Wall of text here, as it's Saturday morning, I'm in bed, and I'm mildly triggered because as usual forum theories trade in scope and realty for
convenient bling... 
Geologists and archaeologists have been obsessively combing the planet for centuries.
They would love to find Atlantis or some other proto civilization. The reasons we can't find much evidence for earlier civilizations are various, for instance that they didn't use stone to the same extent, or the lands they once populated are now flooded or covered in sand dunes. If there was some unknown, glorious, conveniently omnipresent proto civilization out there, they would have left something in a place that was relatively isolated from natural concealment for us to find. No such evidence has yet been found, to the extent that it would suggest a rome-before-rome, or anything of that weight.
It's also goofy to just say "brah, they be sailing all over the place, they must have been more advanced than we think."
There's a logical fallacy, or two, i forget the names, wherein you look at something improbable and think it's amazing - without considering the failed attempts, the amount of time it took to arrive at that end, or recognising the true nature of the event. It's like saying "can you believe that license plate said 5663-8632? Amazing!", or looking at a virus that just mutated to infect humans after billions of generations that failed to mutate that way and thinking it's a nefarious, deliberate, conscious act. Nah, guys, it's dumb luck.
Keep in mind: the oldest knowable civilization - more than just fossil evidence -
as it stands now is, like 3000 or so years old (Sumeria). Evidence exists that aborigines, for one, have existed on Australia for 60,000 years. Do we need a calculator to appreciate how fucking long humans had to populate this earth as widely as they did? It wasn't a few hundred years, of even a few thousand. It was tens of thousands of years. How far could you drag your ass in the 300,000 years since the oldest yet-found modern human bones were found? You've heard of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco? A 300,000+ year old settlement of modern humans.
Note: it's a common trait of people trying to peddle BS that they apply their own tendency towards convenient generalisation to the scientific consensus they're attacking - just because you think you know what happened 10,000 years ago, doesn't mean scientists think
they know, they're just making educated guesses based on evidence they've
so far uncovered.
The tentative consensus at the moment seems to be that the first people to move to the Americas in colonizing populations probably did so by foot over a landbridge around the Aleutian islands as they are today, during a more recent ice age, then slowly filtered down. "Nah man them seas too rough and cold" you say? The climate was different then, the sea levels were different, a lot of ocean water was still locked up in ice sheets, and who's to say these ancient humans couldn't problem solve anyway?
(Is anybody saying "oh land bridges sure are convenient"? Shit no. The development of the theory of continental drift ended an age of rampant land bridge speculation, we're past that)
The population of the pacific islands happened later, starting with southern islands like Fiji and Tonga, reached with the assistance of trade winds and probably accident. Such journeys were assisted by the development of "a twin hulled canoe, (..) extremely efficient for ocean travel" to paraphrase the above article. They weren't gifted fucking motorboats or galleys by some international advanced civilization.
I can hardly imagine how many unknowable souls perished after being swept out to sea by typhoons or likewise, only to fail to land on an island. At least they would probably have had coconuts to eat when they got there, as the coconut tree drops its nuts into the ocean specifically so that they might float to a new island somewhere.
These happened thousands of years before those Vikings came to America, which my op says happened more or less around the time of William the Conqueror!!!
Here's the thing about coming on a forum and presenting some alternate history theory, taken from some homebody's YouTube channel, and wording it as if it is the true truth that only a select group of couch warriors know:
you just come off as wanting to have an in, to know something we don't know, so hard that your mental bs scanner has been tuned down or totally deactivated to serve your ego.
The lopsided historical record my man
nush
pointed out is a real thing. Generally the spread of what has become contemporary understanding has reflected the spread of Europeans. Generally Europeans have written the history books and printed them, and since colonization spread their languages around the world, generally their histories are accepted around the world as reality. It's bullshit and it's not realistic, but it's what's happened. It's slowly changing now. The content of these euro-centric histories doesn't touch on things like the population of the pacific islands, these are matters of the deep past that nobody in Rome or Athens, or anything similar, knew about. The Vikings were the first Europeans we now have confirmed evidence of reaching the Americas. That doesn't imply shit about the actual colonization of the continents, though.
Considering Atlantic trade winds I'd be pretty shocked if a few hundred or thousand Europeans got marooned on the continents before then, but we don't know.
www.theguardian.com
