Thor Heyerdahl famously believed that America was colonized from the east. He built a papyrus boat and crossed the Atlantic from Morocco to prove it was possible. It was not the first time he was wrong.
> He was certainly a “doer”. His theories met fierce criticism from academics though.
It seems the privileged place some people give to 'doer', and their decision to define the hard work of academic research as not 'doing', produced the wrong answer. Thor might have done better with another approach.
Those are interesting mythologies, akin to an invisible guy in outer space making a man out of a twig and 2 dingleberries, but does it really have anything to do with where early american people actually came from?
After a couple of genrations, I'm sure early american's had lost cultural knowledge of how exactly they came to be in the americas. After a couple of centuries, for sure all of this info was gone.
Another example of this might be the early viking habitation in north america, which was totally forgotten before other europeans arrived 500 years later...
Myths are not meant to be believed literally, they tell a story about how to live in right relationship to the earth. And that's why I find the first nation stories so valuable - it's a philosophy born of a very different historical trajectory than European culture.
The Beringian Standstill hypothesis states that a group migrated out of Asia 25k years ago and were effectively trapped by glaciers in the temperate coastal plains of southern Alaska (what is now the Gulf of Alaska). When glaciers melted 15kya, sea levels rose and they start traveling south.
(You'll notice lots of references to a great flood - the globally rising sea levels no doubt leading to this myth being prevalent around the world in many cultures, first nations included)
By that point, they'd already been Americans for 10k years. There wasn't likely any conscious realization of this, no cultural memory of "Asia". But they truly were the first Americans, and way earlier than we were taught.
The result is a grand natural experiment - a group of humans completely cut off from Asia/Africa/Europe for millennia. That culture incubated in southern AK for 10k years, then spread out over the Americas for the last 15k, only to run into long lost European cousins 500 years ago. It's that long period of relative isolation that makes the first nation stories so valuable. The kind of morals, myths and values that arose from this unique historical trajectory can be quite different to philosophies of the old continents. Yet surprisingly similar (we are human after all).
Even in more modern times, the details of how a population of people came to be can get lost.
For instance, nobody actually knew where the Romani people actually came from until the 1800s or so, and even then, the theory of a migration out of India (specifically, the Punjab region) couldn't be proven until the advent of modern DNA science.
> which was totally forgotten before other europeans
Was it? They just haven’t realized or cared that it was a different continent rather than a bunch of different islands far in the North.
Vinland sagas were written several hundred years after the last voyages and weren’t lost either (Iceland itself had very limited contact with the rest of Europe though (e.g. it took the plague an extra 50 years to get there).
Other Europeans never knew anything that they could forget…
Nobody cared or had any clue what some “savages” in the North were up to and whether they discovered another random island. If they did it had no impact on them.
Europe was extremely different in the late 1400s compared to 1000 AD, Columbus letters were published in many major cities almost immediately after his return.