Did the Native Americans living in the southernmost tip of South America know about the existence of Antarctica?

by Xxxn00bpwnR69xxX
geniice

There's no evidence of them doing so and there are pretty good reasons to think that they didn't.

The seas to the south of south America are absolutely horrible to navigate. It starts with the roaring forties and gets worse. While its not completely impossible that someone got blow off course and ended up in Antarctica its very unlikely that they would have survived to make it back.

In terms of archaeology no native American artefacts have been found in Antarctica. Two arrowheads were reported as being found in the waters around the South Shetland Islands but later review showed they were either deliberately planted or had been accidentally introduced in the lab.

skadefryd

In addition to the other answer here, you might consider the physics of seeing Antarctica beyond the curvature of the Earth. A good rule of thumb is that the horizon drops 8 inches per mile squared. A person about 6 feet tall standing at sea level can therefore see an object at sea level roughly 3 miles away ((3mi)^2 * 8in/(mi^2 ) = 72in). The tip of the Antarctic peninsula is about 620 miles away from the southernmost tip of Argentina across the Drake passage, corresponding to a horizon drop of about 48 miles (so an individual standing on one end of the passage would have to be 48 miles up in order to see across the passage). So even if Antarctica's tallest mountain were right at the tip of the peninsula, it wouldn't be visible across the passage. This is before atmospheric effects are taken into account, which can double or triple the distance at which something is visible, but that wouldn't be enough to expose the continent to someone standing on South America.