Columbus, Chicken DNA and My Dad

1915. It seems worlds away from today. My Dad was born in a small farmhouse outside the burg of Colburn 98 years ago today Indiana to Dorothy and Ellis, a young married couple.  He was the first of 8 children, seven of whom lived into adulthood.
Today I am in the midst of a juxtaposition that would have amused my father.  Dad loved history and knowledge.  He and I used to joke about my only being able to remember when his birthday by associating it with the fact the day was also the day of the Battle of Hastings in 1066.  He loved this!

He undoubtedly would have had some wry pronouncement about Columbus Day being on October 12, the anniversary of his landing on what he called San Salvador and was a small island in the Bahamas that is also known as Watlings Island, not the second Monday in October.
Dad and I shared a type of intellect that focuses how things inter-relate.  Words, history and ecology all were parts of the same process to us:  life.  Maybe this mega or meta world view came from being a farmers for generations or from our family coming from Anabaptist roots that recognized the interplay of community, technology, and politics on a very personal level.  Maybe it was both and a thousand other things creating a heritable mesh of nature and nurture  expressed in both of us.  I think he knew how like him I was.  I was 29 when he passed away and I had not really realized how alike we were.  I did not know him when he was 29.  I wasn’t born until he was in his early 40s.  So I didn’t really come to know him until he was close to the same age that I now am.
Whatever the case, were Dad alive I know we would be discussing Columbus and the ever-increasing evidence that the Catalan Captain was so far down the list when it comes to Europeans setting foot in the  “New World”  that it wouldn’t even be worthy of note  had his landing not signaled the coming invasion and genocide from Spain and Catholicism.  He would have loved the “chicken connection” in the current discussion.  While not our only livestock, we did have up to 1000 hens at any one time on the farm.
Castilian, Latin and Catalan were the only languages in which Columbus ever wrote.
Findings published in Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his writings explain that although he wrote in Castilian it was certainly not his first language and his origins are pinpointed  to the Aragon region because of the grammar and the way he constructed sentences.
So the first thing my Dad would do with this information is make some sort of inappropriate joke involving southern European ethnic groups.  My Dad was a product of the rural early 20th Century.  Cultural sensitivity was not high on the list of social expectations.
The second thing he would do would be to begin to wax eloquent about people meeting Columbus showing how the whole “discovery” thing was a cockamamie cover-up of other migrations to the Americas, and just the Southern European take on things.  Even in the 1960s when I was a little kid in grade school  pre-Columbian northern European contact was discussed.  Even little kids were taught about Leif Erickson was The various bits of information that show pre-Columbian contacts with other parts of the world in both trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific exchanges of information, plants, and animals as shown by a long list of evidence such as:

The sweet potato is a plant native to the Americas, and its pre-historic presence in Polynesia is a long-standing anthropological problem.   —  Modeling the prehistoric arrival of the sweet potato in Polynesia Álvaro Montenegro in  Journal of Archaeological Science   Volume 35, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 355–367

But plants might have floated from South America  to Polynesia in despite of the currents and winds flowing in the opposite direction, right?  So how did chickens get to coastal Chile?  Well, no one knows exactly because science cannot prove, it can only disprove.  The evidence as first presented in “Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile” (Read and download PDF.)  shows that chicken bones found in the archaeological site of ElArenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula of Chile,  that are from AD 1000 – 1500, seem to be from the same genetic population as chickens from Polynesian archaeological sites from the same time period and differ from other populations.  These are the earliest known chickens found in the Americas.    This particular journal article also summarizes other known evidence for pre-Columbian contact include

the presence of South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) in pre-European archaeological sites in Polynesia, most notably from Mangaia, Cook Islands, where it is dated indirectly to AD 1000
Linguistic and archaeological evidence suggest that the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), also from the Americas, was present in Eastern Polynesia before AD 1200
Voyaging from Polynesia to the Americas has been proposed in relation to linguistic and archaeological evidence for the occurrence of some watercraft, namely sewn plank canoes, and fishhook forms found in southern California which resemble Polynesian types.
Sewn plank canoes have also been documented in Chile by ethnographers and claims have been made suggesting artifactual and linguistic evidence for Polynesian influence in the Mapuche region of south central Chile

Computer simulations suggest that voyaging eastward from Polynesia in the southern hemisphere where the mid-latitude westerlies are more accessible, is a more likely prospect than a northern route to the Americas