My Favorite Fact: Sweet Potatoes Prove That Everything You Were Taught In School Early Humans Was Bullshit

So Dave drafted sweet potatoes in the potato draft even though it's not a potato at all. I wanted to veto, but ultimately I decided not start a fight with Mr Hawaiian Salad because WSD will argue until he dies and it was late in the draft and I didn't have the energy. Now you know though...sweet potatoes aren't potatoes at all. Whole different thing. Kind of like that Louis CK bit about Indians

We, as humans, have known that sweet potatoes aren't potatoes for a long time now, but like..whatever. Fuck it. They're potatoes. 

That isn't my favorite fact about sweet potatoes though. My favorite fact is that they prove that everything they taught us in school about how humans got to North America is bullshit. We know about Columbus. Some people know that the Vikings landed in Greenland and maybe New England. We were taught that in school forever. That those were the first people to land in the Western Hemisphere

WRONG. 

So...the sweet potato is a staple of the polynesian diet. They've been growing it for eons there. Smashing them for millenia and growing into football players that end up at USC and BYU. The sweet potato isn't native to Polynesia. It is native to South America where it is also a staple food of the diet. Now, plants and dietary items cross cultures all the time. Birds could move species, theoretically. Even thousands of miles across the Pacific. You know what birds can't carry? Words. The word for sweet potato is the same in Polynesia as it is in the ancient indigenous language in South America from tribes in Chile and Peru. That means...contact. A group of Polynesians sailed ALLLLLLL the way across the South Pacific in their little canoes, met the people living in South America and they were like "here is a sweet potato as a parting gift, they're awesome. Thousands of years from now a stupid white person will be singing their praises while misidentifying them" and they said thanks and took the plant and the word back home and called it that for the rest of time. Tell me how Polynesia's ass tastes, Christopher Columbus. 

Full episode below