Beware of historical mythconceptions
Fri 19 Jan 2018 11.53 EST
If Rebecca Rideal is to put the rest of us right (Ten historical facts everyone gets wrong, G2, 18 January), she had better get her own information correct. Columbus did not “discover†the Americas, but nor did the Vikings, the Welsh, or even St Brendan. Archaeologists continue to make finds that date human occupation of those continents in millennia rather than centuries, so the answer to the question “Who first discovered the Americas?†should be “Whoever the ancestors of the Lakota, the Apache, the Cherokee, the Maya, the Inca, the Aztecs, etc … happened to have been.†Any other answer writes over 10,000 years of human occupation out of history, and smacks of the unthinking racism all too familiar to me from my 1950s childhood.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/19/beware-of-historical-mythconceptions
