Page 333 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The second line of evidence would involve search for con­
necting links along the route between the entrance to the Medi­
terranean and the Gulf of Mexico. There is a strong case for re­
search along the northwest coast of Africa, in the Canaries

(where Bronze-Age carvings have been found) and the Azores,
in the West Indian islands, and on the coasts of Venezuela. In
these areas even negative evidence would be of importance—
until it can be said that these areas have been explored and noth­
ing of Second Millennium date discovered, the question of con­
tact between the old world and the new must remain open.

Until then all that can be said is that, if there is one single theme
which runs through this book, it is that during the Second Mil­
lennium people were traveling more widely than ever before,
trade goods were traveling even farther than people, and ideas

even farther than trade goods. And that if ever there was a period
in the millennia before our own era when America might have
been reached from Europe or Africa, that period was in the cen­
turies between 1650 and 1300 b.c.
Anyway, in these centuries there were maize-growing com­

munities living in Middle America. And they may have been
visited, very infrequently, by long galleys out of the eastern sea.
Certainly their legends thousands of years later say that they
were.

In Europe we are on surer ground. Three hundred fifty
years ago, when we last looked down upon the continent, we
saw a mixture of peoples of widely different origins and modes of
life in the process of adjusting to each other. Bronze traders and
prospectors from Spain, cattle-herding charioteers from the south

Russian steppes, coastwise congregations clustered round stone-
built communal tombs which had their origin in the eastern
Mediterranean, communities of com-growing fanners who had
been settled in the interior for two thousand years or more, and

forest hunters who had been there almost forever all were
acting and reacting upon each other.
Now, three hundred fifty years later (a period, let us again
remember, as long as from the Pilgrim Fathers to our own day)>

the reaction has stopped effervescing. An equilibrium has een