Here's something really cool I learned about a while back ...
The Chinese actually discovered the 'New World' or the Americas much before the Europeans. They sent around a huge fleet in the 1420s. The logic was, hey we're so awesome we should go around the world and show them how awesome we are. So they went around the world, mapped it out, then things sucked for a short while in China, they thought it was bad luck, so they destroyed all their records. The Chinese are renowned for destroying records and erasing history.
How do people know this ... well the Europeans used maps, which came from the Chinese (they'll never admit it though ... cuz we know how much Europeans like to take credit for good things lol .... and how much they WONT take credit for bad things, like the implosion of sub saharan africa). Europeans didn't just set sail to find land, they had a general idea of which direction they should've been going, and looked at maps to help them out. Also, don't believe that myth that people thought the world was flat. Everybody knew the world was round, Europeans just didn't know the exact circumfrance, they thought it was about half of the actual size.
Also, there's a population of Chinese speaking people in South America. This is not due to aliens picking up people from China and dropping them off in the Americas, it's been passed down from that time. There were many artifacts found, when tested by archeoligists and geologists were traced back to material from China, from a period earlier than the European exploration. The Europeans didn't take with them all their Chinese goods, they took their own stuff (like animals and animal habitats).
Cool stuff ! So the Chinese knew about our land much before the Europeans
-_-