaning it should be fully written out as Youkou, which significantly alters the pronunciation. She omits the diacritical marks that would have made this obvious even though they were used on another word on the same page.

She also twists words to mean what she wishes they would rather than what they actually mean. In comparing Zawaki and Wakai, she claims the first is Zuni for 'young man' and the latter is Japanese for 'youth'. Wakai is an adjective, not a noun. She wanted Wakamono (or possibly Wakaishu, considerably less common) which reduces the similarity to a triviality. Also, there are specific Japanese words for 'young man' and they sound even less like the Zuni word. She makes the same mistake with Mukashi; if you're using it to refer to a person, there's more to it ('Mukashimono' meaning 'old person') and there are much better Japanese words that mean 'seniors, ceremonial officers, sacred personages and civil authorities' than the incomplete stem she picked Similarly, Kashira in Japanese means Head (as in the part of the body), not 'Top' or 'Summit'. Totally different words.

She also makes an amusing error when declaring that 'I' in Japanese is Watakushi. While this is technically correct, it is about the least common form of the pronoun you're likely to encounter in everyday conversation because it's extremely formal. Use it today outside of, say, a job interview and people will stare at you. Oh, and it didn't become used as a pronoun until well after D

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Jean Stone
12/30/2014 02:42:48 pm

<continued>

Oh, and it didn't become used as a pronoun until well after Davis thinks the contact happened. Oops.

In short, she can't tell the difference between nouns, adjectives and verbs in Japanese, doesn't realize how much the language has changed over time and apparently isn't all that good at figuring out how certain words are actually used, deciding that if it looks close in an English-language dictionary it must be close in Japanese usage both ancient and modern. I'll be charitable and assume mistake rather than malice since errors like this are easy to make if you're consulting dictionaries designed for English speakers and have no familiarity with Japanese going in. It doesn't say much for her scholarship though.

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EP
12/30/2014 03:07:06 pm

Jean Stone, you sound (and I say this in the most non-creepy way possible) like a woman after my own heart :)

Oriana
12/23/2014 02:47:03 pm

A Chinese coin from the Song Dynasty was found in Chinlac, British Columbia, and dated to cca 1125. The site was abandoned by the natives in 1735, which was a pre-contact date for that tribe.

"MacDonald (1984) has questioned Borden’s (1952) post-contact dating of the Chinlac village site in the northern interior of British Columbia. I agree with MacDonald that, based on the native informant’s statement given to Morice (1971:14-19), the date of about 1735 A.D. for the abandonment of the village is probably more accurate. The site would then predate the contact period. The Chinlac site contains many iron artifacts as well as a Chinese coin from the Song Dynasty given a preliminary date by Borden (1952) of 1125 A.D. I have since examined this coin and it clearly dates to the Chih Ho period, 1054-1056 A.D., of the Song Dynasty (Fig. 3)."

Source: http://curious.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/the-question-of-asiatic-objects-on-the-north-pacific-coast-of-america/

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EP
12/24/2014 01:28:53 am

The coin could have made its way through from the Far East via the Russians, who were present in Alaska since the late 17th century. You don't need to appeal to Chinese contanct with America to explain its presence.

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dictionary*nerd
12/24/2014 11:21:39 am

the trade in mastodon and mammoth ivory?
the extensive networks & trade routes???
seems to be either/or if not both in tandem!

Procopius was Worse than Suetonius
12/24/2014 11:36:43 am

Assuming that the Black Death was global, and it
impacts areas of China and India in addition to old
mid-1300s Europe, if it leaped from port to port and
raced along the Silk Routes, did it impact the great
MING fleets Scott Wolter has blundered into? The
Bubonic Plague is near to global, if it reached the
Americas, if there were extensive trade networks, it
MIGHT NOT have arrived via a Ravanok ravaged
Viking longboat "shippe of the dead" for if Asia trumps
Solutrean and/or Basque approaches by a 1000 to 1
or 10,000 to 1 ratio always, lets ask "social network"
questions! Clearly Marco Polo travels to China before
the Bubonic Plague, and the fall of MING is after it.
In A.D 541 a plague hits the Byzantine's hard, it has a
travel pattern like the 1300s epidemic, but its source is
in Ethiopia, not Asia! Procopius is absolutely certain
that Justinian spread it quite deliberately, even though
he too was sick with it but somehow had recovered...

EP
12/24/2014 02:28:19 pm

Look, everybody! "." is trying to sound smart.

Procopius was not somebody's well paid hack... he was a demi-urge!
12/26/2014 04:04:00 am

Lets face it... the good and ethical Christian monk had this
horrid sexist disdain for the Empress and a latent almost
homoerotic love/hate ambivalence where he is drawn to
the person of the Emperor but must trash him horridly. We
know Justinian gets the plague but recovers, he obviously
did not help spread it. Clearly the monk had his bias. It is
rather interesting to see how Islam arrives as people recover.
I think it took Europe 300 years to recover from the 541 epidemic,
and 150 years for Europe to do a likewise after 1350. Seriously.
At a point when a dynamic leader could have unified the Roman
Empire a third time, following in the footsteps of Augustus and
Constantine, we have a malaise and a discontent, and chaos.

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gibbon/edward/g43d/

Did i over-rate both Justinian & Constantine? Procopius writes
like a muckraking pamphleteer. I know that the Federalist Papers
have better worded English than the Anti-Federalist ones, but we
read both to understand the debate. Have we spent 1400 years
trying to understand Islam as we ignore the chaos that gave folks
a reason to bypass politics as usual? Theocracies create a much
simplified format and structure, i like Madison's approach, basically.

EP
12/26/2014 02:23:50 pm

(1) Stop posting.

(2) Go away.

(3) Repear as needed.

Digger
12/24/2014 04:07:44 am

I just read the paper at the end of that post. It is much more pragmatic than the quote above and its source blog post.

I used to live down the street from that museum in Vic, shame on them for sensationalizing. Worthy of discussion, of course, but they leave out a lot of context, purposefully, imo.

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Jeanne
12/24/2014 12:51:20 pm

Marco Polo? Hey, I have a 36 acre boulder farm on the side of a mountain....I saw some scratches on the glacial erratics that MUST be Chinese...and some look like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Send Scott here to check it out...at a nominal fee for usage of our land of course......

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Lost Templar Freemason Giant Pirate
12/24/2014 04:20:47 pm

Just make sure when you contact him, you send it on crumbling ancient parchment in a mysterious unmarked tube. Maybe include some Templar or Viking artifacts that you don't need anymore. Mark the location with a big hooked X labeled "Cursed Treasure Here??".

Watch some old looney tunes if you need some tips on map making.

How else is he going to reenact it in his dimly lit NCIS lab for the first 10 minutes of the show?

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marco polo
12/24/2014 01:20:19 pm

Has anyone seen the preview for the episode where SW discovers that Santa Claus is real and a Freemason?

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EP
12/24/2014 02:29:24 pm

Does Santa have Jesus blood? Or am I thinking of that Glenn Beck movie?

(This joke just made me sad. Fuck this universe.)

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Albert
12/27/2014 04:02:23 pm

I had to laugh when I read this ...

Wolter suggests that the East Bay walls are 'similar' to the Great Wall of China ...

Yes, they are both walls. Apparently, apart from in California and China, no one has ever built a wall.

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EP
12/28/2014 03:38:24 am

I've seen some archaeological evidence of ancient Chinese presence in East Berlin :)

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The Other J.
1/1/2015 07:06:08 pm

Jason said:

"He shows another Chinese map of the Americas made in the 1600s, but Thompson falsely claims that it is from the 1400s. The reproduction map is clearly labeled as being from the 1600s on the damn map."

YES.

I haven't been keeping up with this show because the stupid hurts, but I want them off my dvr so started going through a few. I started with this one. The first thing that made me go hm is when he declared the wall to be 300 years old, and then jumped that back a couple hundred years almost every commercial break.

There's a regular rhetorical technique SW uses, but it seemed more obvious in this episode: He'll introduce something speculative, like Marco Polo might have been a spy, and after the break he'll just assert it as fact. Numbers, like ages and distances, get postulated, and then repeated as certainties. Hypotheses are poses, and then accepted as if the evidence had been presented and agreed upon by consensus during the commercial break.

The thing is, if you're zooming past the commercials, this isn't nearly as effective. It's not effective in the first place, but I wonder if Wolter and/or Prometheus Entertainment actually think they're pulling anything over on anyone. And if so, what does that about how they think of their audience? Do they just assume these History Channel rubes are too dim to follow their inconsistencies, or are they assuming they're not paying close enough attention in the first place?

Reply
Stefan Patejak
1/10/2015 04:32:55 pm

Something that nobody has mentioned about Marco Polo being a spy for the pope. If true, it means that more than a century before Columbus, the papacy new about the existance of America. Yet the Catholic Church does not make any mention of this in its voluminous archives. It also made no effort to send expeditions to bring missionaries to the Americas. After 1492 there were extensive efforts to convert the natives. Before then, nothing. Why?

Reply
Don Moore
2/18/2015 09:08:50 am

Geez Louise. All these attempts at intellectual discussion. It's a TV show. It's states lots of rediculously stupid untrue ideas to get people to watch. I would find it extremely diifcult to believe that the host of the show believes any of what is portrayed. Come on now - like he really believes that 15 or more theories on the discovery of America are all true. Give me a break. Enjoy it for what it is but for Goodness sake don't give any credence whatsoever to any of it.

Reply
Frank Groffie, PG, CEG
11/30/2015 12:56:35 am

I happened on one such rock wall on a hike east of San Jose earlier in November (2015), and I’ve observed a few over the years. It appears to me to have been a deer-hunting blind built by the local Ohlone. I’ve developed a write-up describing the theory based on the topography, vegetation, ethnographic reports, etc. Find it at http://www.frankgroffiesmiscellany.info/files/The-East-Bay-rock-walls.pdf

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