Distant Sons of Adam: A Newly Discovered Early Voice on the Origin of the Peoples of the New World

An important intellectual problem raised for Europeans by the discovery of the New World was how those lands had been populated if all humans descended from Adam and Eve. One theory was based on an ancient Greek text which claimed that the Carthaginians discovered a large island in the Atlantic. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was believed to be the first (in 1535) to suggest that this passage showed that the New World had been discovered in antiquity. In fact this theory was proposed about eight years earlier in anonymous annotations in a copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. I suggest that the theory was transmitted from the annotator to Oviedo by way of Willibald Pirckheimer’s Germaniae explicatio (1530, 1532). The annotator seems to have been the first to have proposed the Carthaginian origin for the native peoples of the New World, and indeed the first to propose any theory to account for their presence.