Who Actually "Discovered" America? Why Do We Care? w/Dan Walker Seemingly Unrelated S2E9

Up front this is just about which Europeans landed on the Americas first and set up shop. The actual answer beyond that is no one and there are many peoples and histories that populate both continents for millenia before any Europeans managed to cross the Atlantic (or vice-versa?).

Either way, we are digging into the major competing narratives about which White guys traveled where to get at the heart of the question: Who cares? Along the way we'll talk about: Was the inventor of baking powder the most annoying person in Massachusetts? Should all Italian-American stereotypes really have a Louisiana accent instead of Long Island? Where the ancestors of the Pilgrims all Scandanavian? And why are researchers dedicated to making organ transplants more successful so obsessed with a guy on a raft sailing to Easter Island?

Our guest co-host this week is a professional armorer and safety manager as well as a pretty radically nice guy, it is Dan Walker (no link because he does not exist online for you)

All of this plus, why are people so obsessed with finding heroes in the history of European colonial expan...on right...no that one actually makes sense on the face of it...this week on Seemingly Unrelated!

#Columbus #Vikings #ThorHeyerdahl #Yikes

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Bibliography:

Holton, Graham E. L. ‘Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki Theory and the Denial of the Indigenous Past’. Anthropological Forum 14, no. 2 (2004): 163–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/0066467042000238976.

‘Horsford’s Vikings of New England, Pt. 2 | Beehive’. Accessed 1 September 2025. https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2024/06/horsfords-vikings-of-new-england-pt-2/.

Ingstad, Helge, and Anne Stine Ingstad. The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. Breakwater Books, 2000.

Ledger, Paul M., Linus Girdland-Flink, and Véronique Forbes. ‘New Horizons at L’Anse Aux Meadows’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no. 31 (2019): 15341–43. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907986116.

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Reader, The MIT Press. ‘A Colorful History of Baking Powder (And Its Unlikely Inventor)’. The MIT Press Reader, 14 December 2022. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/colorful-history-of-baking-powder-and-its-unlikely-inventor/.

Tyler-Smith, Chris. ‘Human Genetics: Pre-Columbian Pacific Contact’. Current Biology 24, no. 21 (2014): R1038–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.019.