• In Pompeii, there is a painting of a pineapple plant (native to the Americas and officially unknown in Europe before the Renaissance) on one of the walls.

• When subjected to chemical analysis, many Egyptian mummies have been found to contain large amounts of plant materials, including tobacco and cocaine, both apparently unknown in Egypt at the time.

• American sites have yielded considerable numbers of copper tablets shaped like the hide of an animal; named 'reels'. In 1896, in Cyprus, and subsequently in many Mediterranean excavations, corresponding 'Bronze Age' copper objects, recognised now as ingots have also been found, indicating evidence of a recognised international trading system and contact between the 'Old' world and the 'New' (3)(4).

• Numerous large heads with 'African' features have been discovered in the south American jungles.

As well as these examples there are several other convincing cultural similarities, not least of all the building of pyramid structures, solar worship, mummification, and plenty plenty more.

It is now reasonably argued that the accumulative mathematical probability of so many specific old-world and new-world similarities between cultures, makes it more far statistically probable that contact occurred rather than that it didn't.

(Click here for a more examples of pre-Columbian contact)

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There are several 'universal' myths that have been passed on in the oral tradition, which appear to record the same event with similar details, but from apparently unrelated cultures. The most commonly known of these universal myths is that of the 'Great Flood', with over a hundred separate versions recorded around the ancient world.

 

...How much of a coincidence is it that Egypt's earliest stories record contact with the people 'beyond the pillars of Hercules', and that the earliest common myths in all south American cultures is that of bearded strangers coming from the east across the ocean...

 

  Prehistoric Trade and Exchange - 

We know that a substantial amount of international trade operated, even in prehistoric times. Both metal and certain types of stone were valuable commodities which can be shown to have been moved around the world, presumably in trade. The following examples only scratch the surface of a fascinating subject, worthy of substantial research.

Palaeolithic bead factory. France (35,000 B.P)...

Castelmerle Valley in the Dordogne was the commercial heart of the region. There was a bead making factory using woolly mammoth ivory from Czechoslavakia and soapstone from even further east. The beads were woven into the clothing and there were specialised "factories" making one part of the process. It is believed that the standard 6 mm beads were produced by women. Similar beads have been found as far away as Russia.

 

Egyptian finds in prehistoric Britain: -

Faience is a glass-like material, made by heating a paste consisting of sand or crushed quartz, an alkali such as plant ash, and a glaze, until vitrification occurs. The result is an opaque, brittle material. The turquoise colour of British faience results from using a copper-based colourant for the glaze.

Faience technology was developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt during the 5th or early 4th millennium BC, and its use spread out far and wide over the course of the next two millennia. Thanks to a set of faience-associated radiocarbon dates, some recently obtained at Groningen University in the Netherlands from cremated human bone from Britain and Ireland, we can now confirm that it was being used in this country by the 19th century BC-much earlier than people used to think-and that it continued to be used until around 1500 BC. The know-how to make it did indeed come ultimately from the Near East, but certainly not via Egyptian or Mycenaean traders bringing bags of trinkets for the natives in the 14th century.

The picture that is now emerging is much more plausible, and more interesting, than this far-fetched hypothesis. It now seems that people in Britain found out about faience through links with central Europe in the early 2nd millennium BC. These links arose largely from the demand for tin from south-west England for the central European bronze industry, and it seems that the Wessex 'barrow boys' were able to control and benefit from this tin 'trade'.

Faience beads of segmented and other shapes were already being made in central and east-central Europe at this time. The technique had been learned from eastern Mediterranean faience makers, thanks to a network of contacts stretching across south-east Europe. It seems that the know-how for making faience was one of the exotic luxuries that arrived in Britain as a result of this extensive networking.

There is independent support for the idea that the appearance of faience in Britain and Ireland was indeed related to the tin trade. First, a composite necklace found in a bog at Exloo in the Netherlands contained beads made out of tin, together with others of faience and amber and one made of old, recycled tubular sheet bronze. Some of the tin beads are shaped like segmented faience beads. These echo the famous but lost segmented tin bead from Sutton Veny in Wiltshire that the antiquary Richard Colt Hoare illustrated in 1812.

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba70/feat3.shtml

Sumerians -  It is known that there was a close connection between the early dynastic Egyptians and the Sumerians. The Knife found at the Royal cemetery in Abydoss (right), with its depiction of Gilgamesh, is proof enough, but the following information suggests that the cultural link  may have been stronger than once thought.

The pre-dynastic Pharaohs of Egypt were Sumerians from about 2780 B.C.^[5]. At the time of Sargon (Sargon the Great) Egypt was referred to as Mizir or Dilmun and his tomb (as a predynastic Pharaoh) was found at the royal tombs at Abydos (in Egypt today).

Egyptian hieroglyphs are a slightly modified conventional form of the Sumerian diagrammatic picture-writing which came into use during the rule of Menes and the 1^st dynasty pharaohs; they have the same phonetic values as their parent picture-signs in the Sumerian^[5].

Menes (Manj of Egyptian legend) (Manis of Mesopotamia) (Min or Minos of Greek legend) erected Egypt into an independent kingdom and preserved its independence within the Mesopotamian empire when he succeeded to the throne after his father's death; Menes was the prince of Sumeria and governor of the Sumerian Indus Valley. Menes annexed and civilized Crete and extended his rule to the Pillars of Hercules and Britain^[5].

Menes was the son of Sargon (who had a Queen named Lady Ash^[9]), or "Sargon the Great"^[5] of ancient Mesopotamia and Menes and his dynasty referred to themselves as "Gut"(Goth) (in Indus Valley seals) and "Bar" or "Par"(Pharaoh) (as referred to in Egyptian records).

Menes' Egyptian inscriptions were written in Sumerian script (not the later conventionalized hieroglyphs) and deciphered to match Menes' Mesopotamian and Elam records as well as his official seals in the Indus Valley (where he was a Sumerian governor there until he revolted against his father (Sargon) and annexed Egypt)^[5]. Menes had a son named Narmar or Naram (Naram Enzu) whom he sent to the Indus colony of Edin as a viceroy.

Indus Valley seals - The earliest stamp seals found were used in Iran in 5,000 B.C. Later on archaeologists can use both the trade in seals themselves, as well as the distances between seals and the corresponding sealings, to trace long-distance trade networks. One such set of seals were manufactured around 1,900 B.C. on two important island trading cities in the Persian Gulf -- Bahrein and Failaka. These seals were traded all over the Middle East, and have been found at diverse and distant locations such as Susa in Iran , Bactria in Afghanistan, Ur in Iraq, and Lothal on the west coast of India. By 1,750 B.C. Common Style seals are found in locations ranging from Spain, to Mycenaean Greece, to Marlik near the shores of the Caspian Sea. These seals were made from faience, a less expensive material, and used by smaller merchants. [2]

The first cylinder seals belonged to the now long dead civilization of the Sumerians, the inhabitants of Nippur, Lagash, and other cities on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in what is now Iraq. They spoke a strange language -- neither Semitic nor Indo-European, the family of languages spoken by many later civilizations and the most current inhabitants of the Middle East. Sumerian was an agglunative tongue, bearing resemblance to such diverse agglutinative languages as Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, and Dravidian. Indeed, it was probably some version of the latter tongue that was spoken by their neighbors, the early inhabitants of the Indus river valley. These Indus valley people developed, soon after the Sumerians, their own civilization and unique style of seals. Modern speakers of Dravidian languages are scattered all over the Indian subcontinent, including remnants in Afghanistan and a large number of Tamils in southern India. Seal impressions have been found in the ancient city of Harrapan, in the Indus River valley (modern Pakistan), that had been made by seals found in Lagash in Sumeria (modern Iraq). From 3,600 B.C. in Sumer, and a little later in the Indus Valley, we can find seals made out of a rare high-quality stone, lapis lazuli. These stones could only have originated from rather distant and inaccessible mines in Afghanistan.

The first objects unearthed from Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were small stone seals inscribed with elegant depictions of animals, including a unicorn-like figure in upper left, and marked with Indus script writing which still baffles scholars. These seals are dated back to 2500 B. C. Source: North Park University, Chicago, Illinois.