A Bone to Pick With Historians

“It’s all in the chicken bones,” says George Carter.

Specifically, very old chicken bones from Arizona and New Mexico.

Carter, a geography professor emeritus from Texas A&M; University, relies on those chickens to feather his theory that European and Asiatic seafarers visited America centuries before Christopher Columbus.

Poppycock, other experts say.

Honored in a special session during the Assn. of American Geographers annual meeting in San Diego this week, Carter pooh-poohed his critics as though he believed they might one day come around to seeing the world his way.

“Let’s get on with this matter of chickens,” said Carter, with an impish gleam. “I like them as much as anyone. I like them fried, stewed or otherwise.”

Carter also likes his chickens buried in the desert long enough to back his theories. Chicken lover that he is, who better to pronounce that the 1,000-year-old chicken bones in question represent an early import?

For several decades, Carter has maintained that travelers voyaged across the Pacific long before Columbus. These brave sailors brought along various plants, such as sweet potatoes, cotton and hibiscus, he says.

But the chicken bones, he hopes, will clinch his argument, which has been shot at and greeted with much skepticism. Nonetheless, Carter has persisted.

“The chicken is the added piece of biological evidence,” said Carter, a native San Diegan who turns 80 this month. “The information has been building oh-so-slowly.”

The chicken bones, found in several archeological digs in New Mexico and Arizona, date to at least A.D. 1000, he maintains. And these bones resemble those of Chinese chickens, which were commonly used for sacrifices and divination in East Asia. This means, he says, that people sailed the Pacific with live chickens, passing on a tradition of such religious practices to American Indians.

Today, most experts maintain that civilization sprang up independently in Asia and the Americas. But Carter’s theory flies in the face of that--stipulating that man shared and spread his knowledge. It would also mean that Columbus didn’t discover America.

Horsefeathers, established experts say.

“Would it be impossible for someone to come across? Heck, no. Is there any evidence of this? No,” said Stephen Williams, professor of archeology at Harvard University and frequent critic of Carter.

In fact, according to Williams, Carter’s theories on chickens are about as likely as notions about the legendary Bigfoot or unidentified flying objects.

“George has got this notion about the chicken, but I know that half the evidence he presents is not correct,” Williams said. “George has always been way out. He just uses the evidence he wants to see. There’s no stopping him.”