I've sometimes seen archaeologists or some fringe historians state that many non-white groups of people came and settled in SA before Europeans did (mainly Columbus, but they dismiss the Vikings landing here too).
Searching online leads to a lot of obvious forgery and uncompeling unconvincing information.
But there was an anthropologist professor on radio this morning saying that Europeans re-wrote history and that black people were discovered in SA by colonialists but they never wanted admit the black man made here before them.
I'd like to know what is the real truth. I tend to always side with the scientific establishment but I'm willing to be open.
There are apocryphal stories of African explores heading west into the Atlantic; the most famous of which is Abu Bakr II, the predecessor of Mansa Musa. According to legend, Abu Bakr disappeared during such an exploratory expedition into the Atlantic.
On the other side of the Atlantic, though, there's no evidence that the expedition actually arrived - if the expedition even existed in the first place. Some people like to point out the Olmec colossal head statues as evidence of African explorers reaching the Americas. But the alleged African features of these statues also correspond to the features of the indigenous populations living in the area today, who show no genetic signs of pre-Columbian admixture with African populations.
As for Polynesians, they almost certainly reached South America before Europeans did, but Native American populations had beat them by many thousands of years. The general time frame for Polynesian contact with Americas is placed around the 1200s CE, but we're missing a lot of the specifics on this one. Unlike the Norse contact with the Americas two centuries earlier, we don't have written records or archaeological sites. What we have instead are linguistic echoes, the spread of sweet potatoes (a South American crop) through Polynesia, and genetic evidence for Pre-Columbian genetic admixture between the Rapanui (Easter Islanders) and indigenous South Americans.
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