[blam]

Zheng He's ship (400ft) compared to Columbus's (85ft).

[blam]

FYI.

[muawiyah]

So, let's return to the Great Mound at Cahokia. The last thread in FR concerning that place had a stone structure buried deep inside.

Chinese who could sail around the world could also have sailed up the Mississippi!

But, I digress and leap ahead of my story. The Sioux Indian sign language uses the human body to configure ideographs virtually identical to the Shang Dynasty characters. As late as 1541 people speaking several Sioux dialects lived in the vicinity of Cahokia. Witnesses at Pacaha's Town (Terre Haute, or "quaking earth") report that no one lived in the Great Plains at the time because there were too many buffalo.

OK, now back on track. The Chinese presence at Cahokia is apparant. There is a variety of brown (or river) birch that lives in Southern Indiana. It grows straight with little prompting and does not break up into clumps. People from Korea have reported to me that they have an identical, and very useful, type of brown birch growing in Korea, but all the others break up into clumps, just like here. I have often wondered who brought the seeds for those birch trees to the Ohio Valley.

[aruanan]

Very cool. Too bad it was abortive like most of China's discoveries and innovations, swept away when the new regime came into power. Sounds a lot like what happened in the 1950's. At least their maritime pioneering made it possible for others with sticking power to quickly spread throughout the world.

[d4now]

Any idea what he used to determine longitude?