How old could a story be?

[xylaria]

When they dated the hobbit skeleton at many thousands of years old the local islanders were surprised as they had a local legends of the little people coming to steal food off them. They had presumed the stories were hundreds of years old not tens of thousands. You would expect more drift in oral tradition, the longer the time the more drift from facts. The irish told stories of the land across the western sea a thousand years before columbus but they were full of shape shifting seals and singing sea creatures not descriptions of alligators and pumpkins. Iceland had a good description (volcanoes and geezers). It might be the culture of storytelling, some cultures imblish some repeat virbatum.

I have wondered with norse myth about green europe appearing from the retreating ice and the good land lieing between the ice caps and the desert. The land appeared between the fire and the ice. The cow thing just gets daft, but if was integrate people from asia during the bronze age it starts making more sense.

 

[Robson Valley]

The cow-thing could be direct reference to the extinct Aurochs.
The Vikings beat Columbus to the New World by maybe a thousand years. There are identified habitation sites in Newfoundland.
Here in the west, native peoples gradually moved across Beringia from Asia what with the dramatically lower sea levels during the ice age.
Evidence of their passing is flooded now but underwater archaeology has made some confirmation in the last 2 years.

What I find fascinating is that mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and all of the native peoples are descendants of 4 lines. Simply labelled a, b, c and d.
Right down to Tierra del Fuego. The Asian heritage has been well-documented. However, if you do your analysis in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States,
you will find decendants of a, b, c and d. There is also e-type. Northern European.

 

[Wayland]

There is some thought that the Saami actually weathered the ice age in the North which is part of their claim to be the true indigenous population. Jury still out on that one I believe.

The Vikings were closer to 500 years ahead of Columbus, making landfall in Vínland as they called it somewhere around 1000ad.

Interestingly there is an Icelandic tradition that Columbus travelled to Iceland where he first heard of land to the west. Don't know much more than the story on that one though.

 

[boatman]

Chinese whispers is amusing as a game but messages/stories tend to be self-correcting because context and referring back, a generation for example, acts as a control.

Cod fishermen from Europe were among others that crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. St Brendan and fellow monks possibly in the "Dark Ages" certainly got to Iceland. For even earlier there are hints of European settlement suggested in books such as Farley Mowat's The Alban Quest (Farfarers in USA).

 

[Tengu]

Yes, the Grand Banks certainly were known about before Columbus day.

Kirsten Seaver in her book `The Frozen Echo` mentions it. She believes the Greenland Norse were the first to exploit it, and moved their settlements there.

 

[Joe tahkahikew]

What I find fascinating is that mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and all of the native peoples are descendants of 4 lines. Simply labelled a, b, c and d.
Right down to Tierra del Fuego. The Asian heritage has been well-documented. However, if you do your analysis in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States,
you will find decendants of a, b, c and d. There is also e-type. Northern European.

I guess Vikings visited and settled in Greenland long before the rest of europe put it on the map. Maybe vikings had children with Innuit. Innuit can and did travel from Western Greenland to Northern Canada right until recent times, travelling like we do in winter across the ice and frozen land. Those innuit will probably have ended up marrying into local indian groups.

Just incase you doubt that Innuit can travel over far across the sea, the last time I was in Fort Smith (Northwestern Territories), the guy who ran the local hotel it was a Greenlander who'd travelled over one hunting season with his dog team and one year decided to stay. He certainly isn't the only guy to make that trip as my wife's father moved across from Greenland in the 1950's on a hunting trip from which he decided to stay here.

 

[Robson Valley]

Travelling like that for so long and so far takes both skill and confidence.
In the past, I guess, they were called "explorers" and they were self-sufficient.
I never got north of the Churchill River.
Lived, worked and played from Black Bear Island Lake down to Keg Falls.
Always lots of fish to eat.

 

[boatman]

Worst comment I read was that of Nansen on Umiaks, crewed by women he called them bad sea boats which was strange as they covered hundreds of miles at sea.

 

[boatman]

Whether they did or not the boats of the Veneti could certainly have crossed the Atlantic, go forward 13/1400 or so years and Brittany fishermen from the same area were certainly doing so.