Quote:If there were, it must have been small and of negligible importance to either environments and sociologies involved.
How about a band of refugees fleeing a political upheaval in their homeland? They might not have been very numerous but may still have settled in Central America....and, of course, they could not return home if they wanted to.
I do get a little tired of people trying to inflate what might at best have been superficial contact between Europeans and Native Americans into some sort of "trade network" or, worse, a "migration." As Charles Mann has noted in his exemplary book, "1491" within a generation of Columbus' arrival we start to see the Native American populations ravaged by common European diseases. Most Native Americans were sickened as the germs were transported along internal trade routes without ever seeing a white man.
Had there been earlier contact we would see the impact of disease organisms long before Columbus.
