page_title: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories
section_title: Claims of Egyptian coca and tobacco
hierarchical_section_title: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories / Claims of trans-oceanic travel originating from the New World / Claims of Egyptian coca and tobacco
caption_attribution_description: English: Mummy of 19th dynasty King Rameses II.
context_page_description: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories speculate about possible visits to or interactions with the Americas, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or both, by people from Africa, Asia, Europe, or Oceania at a time prior to Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. Such contact is accepted as having occurred in prehistory during the human migrations that led to the original settlement of the Americas, but has been hotly debated in the historic period.
  Only one historical case of pre-Columbian contact is widely accepted among the scientific and scholarly mainstream. Maritime explorations by Norse peoples from Scandinavia during the late 10th century led to the Norse colonization of Greenland and of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which preceded Columbus' arrival in the Americas by some 500 years. There is also significant evidence of material exchange between the peoples of Siberia and Alaska dating at least five centuries before Columbus' travels to the New World. Genetic evidence presented in 2020 found that some eastern Polynesian populations have admixture from coastal northern South American peoples, with an estimated contact around 1200 CE.
context_section_description: Traces of coca and nicotine found in some Egyptian mummies have led to speculation that Ancient Egyptians may have had contact with the New World. The initial discovery was made by a German toxicologist, Svetlana Balabanova, after examining the mummy of a priestess called Henut Taui. Follow-up tests of the hair shaft, performed to rule out contamination, gave the same results.
  A television show reported that examination of numerous Sudanese mummies undertaken by Balabanova mirrored what was found in the mummy of Henut Taui. Balabanova suggested that the tobacco may be accounted for since it may have also been known in China and Europe, as indicated by analysis run on human remains from those respective regions. Balabanova proposed that such plants native to the general area may have developed independently, but have since gone extinct. Other explanations include fraud, though curator Alfred Grimm of the Egyptian Museum in Munich disputes this. Skeptical of Balabanova's findings, Rosalie David, Keeper of Egyptology at the Manchester Museum, had similar tests performed on samples taken from the Manchester mummy collection and reported that two of the tissue samples and one hair sample did test positive for nicotine. Sources of nicotine other than tobacco and sources of cocaine in the Old World are discussed by the British biologist Duncan Edlin.
  Mainstream scholars remain skeptical, and they do not see this as proof of ancient contact between Africa and the Americas, especially because there may be possible Old World sources. Two attempts to replicate Balabanova's finds of cocaine failed, suggesting "that either Balabanova and her associates are misinterpreting their results or that the samples of mummies tested by them have been mysteriously exposed to cocaine."
  A re-examination in the 1970s of the mummy of Ramesses II revealed the presence of fragments of tobacco leaves in its abdomen. This became a popular topic in fringe literature and the media and was seen as proof of contact between Ancient Egypt and the New World. The investigator, Maurice Bucaille, noted that when the mummy was unwrapped in 1886 the abdomen was left open and that "it was no longer possible to attach any importance to the presence inside the abdominal cavity of whatever material was found there, since the material could have come from the surrounding environment." Following the renewed discussion of tobacco sparked by Balabanova's research and its mention in a 2000 publication by Rosalie David, a study in the journal Antiquity suggested that reports of both tobacco and cocaine in mummies "ignored their post-excavation histories" and pointed out that the mummy of Ramesses II had been moved five times between 1883 and 1975.
caption: The mummy of Ramesses II
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