The Long Way Back to Ourselves

5.3

The Other Seafarers: Phoenicians, Arabs, Chinese, Vikings

This episode takes you through Phoenician, Arab, Chinese, and Norse seafaring to ask why none produced a lasting worldwide network the way 15th-century European voyages did. It examines Herodotus's report of a Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa, arguing the sun appearing on the sailors' right while heading west is exactly the implausible detail a fabricator would not invent. It uses a 2021 tree-ring study dating the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows to the exact year 1021, then asks why that landing, unlike the 1492 one, led nowhere. It treats as untestable the explanation that European fragmentation drove the push, though Zheng He's fleets under a single Ming court were larger than Europe's and were shut down by a budget decision.