Coin found off northern Australia may be from pre-1400 Africa | Hacker News Reader

Coin found off northern Australia may be from pre-1400 Africa

theguardian.com

127 pointscurtis36 comments

Old news (~2013). Australian Geographic had a feature on it years ago. Here's one of their articles: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-cultu...

Apparently they also found Chinese coins https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2014/08/18th-ce...

Personally, having studied Chinese history, travelled the area fairly extensively, and read all of the Ming Dynasty texts around Zheng He's voyages (~1400s), I am sort of convinced it would have been unthinkable for the Chinese not to have visited northern Australia, since (a) presence of land should have been well known / established through local knowledge, currents, clouds, winds, and seabird migrations; (b) they went to so many other places, it seems insane they would stop just after the equator when they already had compass-aided navigation and strong (for the period) navigational astronomy. Still, stranger things have happened...

Wouldn't it be odd for the Ming fleet to have "found" Australia, but not have left surviving documentation?

Is suppose they mightn't have realized the size of Australia.

Manuscripts had to be copied, and the copyists were Confucians who, as a class, had little interest in such things.

That or it may not have seemed like a valuable trade route. Trade requires both sides to have something the other wants that’s also worth transporting the distance.

there's a fascinating audio book called 1434 putting together a pretty convincing argument that many of the European "discoveries" where predated by Chinese.

http://www.gavinmenzies.net/

> pretty convincing argument

I read the printed version of the book and found the nature and quality of the argument to fall somewhere between von Daniken ("we don't know exactly how the ancients built the pyramids, so it must have been aliens") and Thor Heyerdahl ("I can sail this thing so Polynesians must have come from Peru").

Also, noone really cares if some lone Chinese sailor "discovered" America, or some other land, if the knowledge about this discovery was lost. The reason Columbus is considered the one to discover America is because him landing on America's shores started a new era in history, not because he was first human there (there were Native Americans there, after all).

Likewise Indian and East African sailors. They traded extensively with Indonesia. If you look at the map, it is hard to imagine anyone trading with Indonesia not stumbling upon Northern Australia.

It's new to me! I'm one of the lucky 10,000

Edit: From a brief skim of the OP article, this is about a new coin found and references the five coins found in your article. I've only skimmed the articles though so they may be referencing the same thing

This was my first thought as well. Zheng He did not reach Australia, based on what I know of the Chinese sources, but that doesn't mean that is not the source of the coins, as he famously paid for tribute. He was definitely in what is now Indonesia. Northern Australian aboriginal tribes have traded with Indonesia for centuries so a find of this nature shouldn't really be that surprising although it is definitely interesting.

The whole article is full of sensationalism.

1. The only connection to Kilwa is the size and shape of the coin, that's flimsy at best.

2. It's not evidence of direct contact, there are plenty of instances of coins from one place ending up in another with no direct contact.

3. Trade between Northern Australia and Indonesia is already somewhat well established.

4. Similarly Indian ocean trade has been going on for thousands of years.

This might be a cool find and further evidence of trade between Australia and Indonesia but it's not rewriting history.

Well said.

Beringer's Lying Stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringer%27s_Lying_Stones

In case you have to check like I did, Kilwa is in present day Tanzania.

The Portuguese colonized the east African coast but were run off by the Arabs and Africans in the region. Intermarriages between Arabs and the local Bantu led to the creation of a new tribe, the Swahili

It's more of the Portuguese Empire collapsed otherwise they'd still be around till today. FYI, the Arabs in question here were the Omani Sultanate who operated a gigantic slave trade on the East African coast.

Not commonly known, but the highest incidence of Arab genetic markers is in Yemen, followed closely by East Africa. Based only on genetics, an Ethiopian or Somali is much more Arab than an Egyptian, Syrian, or Iraqi. Although culturally speaking East Africa did not adopt/uphold Arabic language and culture as much as the Levant or Egypt.

It's a tangent but I always found it fascinating.

A similar case for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_penny

I feel like I learned something special about archeology from that. So cool to be able to dispute the comings and goings of civilizations.

Whatever the significance of this coin found is, I find it extremely faszinating how many archeological finds turn up in recent years which show how much "globalization" existed in ancient times. Even without direct long distance connections, trade connected most human societies.

But also individuals seem to have travelled further, than one would imagine in absence of travel infrastructure. It has been known for long time how the vikings traded with the mediterranean, but recent findings about stonehenge show, how big the sphere of contribution was.

For all societies which had ocean-going ships doing off-costal travels, I would expect them to have occasionally travelled much further, than most history-writing accounts for. Besides the known viking settlements off the American coast, it would actually be quite surprising, if not a few ships had reached the mainland. So I would not be surprised about any artefacts being found in America, pointing at pre-columbian contacts.

> than most history-writing accounts for

Historical accounts are necessarily a subset of actual history. Just like the fossil record is necessarily a subset of the actual flora and fauna.

I'm sure there's an awful lot of important stuff we don't know about history, just because nobody bothered to write it down, or their manuscripts got lost.

Nobody knows whether King Arthur existed or not, for example.

Yes, the known history is neccessarily a subset of the actual one - but I think we often don't imagine how large the gap is and also often make the mistake of assuming that this gap is smaller than it is. Consequentely, our "models" of ancient societies or the biology of the dinosaurs are far too limited.

I think one reason for us not understanding this gap well is the way history is taught. We learn about the earliest civilizations. We assume that we know a comparable amount from later periods in other regions about other civilizations, but we often don't. In Europe we have a wealth of information about ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, but we know relatively little in comparison about Scandinavia even hundreds of years later.

I was with you until you mentioned King Arthur. We might as well wonder if Gilgamesh and Beowulf were real people, at that point - at least they were local tales.

King Arthur is illustrative of the yawning gap in our knowledge of British history after the Romans left, because nobody there at the time seems to have written anything down.

I understand, but my point is that it's not even a local legend - it's a French story written for French audiences, mostly for entertainment purposes, so there is no point considering it in a historical context. It's like wondering whether Othello was a real Venetian general.

Inevitably I am unfamiliar with the vast majority of the historical literature. However, the historiography of late antiquity and the early middle ages features very much debate as to how much people travelled; the possibility of travel is always entertained.

As for Stonehenge, I am unaware of any substantial connexion with the Vikings. I am aware of recent findings concerning the DNA of those who built it, but the raid on Lindisfarne is separated by at least a millennium from the latest posited dates of construction of Stonehenge.

The monographs I have read concerning Byzantium do not refer to the Vikings particularly frequently. This is unsurprising. The Vikings were important, but not sufficiently important to merit repeated and deliberate reference without some other obvious justification.

Coins last a very long time. A 2000 year old Roman coin could be lost by a Spaniard in the new world in the 16th century. The strike date only provides an upper bound on how long ago the coin was placed. The lower bound is the present.

Is it completely impossible for a coin to fall into the ocean in Kilwa (Tanzania) and just get washed to NE Australia? 1000 years is a long time and could account for a lot of movement in the ocean.

If you mean by ocean currents then yes. Coins sink even in a fast flowing stream, ocean currents are slow. Beyond that it would effectively need to climb a mountain at the other side.

A general idea was it was found on the top part of here: https://opentextbc.ca/geology/wp-content/uploads/sites/110/2...

The misleading headline (likely not written by the author) is meant to imply the possibility of some sort of hitherto-unknown 1300s trade route.

In fact, the article indicates that the most likely scenario is Portuguese traders blown off course from Timor in the 1500s, but the lede is buried quite far down.

Very interesting nonetheless, but bs headlines and buried ledes piss me off.

Agree, ridiculous and misleading headline. The coin's history will never be fully known but there are thousands of possibilities around how it ended up where it did

five of them found on the beach in WWII

alternate explaination..

Yeh i collect coins and i dropped it.. its mine..

Plot twist ... It was a Bitcoin.

Save the jokes for reddit

Great minds think alike. Unfortunately we can only speculate.

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