"Another pre-Columbian book I consumed recently suggests Iroquois' may have had Celtic and or Norse bloodlines mixed in. That would explain blond and redheaded natives in various areas of the continent."

Greenster, I would be curious to know what book you are referring to here.

I've been reading "1421: The Year the China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies. I find the book's tone rather strident, even boastful, in the vein of "as I quite rightly have always thought, X is now proven to be unequivocally the truth." This makes it tough going for me, but the topic is interesting.

A cadre of historians, researchers, scientists, etc have assembled to write against some of the book's more demonstrable gaffes (the claim that the Chinese collected living Mylodons on their ships, in Patagonia, when Mylodons there (and everywhere) died out long, long before said ships could have been built), and some that I would never have noticed (Menzies appears to be strikingly incorrect about the topography of the ocean floor, though he claims to have been the long-time commander of a submarine that lurked in those very areas about which he writes). I keep reading because at the very least, the author mentions a few things that have long been of interest to me--subantarctic islands like the Kerguelen islands, for example.

Menzies makes the claim that Cherokee people (elders) were able to understand Chinese. He claims that many of the tribes in the Americas had Chinese DNA. Elsewhere, I have seen claims made that the Cherokee bloodlines were laced with (alternately) Turkish and Jewish DNA, with the argument being that there was supposedly a great deal of pre-Columbian traffic accross the Atlantic, and not just on the shivery coasts of Greenland. There is a stone that was found near Bat Creek (google Bat Creek Stone if interested) that bears ancient writing . . . and that has been speculated wildly about, and also attributed to certain political intrigues at play in the middle nineteenth century.

I don't buy this idea of large-scale trade/contact before Columbus, whether applied to China or to Europe (or Africa for that matter). For me, the clincher has to do with what happened once Columbus got over this way. If there had been large-scale contact prior to that time, I would have expected such a happening to have been much earlier. I am speaking of the extremely fast spread (over here) of diseases to which Europeans/Asians were more or less immune. Flourishing populations were decimated practically overnight.

A more convincing writer, Jared Diamond, offers the theory that the "primitive" state in which Europeans found many Native American cultures was actually the result of the onrush of disease, fanning out in all directions well ahead of the expeditions, decimating these highly-developed groups. This idea is explored in Diamond's highly engaging "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

(The ones that fail tend to be the ones that cut down trees & fail to manage erosion, btw. From Easter Island to Greenland, and even some of the Native American societies. Diamond is unequivocal on this point, even in the face of the popular stereotype that paints ALL Native Americans as perfect stewards of the Earth.)

So . . . um, where was I again? Oh yeah--I want to see the book you were talking about. I'll add it to my admittedly jumbled store of ideas about who we are and what we are up to on this ball of mostly water.

Herring405