I'm not trying to start nothing, but this crowdfunding campaign could kick your crowdfunding campaign's ass. The team: archeologists, anthropologists, an Aboriginal army unit, shipwreck hunters, and native rock art historians. The goal: investigating mysterious East African Kilwa coins found in Australia, dating from centuries before known non-native contact on the continent. They call themselves the Past Masters, and they want to change Australian history.

Now, Australia has been populated for a while—upwards of 40,000 years, in fact. It is a conspicuously large land mass, with several expansive trading cultures around its perimeter that predated Western contact. Yet, the story still goes that Australia was discovered for the very first time (the first arrival of human settlement notwithstanding) in either 1770 by Captain James Cook, or 1606 by the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon. The presumed likelihood of this theory has declined somewhat with the increase in "facts" and "evidence" of earlier trade linking East Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, China and Indonesia. These coins may not have rested on the beach since they were first in circulation, but the Past Masters believe the region's history is less cut and dried than supposed.

Their project will hunt for the remains of shipwrecks that may be implicated in the East African coin mystery. Additionally they'll try to code-break Aboriginal cave art depicting ships and other clues, possibly re-envision the known trade paths of the silk road, and probably find lots and lots of treasure. I know, I've seen the movies.