New finds at Cape Espenberg near the Rising Whale settlement provide evidence of trade ties between China, Japan, Yakutia, and Alaska residents.
Archaeologists date the artifacts found - bronze and leather buckles and a bronze whistle - around 600 AD. The type of products suggests that the place of their production could be East Asia.
At the sites and settlements of prehistoric inhabitants of the arctic and subarctic regions of North America, archaeologists sometimes come across tools of labor and hunting, the tips of which are made of native copper and meteoric iron. However, there is no historical evidence of metal smelting, casting, or alloying in the Western Hemisphere north of Mexico prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Due to the complete absence of traces of processing of non-ferrous metals in the places of settlements (only objects made of obsidian - volcanic glass - in the assortment of which were knives, blades, arrows and spears) were found, both of these facts testify in favor of exchange trade.
The Chinese were interested in obtaining ivory in the form of mammoth tusks and walrus tusks, and the people of the Birnirk culture, who lived at that time on both sides of the Bering Strait, being talented hunters of seals, walruses and whales, could well supply them. Further evidence for the trade is ivory armor, a style of overlapping that was developed in Asia a thousand years ago.
A controversial hypothesis was put forward by amateur historian Gavin Menzies, who believed that China discovered America 70 years before Columbus. Menzies bases his theory on an alleged 18th century copy of a 1418 map allegedly drawn by Chinese admiral Zheng He, depicting the New World in substantial detail on the map.
In addition, Menzies believes that the first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere did not come to America by land through the Bering Strait, but it was the Chinese navigators who first crossed the Pacific Ocean 40,000 years ago. Most scientists are of the opinion that the first people appeared in the New World 15,000 years ago, coming across the now flooded isthmus, which was then located on the site of the Bering Strait.
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Confirmation of Menzies's theory is the fact that DNA markers of American Indians and other Native American peoples prove that they are descendants of several waves of Asian settlers.
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