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Science

Is This The Oldest Map of North America? 33

Posted by timothy from the christopher-who dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "Scientists from the University of Arizona, the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Smithsonian Institution have used carbon-dating technology to determine the age of a controversial parchment that might be the first-ever map of North America." Update: 07/30 03:04 GMT by T : Bill Reardon writes: "Thought you might like to know there's another story running via the AP on the map. New study says Yale University's Vinland map is a forgery. Poor Yale. First hacked by Princeton, now their map is a forgery."
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Is This The Oldest Map of North America? More

Is This The Oldest Map of North America?

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  • This is just something for people with too much money to get their panties in a tangle about.

    Prehistory isn't prehistory because there wasn't history, but because no documents survived the battle with time. We already know the people traveled to NA before Columbus. This map means almost nothing, it has just because another collectible to the uber-riche. Also arguing about which dead man in the recent past was the first to get here is of absolutely no use, except to some grad student/professor.

  • Old trick (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    Find a very old piece of paper. Write something on it. When they date the paper, they'll think the writing on it was just as old.

    Fools some of the people some of the time...

  • Walter McCrone and the Vinland map (Score:3, Informative)

    by ike42 ( 596470 ) on Monday July 29, 2002 @07:42PM (#3975143)
    Walter McCrone [mcri.org] (who just passed away) was widely known as a pioneer in chemical microscopy. Back in the 70s his analysis of the ink on the Vinland map showed that it was almost certainly a modern fake.

    Now this article suggests that McCrone's analysis was faulty (or at least limited). It is very interesting to see these types debates evolve with the science. Maybe someday DNA analysis even will be able to prove that OJ did it ... or maybe not.

    More info on McCrone's analysis from his site. [mcri.org]

  • Map dated one year after end of pelt trade records (Score:4, Informative)

    by iskander ( 9699 ) on Monday July 29, 2002 @08:42PM (#3975481)

    The article says that the map dates to around 1434AD. That date is entirely probable because the Basques had been trading in Norh America since at least the fourteenth century. Actually, the date is precisely one year after the end of records showing the landing of North American beaver pelts by Basque traders at English ports. The folloqing recycled quote is from Europe's Mystery People: Did the Basques Beat Columbus? by Evan Hadingham, in World Monitor, September 1992, p34-42 (p37):

    Recently, historian Robert Delort, of Switzerland's University of Geneva, discovered remarkable evidence implying that the New World fur trade may go back long before the whaling expeditions and, for that matter, Columbus. Delort has unearthed British customs records indicating that Basque traders landed a heavy volume of beaver pelts at English ports from 1380 to
    1433. Since north European beaver population were already nearly extinct by that time, Delort speculates the source is more likely to have been the New World (the pelts were delivered in rolls -- the way Quebec Indians stored them). Delort emphasizes, however, that his conclusion is preliminary. Certainly the idea is not far-fetched. An Icelandic chronicle from 1412 mentions the presence of Basque whalers in Iceland, a testimony backed up by two contemporary maps depicting Basque whaling ships there.

    Now, the proximity of the map's date (as reported by the linked article) to the unexplained end of the beaver pelt trade, and the connection between the Catholic Church and this allegedly long-lost map (a connection to which the linked article refers only in passing) would go together quite well in the mind of your average conspiracy theory buff. Surely, this suggests that today's governments are not the first in history to protect their citizens from news of an alien civilization. ;) In any case, I just thought I'd toss that in FYI.

  • Are we to infer that the original inhabitants [kstrom.net] of North America had no map making skills?

    • Re:Native Maps (Score:2, Funny)

      by Eccles ( 932 )
      Are we to infer that the original inhabitants of North America had no map making skills?

      Yup; possums, deer, and grizzly bears are particularly poor at cartography. (Eagles are quite good at it, but refuse to give away their secrets by drawing maps.)

    • Re:Native Maps (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Redskins have heap good maps. Scale of 1 foot equal 1 foot. It right outside. Come take a look. How.
      • Redskins have heap good maps.

        What the hell does a crappy football team residing in the nation's capitol need maps for?
        • ShavenYak wrote
          What the hell does a crappy football team residing in the nation's capitol need maps for?
          So they can find their way into and out of the city? (have you ever tried to navigate through Washington D.C.? Well, it's not like disting crops boy. Without precise directions you'll go the wrong way through an under-over or find yourself on Rt. 66 crossing the river into Virginia, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it.)
          • have you ever tried to navigate through Washington D.C.? Well, it's not like disting crops boy.

            I've never disted crops. Never dusted crops either, but that's neither here nor there.

            Is the difficulty of navigating D.C. the reason all our government officials seem to have a permanent look of confusion on their faces?
        • To find the opponent's end zone?

  • The map has the same handwriting as other maps found by the same guy.

    Here is some more information about it and other things that may never be proven real or not.

    http://www.mcri.org/vm_shroud_update.html
  • As a caption under a picture in this article they say "The removed slice was approximately three inches long. Based on the Vinland map's estimated value of $20 million this slice would be worth approximately $40,000" this seems to raise one main question to me. who is going to buy "A small strip of what might have been the first map of North America (map may not have been first and strip contains no portions of anything like a map)". This question leads me to the question of will they buy it from a random person on ebay... to get more serious i hate it when people say things like this. Thats the sort of nonsense trivia i hated in grade school and hate now no one in the world needed them to write that
    • It makes about as much sense as a reporter who sees that Tom Cruise is getting paid $20 million for an upcoming movie -- and then concluding that a small strip of his flesh would earn $40,000 in the role. When, of course, the small strip of flesh would do a better job.
  • http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-07/acs -tvm072902.php [eurekalert.org]

    Where do those spaces come from? [The one between 'acs' and '-tvm'. I didn't put it there]
  • Yup, it's a fake, that's for sure.
    Just look at the writing, it is precisely in line and spaced absolutely perfectly, on a standard European A4 lined notebook sheet.

    Compare that with authentic maps from that period, even with authentic written works.

    That alone makes it a fake. Also, examine the geography of the map overall and compare that with the geography of the North american part.

    And that completely ignores the ink data. Dating the paper doesn't prove that the map is old, only the paper.
  • This article [bbc.co.uk] talks about a study which suggests the map is a fake.

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