Did China Discover America?
The discovery of the Americas has for centuries been credited to the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, but ancient markings carved into rocks around the US could require history to be rewritten.
Researchers have discovered ancient scripts that suggest Chinese explorers may have discovered America long before Europeans arrived there.
They have found pictograms etched into the rocks around the country that appear to belong of an ancient Chinese script.
Author and epigraph researcher John Ruskamp claims these symbols shown above, found etched into rock at the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are evidence that ancient Chinese explorers discovered America long before Christopher Columbus stumbled on the continent in 1492
They say could have been inscribed there alongside the carvings of Native Americans by Chinese explorers thousands of years ago.
John Ruskamp, a retired chemist and amateur epigraph researcher from Illinois, discovered the unusual markings while walking in the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He claims they indicate ancient people from Asia were present in the Americas around 1,300BC – nearly 2,800 years before Columbus’s ships stumbled across the New World by reaching the Caribbean in 1492.
He said: ‘These ancient Chinese writings in North America cannot be fake, for the markings are very old as are the style of the scripts.
‘As such the findings of this scientific study confirm that ancient Chinese people were exploring and positively interacting with the Native peoples over 2,500 years ago.
‘The pattern of the finds suggests more of an expedition than settlement.’
However, his controversial views have been met with scepticism by many experts who point to the lack of archaeological evidence for any ancient Chinese presence in the New World.
Mr Ruskamp is not the first to claim that the Chinese were the first to discover America – retired submarine lieutenant-commander Gavin Menzies claimed a fleet of Chinese ships sailed to North America in 1421, 70 years before Columbus’s expedition.
However, Mr Ruskamp believes the contact between the Chinese and Native Americans may have been going on for far longer.
He claims to have identified 84 pictograms which match unique ancient Chinese sites in various locations around the US including New Mexico, California, Oklahoma, Utah, Arizona and Nevada.
He says many of these have been examined by experts on ancient Chinese scripts and they appear to forms of writing that went out of use thousands of years ago.
The pictograms he discovered on the rocks of Albuquerque appear to be an ancient script that was used by the Chinese after the end Shang Dynsasty.
Known as oracle bone pictograms, Mr Ruskamp claims the markings record a ritual sacrificial offering perhaps made to the 3rd Shang dynasty king Da Jia and also a divination of an ‘auspicious’ 10 day sacred period.
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