John A. Ruskamp: Chinese Explorers in Pre-Columbian America

The Identification of Ancient Chinese Pictograms in pre-Columbian North American Rock Writing ?? ?For centuries, researchers have been debating if, in pre-Columbian times, meaningful exchanges between the indigenous peoples of Asia and the Americas might have taken place.? Many sinologists have written positively on this topic, yet, so far, no conclusive proof has been put forth establishing such trans-Pacific contact as a historical event.? The primary report of this study, simply referred to as Asiatic Echoes, presents the reader with written evidence that in pre-Columbian times, and on multiple occasions, such historic trans-Pacific exchanges indeed took place. Using the novel integration of the legal construct of substantial similarity with the comparative statistical tool of the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient, the Chinese origin of 107 previously unrecognized North American petroglyphs and pictographs is established. For each of these pictogram-glyphs an analytical comparative statistic has been generated for the sometimes-obvious similarity of each symbol's line strokes with the corresponding features of an equally ancient and complex Chinese script pictogram. ?? John A. Ruskamp, Jr. is the Senior Research Analyst for Epigraphic Research. His education includes a B.S. in biochemistry from the Illinois Institute of Technology, three graduate degrees (M.Ed., M.B.A, and Ed.D.) from Loyola University of Chicago, and extensive postdoctoral coursework.