[HN Gopher] A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
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A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
Author : Michelangelo11
Score : 325 points
Date : 2021-09-24 23:07 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| twirlock wrote:
| I don't understand why dan g heavily moderates our comments while
| allowing links to paywall websites that don't want to be included
| in news aggregation.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| There isn't much to go by here. I mean -- if they could embellish
| with large stone tablet buildings and "giants", we may reasonably
| surmise that the whole tale is a stand-in for simply
| uncharted/unexplored territory. The Norse equivalent of "Here be
| dragons".
| mongol wrote:
| I think the surprising news is that the norse explorations of
| North America was known in southern Europe. Until now I had
| thought it was a quite isolated event.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm not sure of the timeline, but Vikings ships were known to
| sail all the way to Venice.
| sigmar wrote:
| Markland is the Norse name for the Americas (probably should be
| stated more clearly in the article). So yes the description
| could be completely imagined, but this is evidence that word of
| the continent was gossiped from the Norse cultures to Italy.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| https://archive.is/QWGtl
| swalsh wrote:
| Thought i'd give a quick shout out to a book I recently read
| "1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles
| Mann, and his followup book 1493.
|
| The 2 books really changed the way I view the history of the
| contienent, the people who were here before, my view on
| agriculture and disease. Just an all around great read. He does
| use some language I would consider politically incorrect... but
| it's not for ignorance. Indeed, he's clearly spent an enormous
| amount of effort trying best to figure out what language to use.
| Ultimately he concludes there weren't any good "accurate" terms
| that currently exist so he used what was accepted nomenclature.
| It does make parts hard to read though.
| rocketbop wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, I might check it out. I am
| curious about the notion that reading certain terms of words
| language or terms is could be challenging, regardless of
| whether or not that language would be out of usage now.
|
| I would hope that as a society are not moving on a direction
| where people are uncomfortable hearing words they wouldn't use
| themselves or words which are considered incorrect in a modern
| context, it sounds very chilling to me.
| fbn79 wrote:
| Why "Christopher Columbus" and not "Cristoforo Colombo"? In Italy
| the press and media did not convert names into an Italian from
| the '60. We say New York and Joe Biden. Not Nuova Iorc and
| Giovanni Baiden.
| avereveard wrote:
| Funny you claim that, since we do study in school about
| Cartesio and Copernico.
| newfriend wrote:
| Giuseppe Baiden
|
| Giovanni = John, Giuseppe = Joseph
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Cristobal Colon, you mean
| alserio wrote:
| Just complain to Regina Elisabetta
| bluenose69 wrote:
| It's extremely helpful that the first comment in this thread
| points to a non-paywalled version of the article. This seems to
| happen quite a lot, and it says a lot about the HN community.
| Still, wouldn't it be nice if HN automatically inserted a
| paywall-status indication in titles?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Intriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting
| Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where
| the stories of Markland would have predominated.
| fsckboy wrote:
| interesting! here's what wikipedia says:
|
| "In May 1476, [Columbus] took part in an armed convoy sent by
| Genoa to carry valuable cargo to northern Europe. He probably
| docked in Bristol, England, and Galway, Ireland. He may have
| also gone to Iceland in 1477. It is known that in the autumn of
| 1477, he sailed on a Portuguese ship from Galway to Lisbon,
| where he found his brother Bartolomeo..."
| JudgePenitent wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, the source for Columbus visiting Iceland
| was by his son Ferdinand (who said his dad left notes laying
| around and his son figured out he was talking about Iceland) in
| his biography of his father, written in Spanish, the original
| of which is lost; Italian copies were made, which was then
| translated into English as well. I don't know if "Columbus
| claimed" is the right way to phrase this. Ruddock [1] covers
| this topic well and also asks pretty pointed questions about
| the source today, why it exaggerates so much, etc.
|
| [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1796276
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| Isnt Ruddock the same person who claimed that Cabot and a
| friar established the only pre Reformation church north of
| Spanish territory?
| kitd wrote:
| And Bristol fishermen were known to fish Icelandic waters and
| beyond.
|
| A major backer of their voyages was Welshman Richard ap Meryk,
| sometimes elided to Ameryk. There's a theory that the fishermen
| established a processing station in Newfoundland and called it
| Ameryka in his honour, associating the left-hand side of the
| pond with that name in voyagers and cartographers minds.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| That's a fun etymology.
|
| I thought it was well established that the name America came
| either directly or indirectly from explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
| [deleted]
| lodovic wrote:
| I'm pretty sure America was named after Amerigo Vespucci.
| interfixus wrote:
| Markland is frequently referenced by the fourteenth century Norse
| characters in Jane Smiley's novel _The Greenlanders_ [1988]. I
| cannot vouch for the historical accuracy, but the whole thing
| appears otherwise exceedingly well researched (and is hereby
| highly recommended). These people maintained contact with Europe
| almost to the end. Titbits of myth and knowledge will have
| filtered through, not least via the papacy in Rome.
| earksiinni wrote:
| This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would
| have you believe.
|
| First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery
| tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by
| hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid
| zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the
| world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable
| frigid zones (at the poles), and one uninhabitable torrid zone
| (basically the equatorial region). You had European textbooks
| being printed well into the seventeenth century describing the
| torrid zone's literal uninhabitability. Like, literally
| describing areas colonized by Europeans and integrated into
| European economies as unable to sustain any human life.
|
| Second, there are many mentions in medieval European literature
| of pre-Columbian and, in the case of Africa, pre-Henrician
| explorers going beyond Europe's periphery, directly contradicting
| the easy school narratives most of us learned about European
| "discovery". E.g., the voyage of the Zeno brothers [1]. Most of
| these mentions are just that, mentions. The Marckalada/Markland
| manuscript seems notable in that it has a bit more evidentiary
| heft behind it, but my point is that it's not an entirely unique
| document.
|
| I should add that generally speaking, there's a rich tradition in
| history of mercantile contact going well beyond the surviving
| documentary record. The ancient Romans were almost certainly in
| regular contact with the Indian subcontinent and possibly China
| through trade, even though the written record is sketchy.
| Archaeology has helped in this regard. Michael McCormick is the
| authority in this area when it comes to the early medieval period
| or so-called "dark ages" [2].
|
| Edit: In history, be wary of any narrative that presupposes
| isolation. If you dig deep enough, you'll find that it's often
| written by someone long dead with an agenda. Hence medievalists'
| disdain for the "dark ages," which are basically an Italian
| Renaissance construct that got blown up by nationalist Germans in
| the nineteenth century.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Zeno_brothers
|
| [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-
| Communicatio...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| From the article: "...one of the students, Giulia Greco, found
| a passage in which Galvano, after describing Iceland and
| Greenland, writes: "Farther westwards there is another land,
| named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are
| buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build
| them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals
| and a great quantity of birds."
|
| Where are there megalithic cultures in Northern America? Or is
| this evidence of a visit to Mexico?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The point is that this is evidence that scholar(s) on the
| other side of Europe, centuries after the Norse voyages, had
| heard of the lands they had discovered (Markland).
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| I visited Chichen Itza in a guided tour. The guide was a
| local Mayan man. He led us to a structure which had reliefs
| of people. One of the people had trimmings around his face.
| The guide stated that this was a man's curly beard, and that
| in the past this relief had been polychromed, and the color
| used on these trimmings was red. And as if we couldn't make
| the required extrapolations on our own, he said that the
| relief indicated that Mayans had known/may have known of Eric
| the Red. I don't know of other evidence that Mayans of old
| had direct or indirect pre-Columbian contact with curly-
| haired explorers from Europe. It's just that your query
| triggers this reminiscence.
| ummwhat wrote:
| The informal Chinese word for white people is "Lao Wai" which
| literally translates as "old foreign" (the formal word for
| foreigners is Wai gou Ren (foreign country person)). The
| explanation I was given for the informal word is that it means
| "the old foreigners, as in the ones we've known about since
| antiquity."
| earksiinni wrote:
| Fascinating. Is there a "new" foreign...?
| eloisius wrote:
| No, GP heard some folsky etymology. Laowai does not mean
| ancient foreigner. One of Lao lao's meanings is an
| honorific like "old / venerable." Lao Bo laobo uncle, Lao
| Ban laoban boss, Lao Shi laoshi teacher, are all
| honorifics that don't mean really mean "old" (except for
| uncle, which you can use to address a man older than
| yourself, but doesn't mean he's from ancient times). Lao
| Ren laoren does mean "old people" but just regular old,
| not ancient old. Lao Wai laowai just means outsider.
|
| Gu gu means ancient, like Gu Ren guren is ancient people.
| You could construct phrases to mean ancient foreigners,
| modern immigrants, modern foreign people, etc. but I don't
| know of any that would carry more special meaning than
| equivalent phrases in English.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Rome/Constantinople and China definitely knew about each
| other through trade relations, and I'd guess it's quite
| likely that some individuals made the whole trip along the
| silk road long before Marco Polo:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations
| kinghtown wrote:
| My experience living in Taiwan is that those terms may
| literally mean foreigner but their practical usage means
| white/western people. A native or black american would not be
| called that. Also, lao wai is the one they go for when they
| are angry or postering xenophobia amongst each other. I find
| it to be a needlessly othering term but I try to accept it as
| not said with explicitly bad intent.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, the traditional insult is quite different, Yang Gui
| Zi . ("Foreign devils" is the traditional translation.)
| People who are looking to insult foreigners have no need to
| use the ordinary, non-insulting word.
|
| Though this may be less true in Taiwan; I think Yang Gui Zi
| is fairly Maoist.
| garmaine wrote:
| Correct that it is very different in Taiwan.
|
| But generally you're missing the point. (1) Lao Wai (lao
| wai) is an intrinsically othering term, and (2) it's
| generally applied by race rather than by national origin.
| It doesn't matter what the literal translation is. The
| point is about how the word is used.
|
| Here in California many Chinese-speaking transplants use
| the terms Lao Wai or Wai Guo Ren to refer to white
| Americans. I always correct them when they do--pointing
| out that _they_ are the foreigners. It comes off as rude,
| but that 's the point! No one likes to be ostracized or
| grouped based on the color of their skin, and that's
| precisely what they were doing when they used the term to
| refer to white people in the first place.
|
| If I move my life to China or Taiwan, how long do I have
| live there before I am no longer Lao Wai ? What about my
| kids who grow up there, speaking at a native level and
| calling the country their home. Are they Lao Wai too?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > many Chinese-speaking transplants use the terms Lao Wai
| or Wai Guo Ren to refer to white Americans. I always
| correct them when they do--pointing out that they are the
| foreigners.
|
| Consistent with this, do you also insist that they refer
| to the USA as "Zhong Guo "?
| garmaine wrote:
| I don't see that as consistent. The USA isn't the middle
| of the world by any measure.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Zhong [inside] is the opposite of Wai [outside].
|
| (Actually, there are several synonymous words which are
| opposites of Wai , but in the Zhong Guo / Wai Guo
| contrast, the opposite of Wai is obviously Zhong .)
| garmaine wrote:
| My history may be off, but I believe that the Chinese
| named their country Zhong Guo because they believed
| themselves the center of the world. Much like how the
| Romans named the Mediterranean (which means "middle
| sea"). The primary meaning of Zhong is "middle" and it
| gains the meaning of "inside" by the geometric
| implication of the insides of something being that
| thing's middle.
|
| Zhong Guo Ren is a specific term of nationality.
| Likewise with Mei Guo Ren . But Wai Guo Ren is different
| --it is defined only in relation to something else, as
| The Other. That's fine in the context of passport control
| where your nationality matters, and you need to be in the
| foreigner line. But it's not okay when we all live
| together in the same country, speaking the same language
| and with our kids in the same class in school, and you
| _still_ refer to me as The Foreigner. Do you see the
| difference?
|
| Interestingly, A LOT of mainlanders don't know to line up
| in the Wai Guo Ren line when they go through Taiwan's
| passport control, and they get upset when they are told
| to switch. It happens literally every time I'm in the
| airport (at least pre-pandemic). I don't know if this is
| a dialectical, cultural, or propaganda problem, but it
| seems related.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > My history may be off, but I believe that the Chinese
| named their country Zhong Guo because they believed
| themselves the center of the world.
|
| Your history is off; the term is very old and does not
| even originally refer to all of China. It's also the name
| of a small, non-central part of Japan.
|
| > Interestingly, A LOT of mainlanders don't know to line
| up in the Wai Guo Ren line when they go through Taiwan's
| passport control, and they get upset when they are told
| to switch.
|
| I think they have a point here; putting mainlanders in
| the Wai Guo Ren line would seem to be an explicit
| contravention of the One China Policy.
| ummwhat wrote:
| The best summary of the word that I've seen is that its a
| lot like "gringo". Its status as pejorative or descriptive
| or even endearing depends on how it's said and the context
| in which it is said and on the person saying it. World of
| difference between "ey gringo, since when you drink tecate"
| and "what you doing in our neighborhood gringo".
| seniorivn wrote:
| would be wonderful if people thought the same about n
| word
| [deleted]
| prewett wrote:
| Lao is often use as a colloquial form of respect. So "ba"
| means "father", so "lao ba" is kind of like "my old man".
| "Lao ban" (ban meaning business owner / boss) is "boss".
| Wives might call their husband "lao gong". I think "jiu4" is
| old as in the opposite of new (xin1), as in Jiujinshan (San
| Francisco, literal, old gold mountain).
| dheera wrote:
| Yes, but "lao wai" is not actually a particularly
| respectful usage of "lao". It's usually said with the
| intent of excluding someone, which is inherently not a
| respectful thing to do. Respectful uses of "lao" are not
| used to exclude someone from the group.
|
| If it is absolutely necessary to refer to someone's
| exclusion for logistical (e.g. visa, legal) reasons the
| usual way to say it is Wai Guo Ren ,Wai Ji Ren ,Wai Bin ,
| the latter of which is usually the most formal and
| respectful.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I have read that Jiu Jin Shan originated as the term for
| the mountain of silver the foreigners who came to trade
| silver for silk must have had somewhere. (They did have
| such a mountain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Rico
| ) "Gold" is, in this analysis, just a more respectful way
| to refer to silver.
|
| I'm curious when and how the name might have attached
| itself to San Francisco, which is not near Potosi.
| mc32 wrote:
| For SF there are two translations, jio jin shan and san fan
| shi. It depends on the origin of the speaker.
| uranusjr wrote:
| (In case anyone's wondering, Xin Jinshan i.e. New Gold
| Mountain is Melbourne, but unlike the case of SF, that name
| did not stick.)
| cafard wrote:
| Herodotus dismisses a story of Phoenicians (acting for the
| Persian king) sailing around Africa. He says it must be a lie,
| because they claim that the sun was in the wrong direction--
| just what for a modern reader strengthens heir claim.
|
| But the notion of trans-Atlantic voyages, the Vikings apart,
| seems shaky to me.
|
| You are correct that the notion of isolation tends to be
| carried much too far.
| stkdump wrote:
| > Hence medievalists' disdain for the "dark ages," which are
| basically an Italian Renaissance construct that got blown up by
| nationalist Germans in the nineteenth century.
|
| Any more info on the last part? I am asking because in
| contemporary German the term 'dark ages' is almost unheard of,
| whereas in English it seems to be a fairly common term.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| From [1]: Modern historians and geographers have disputed the
| veracity of the map and the described voyages, with some
| accusing the younger Zeno of forgery.
| ummwhat wrote:
| I heard that first he went half way to the new world, then
| half of that distance, then half of that distance...and never
| made it in the end.
| zeven7 wrote:
| Quite the paradox
| [deleted]
| dash2 wrote:
| It might also be fair to say that a lot of "global history" of
| the past 30 years has been written by living people with an
| agenda. And the rigour of their work has not always been that
| high.
|
| From an English perspective it is hard to understand the
| disdain for the "dark ages" label. After the Romans left,
| people in Britain got several inches shorter and became
| illiterate.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > the "dark ages," which are basically an Italian Renaissance
| construct
|
| they really were to their eyes.
|
| We know more about ancient history today than people from the
| VII century about a 100 years before them
|
| The invasions of the former roman empire in today's Italian
| territory destroyed most of the historical knowledge and gave
| birth to dark folk legends that are still well alive today,
| even though historians have debunked the myth of the middle-
| ages as dark times.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| How likely is this to be real?
|
| If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?
| ummonk wrote:
| According to the paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10
| .1080/00822884.2021.1...), it wasn't widely known (or at least
| believed) in Italy at the time (since Genoese maps didn't
| reflect North American lands).
|
| There is no reason to suspect this isn't real - it's hard to
| fabricate a convincing forgery of a medieval Latin manuscript.
| And this manuscript itself is perfectly plausible - all it's
| really showing is that one Italian friar somehow (perhaps via
| Genoese sailors) learnt about what Viking sailors already knew
| about the New World.
| tokai wrote:
| From the research article:
|
| <<The _Cronica universalis_ is thought to be one of his later
| works, perhaps the last one, and was left unfinished and
| unperfected>>
|
| So I would guess only few read it. But the friar would have had
| the information from other sources available to him, and
| presumably others. The provenance of the manuscript sounds
| pretty solid to me.
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...
| jaclaz wrote:
| > Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes:
| "Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada,
| where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such
| huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge
| giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great
| quantity of birds."
|
| The manuscript is real, it is the contents that (IMHO) are
| senselessly considered "real".
|
| Besides the huge giants, where are the buildings made with huge
| slabs of stone in Northern America, built before 1300?
|
| If they were so huge to be included in the characterization of
| this Marckalada, isn't it strange that no traces of them were
| found?
|
| It is more likely that what the monk did was only to transcribe
| the (invented) stories and (fantastical) myths learned by this
| or that sailor.
| qw wrote:
| What if the North Americans told the Europeans stories about
| the stone buildings in South America?
|
| The buildings had already existed for a long time when the
| Vikings visited. It is unlikely that they would have seen
| them in person, but stories could have travelled for
| generations over long distances.
|
| The first pyramids in America were built 1500-2000 years
| before the Vikings. We are closer to the Viking age, than
| they were to the first stone buildings at the time. I don't
| think we should underestimate how far stories can travel
| given enough time.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The pyramids you're talking about are in Norte Chico, the
| Peruvian coast of South America. South American chronology
| firmly establishes a pretty continuous history from those
| early countries down through the Wari culture, which was
| the chief Andean empire at the time of the Viking visits to
| Vinland (most people are only familiar with their successor
| culture, the Inca).
|
| Shifting to Mesoamerica, we're in the very early
| Postclassic--Teotihuacan has been abandoned, and Maya
| dominance is shifting from the Guatemalan Highlands to the
| Yucatan Peninsula. These cultures also built large
| megalithic structures.
|
| In North America proper, 1000 correlates with the height of
| the Mississippian cultures, which are noted for their use
| of large _earthen_ , not _lithic_ structures. This is about
| when Cahokia is building Monk 's Mound for example. Going
| further northeast across the Appalachians is difficult for
| me to come across firmer chronology, because the narrative
| is dominated by the setup of Native Americans at the time
| of English settlement (~1600 and later), which isn't the
| same as that at the time of Viking settlement (~1000-1100).
| Although it is worth pointing out that Viking settlement is
| roughly the time that the Dorset culture is being replaced
| by the Thule culture that makes up the modern Inuit.
|
| As for trade routes, there are pretty well-established
| trade routes linking many of these places. Mexico's Pacific
| Coast and the US Southwest cultures seems to have pretty
| strong trade routes with the Andean coastline regions, and
| metallurgy probably diffused along that route. It's also
| thought that there was extensive contact between the Andean
| highlands and the Amazon river basin, and there are some
| tentative suggestions that the lineage of pottery in
| Mississippian and antecedent Southeastern cultures comes
| from the Amazon via the Caribbean. But Mesoamerica and the
| US Southwest are somewhat insulated from Mississippian and
| Southeastern cultures by large desert and semidesert
| regions, and most notably, corn takes an awfully long time
| to make its way from Mesoamerica into the eastern US, first
| showing up only around 1000.
|
| I'd be more likely to point to Inuksuk [1] as a basis for
| large stone construction known to the Vikings than stone
| pyramids existing very, very remotely along the trading
| routes.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuksuk
| jaclaz wrote:
| >The first pyramids in America were built 1500-2000 years
| before the Vikings. We are closer to the Viking age, than
| they were to the first stone buildings at the time. I don't
| think we should underestimate how far stories can travel
| given enough time.
|
| Sure, but Occam's razor would probably come out with the
| fact that stories can be invented alright in almost no
| time.
|
| Fishermen (and sailors, and more generally travelers in the
| ancient times) have a long tradition of fabricating (tall)
| stories and/or exxagerating whatever they actually had seen
| or had been told, think of all the various bestiaries that
| were common in medieval times:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiary
| cperciva wrote:
| Quite aside from the difficulty of obtaining copies -- copying
| texts was an arduous process -- the vast majority of the
| population of Europe was illiterate so _nothing_ was widely
| read at the time.
| btilly wrote:
| This is certainly real.
|
| An unfinished and unpublished work in an era before the
| printing press is guaranteed to not have been widely read.
|
| But the voyages to Vinland went from Greenland. And Greenland
| had a bishop who wrote to the church. And priests sent letters
| to each other. It is hardly surprising that one seeking to
| write a book on distant history and lands would have
| encountered information from so far afield.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > And Greenland had a bishop who wrote to the church.
|
| Most of the bishops of Greenland never actually lived in
| Greenland. Certainly, the bishops never found out that the
| Greenland settlements had been abandoned, and bishops were
| appointed until 1537 despite all contact with Greenland
| ceasing circa 1400.
| btilly wrote:
| Judging from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar%C3%B0ar,_Gre
| enland#Diocese..., most of the bishops up through the 1300s
| did spend time in Greenland.
| Thorentis wrote:
| There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern,
| that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never
| written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass
| population upheavals like war and famine.
| masswerk wrote:
| It may be even worse, as history was eventually established,
| competing narratives were probably dismissed and neglected as
| weird tales without foundation or merit, and eventually
| suppressed. For which they eventually weren't retold anymore
| and eventually forgotten.
| abecedarius wrote:
| A relevant case:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas#Literary_influence
|
| (I linked to where he's getting dismissed as a liar centuries
| later, but the main story about the voyage is way more
| interesting.)
| masswerk wrote:
| This works both ways, compare the "Germania" by Tacitus,
| which was really about a fictional foil to contrast with
| the Julian dynasty, but became a historic document and
| origin story for a few centuries. (Sad to say, but
| humanists had a decent share in this.)
|
| Related literature: Chrisopher B. Krebs, "A Most Dangerous
| Book. Tacitus' _Germania_ from Roman Empire to the Third
| Reich ", W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2011.
| [deleted]
| frupert52 wrote:
| And pandemics?
| tootie wrote:
| Pandemics would be pretty unlikely in the days of such low
| population density. Epidemics definitely happened pretty
| routinely though.
| blfr wrote:
| There was a bubonic plague pandemic (1346-1353) right after
| the time this book was wrtten (1339-1345 according to OP).
| tootie wrote:
| Sure, but the topic was pandemics we don't know about
| because they weren't written down. The bubonic plague was
| written about pretty extensively. Even earlier disease
| outbreaks were written about.
| sebws wrote:
| I think the topic was how pandemics would cause word of
| mouth stories to be lost, not the story of pandemics.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| It could be worse, it could be pestilence of biblical
| proportions.
|
| Oh wait . . .
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The Grand Banks fisheries were known to Basque fishermen even
| before John Cabot's voyages, so it's not completely surprising
| that Markland shows up outside the sagas.
| koheripbal wrote:
| That seems unlikely. source?
| etrevino wrote:
| I'll try to find a source, but it's true. The import of this
| wasn't apparent to them, though.
| exhibitapp wrote:
| https://archive.fo/yFias
| akamaka wrote:
| The article should have given more context and mentioned that it
| wasn't unusual for lands across the Atlantic to appear on pre-
| Colombian maps. Here are two examples:
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)
| koheripbal wrote:
| These seem more likely to represent the Canary Islands.
| exdsq wrote:
| And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did
| love to burn books back then!
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the
| survival of the vast majority of written material that remains
| from pre-christian antiquity.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I thought that was mostly due to Islamic scholars. Weren't
| the monks mostly erasing and repurposing old scrolls to make
| copies of the Bible?
| duncanawoods wrote:
| You are getting downvoted but this is the traditional
| history of philosophy as I understand it too (the history
| of Christianity will be different).
|
| Hellenic culture and texts had permiated Africa and and
| Mid-east. There were various ancient libraries and
| academies. Byzantine scholars at the Neoplatonic Academy
| fled to Persia after it was closed by Justinian. Later in
| the 8th Century, the Greaco-Arabic Translation Movement
| gathered books and translated original Greek texts into
| Arabic at the House of Wisdom (Grand Library of Baghdad).
| Study of hellenic philosophy restarted in the Arabic world
| until the Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy with Averroes
| whose commentarities reintroduced Hellenic philosophy to
| Europe in the 12th century.
|
| I don't think that particular flow needs any Irish Monks
| but <shrug> I don't know the specific sources of books used
| by the Translation Movement.
| foobarbazbarfoo wrote:
| A lot of those scholars were not "Islamic" or "Muslim",
| just happened to live in the area. Many of them were
| christians (Church of the East), Sabians, Jews, or local
| hellenistic inspired cults. Also some of those translations
| were translated to other local languages (eg. Assyrian,
| Hebrew...) then to Arabic.
|
| Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam
| becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the work
| and exposure others get.
|
| Here are some of the more famous ones
|
| Christians: -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunayn_ibn_Ishaq -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaq_ibn_Hunayn -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_of_Reshaina -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masawaiyh
|
| Sabians: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinan_ibn_Thabit
|
| Cult of Sin: -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thabit_ibn_Qurra
| kome wrote:
| what? no. if we can read plato and aristotle - and a bunch
| of others - it's thanks to Catholics monk.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| The works of Aristotle were translated from Greek to
| Arabic by Islamic scholars in the early Middle Ages,
| mostly pre-dating the Latin translations, and they were
| sometimes the source from which the Latin translations
| were made.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle
|
| 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-
| influence/
| jhgb wrote:
| But people never forgot Greek. It was, and still is, a
| living language. (Not to mention the undesirability of
| second-hand translations...)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Greek Orthodox; Roman Catholics forgot Greek. Until
| Marsilio Ficino translated Plato to Latin around 1450,
| Plato had been effectively lost _in the west_ for 1000
| years.
| vmh1928 wrote:
| It's complicated but yes, Islamic scholars had a role to
| play in preserving Greek philosophy.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-greek/
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/43577272
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The monasteries of Ireland and Scotland survived the crisis
| and disorder of the Migration Period and re-christianized
| the Continent from the 8th century onwards. Yes, some texts
| from antiquity have come down to us only as palimpsest, but
| the classical writers were copied.
| adolph wrote:
| _How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of
| Ireland 's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of
| Medieval Europe is a non-fiction historical book written by
| Thomas Cahill._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati.
| ..
| edgyquant wrote:
| Love this book it was the first time I came to here the
| story of St. Patrick
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. It leads to
| religious flamewar, the most avoidable of all flamewar, which
| we do want to avoid here.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649134.
| exdsq wrote:
| I don't think it's religious flamebait, I believe it's
| historically accurate - but okay.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The "love to burn books" mostly happened during the Counter-
| Reformation, which is several centuries after this book would
| have been written.
| masswerk wrote:
| However, there was also the Albigensian Crusade and not a
| single piece of catharian writing survived this.
| bobthechef wrote:
| This is false. The "Liber de duobus principiis" survived.
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind that this originated from a diverging faction,
| written about 1240, essentially after the crusade
| (1209-1229).
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| well that and the entire Mayan corpus.
|
| what pittance of codices we have today come from
| Christianized Maya scribes, a massively condensed post-
| columbian highlight reel of their obliterated textual culture
| compiled at the behest of the Spanish crown and under the
| direction of their Catholic overseers.
| jcranmer wrote:
| To be fair, that was _also_ during the Counter-Reformation,
| or somewhat afterwards. Even if it was unrelated to the
| Counter-Reformation itself.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Also, languages like Guarani survived because of the
| efforts of missionaries (the Jesuits in this case).
|
| (But I will say that the current policy of "protecting" the
| isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by
| categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and
| uncharitable. This is rooted in the preposterous myth of
| the noble savage. Tribal peoples are not innocent
| children.)
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| > the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes
| in the Amazon from human contact by categorically
| shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable
|
| I dunno. If you make contact with them, most of them will
| die of diseases to which they have no immunity. This
| happens over and over. Amazon tribes. Pacific islands. On
| a huge scale in the Americas. For those that do survive,
| the event may be so traumatic that they develop a very
| understandable hostility to outsiders.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone would thank Bishop de Landa for
| burning the entire written work of a thousand year old
| civilization.
|
| Disrupting a cycle of ritualized torture may find some
| support on humanitarian grounds, but it was no excuse to
| annihilate the rest of Maya literary culture as well.
| exdsq wrote:
| Books were still hand written and centralized, they'd have
| been burned such that we aren't aware of them today - doesn't
| matter if it's 15th or 17th century
| jmchuster wrote:
| > But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared
| to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless
| void.
|
| I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he
| miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else
| was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky
| enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then
| mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he
| wrongly thought Asia was going to be.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Even if Columbus was aware of Chiesa's work (no evidence for it
| being widely known is given here) or had independently heard of
| the Norse discoveries, he could have assumed they had reached
| some part of Asia already speculatively sketched on the maps of
| the day.
|
| As others have pointed out, what Columbus believed and what he
| said in order to acquire funding are two different things. At
| the time, the prospect of finding an unknown continent would
| have been less motivating than that of finding a new route to
| an area known as a source of wealth; only in retrospect is the
| value of the former obvious.
| krapp wrote:
| > and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean
| was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be.
|
| ... which is why Native Americans have been referred to as
| "Indians," because Columbus was certain he'd reached the
| Indies.
| interestica wrote:
| And why the Caribbean is alternatively known as the West
| Indies.
| tialaramex wrote:
| "No, of course not, not North Wales"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df-uemc-e3w
| felipelemos wrote:
| It's important to remember that he thought he was in the
| Indian sea, not the Indian country. https://www.reddit.com/r/
| AskHistorians/comments/mnvt37/did_t...
| joecot wrote:
| Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds
| could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs
| and leaves from _somewhere_. Portugal, Spain and anyone else he
| asked thought he was wrong because that would 've required the
| Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient
| Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and
| they were very close in their calculations). Columbus turned
| out to be right that there was land there, he was just wrong
| about what the land was.
| fartingflamingo wrote:
| One of the only species of birds known to be capable of
| transatlantic flight, and also credibly thought to regularly
| making the crossing [0] is the magnificent frigate bird [1].
| The bird has a super interesting capability of flying on a
| single half of the brain. Remarkably similar to single slower
| core operation of a computer... [2]
|
| [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274193260_Has_th
| e_m...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_frigatebird
|
| [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.
| 008...
| pedrosorio wrote:
| From Wikipedia: "Frigatebirds (...) sometimes indulge in
| kleptoparasitism, harassing other birds to force them to
| regurgitate their food"
|
| I knew birds could regurgitate food (to feed their young)
| but this is something else...
| crakenzak wrote:
| > birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England
| with twigs and leaves from somewhere.
|
| Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic
| from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds
| actually do that, seems pointless.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Not a twig, but there is a recorded case of a bird making
| it to Europe after being shot with an African arrow. (Which
| it involuntarily carried with it.)
| distances wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch
|
| But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry
| anything from Africa either.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Before migration was understood, people struggled to
| explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the
| white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some
| theories of the time held that they turned into other
| kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the
| winter, and such theories were even propagated by
| zoologists of the time."
|
| Ok, it seems that Aristoteles believed, that birds
| actually transformed, but zoologist of that time at most
| believed, that they hibernated underwater", which seems a
| more solid theory, than transforming.
| [deleted]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Transforming isn't exactly unknown; all insects do it.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yes, but by the 18.th century, we knew that birds and
| mammals are a bit more complex than insects and quite
| shape stable.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Shape stability would be an example of being _less_
| complex than insects.
|
| And as you can see, we did not in fact know that in the
| 18th century. Transformations are not so easy to observe
| directly; they often happen e.g. underground.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Shape stability would be an example of being less
| complex than insects."
|
| Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells
| are too complex to merge into something different. Cells
| were known already. And that insects transform is known,
| but birds were closely known and there was not
| observation of them changing drastically. So that
| Aristoteles had this thinking is understandable given the
| time, but after enlightenment, I would not expect that
| from the early scientists.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying
| cells are too complex to merge into something different.
|
| This is not a valid concept. Vertebrates develop from
| stem cells the same way insects do.
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| You have it wrong. It was carrying a coconut.
| hkt wrote:
| They could have been coming from Ireland too..
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether the birds did or didn't. What
| matters is that people of the time thought birds were
| bringing in sticks from somewhere west. People believed
| there was a land out there. Whether or not the observations
| behind those beliefs are credible doesn't take away from
| the fact of their believing there was a land to find.
| ant6n wrote:
| If birds do do that, it's a strong indication that people
| may have actually believed it happened, rather than the
| believe being just a myth.
| comex wrote:
| It doesn't _matter_ , but it's interesting.
| interestica wrote:
| > seems pointless
|
| I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer.
| Doesn't seem feasible to me.
| jcims wrote:
| That's a walk in the park
|
| https://www.birdlife.org/worldwide/news/migration-
| marathons-...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern#Distribution_
| and...
| canadianfella wrote:
| The birds you listed don't fly across oceans to get
| twigs.
| aasasd wrote:
| A bit different, but IIRC some seeds spread by passing
| through birds' digestive tract--which sidesteps the
| bird's decisions on the luggage. However, I'd guess the
| distance travelled is much shorter in this case.
| hadlock wrote:
| Every year or two, people decide to fly from North
| America to Europe in a short range Cessna. They get the
| extra fuel tankage package, then hop from PEI to
| Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, then Iceland to....
| Svalbard, or maybe somewhere in the Scotish Isles. From
| there it's pretty standard flight operations over local
| bodies of water. If a Cessna can do it, that's well
| within a bird's migratory travel distance.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Yeah but you think they'd save fuel and locally source
| the twigs
| scythe wrote:
| Possibly not if the goal is to impress a potential mate.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Have you just invented this or is that actually some
| well-known fact that birds impress potential mates this
| way?
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The joke is that the Cessna fliers are doing it to
| collect the twigs.
|
| If you edit out 'birds', it'd be pure comedy.
| repiret wrote:
| I was under the impression that was still the standard
| way to move GA aircraft across the Atlantic, and happened
| regularly.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Another piece of land to the west before the Americas is
| the Azores archipelago roughly half way between Europe and
| Newfoundlannd. Maybe the bird came from there. This was
| known to Europeans well before Colombus trip.
| sfblah wrote:
| I mean, the real question is whether they carried any
| coconuts.
| httgp wrote:
| That, and if they were African or European.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Trick question... they were American
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Fully laden you say?
| riffraff wrote:
| Barnacle goose do migrate from Greenland to the British
| isles, but I do not know if Greenland is considered north
| America.
| eCa wrote:
| Yes, Greenland is geographically in North America.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Isn't the land west of England just...Ireland?
| slater wrote:
| Wales?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Given they are talking about sailing-off, I'd venture
| they mean the _island_ west of the isle-on-which-England-
| resides.
| slater wrote:
| Oh I see. Yes, so... Anglesey? :D
| weswpg wrote:
| Again, Columbus was _not_ a very clever man.
| stormdennis wrote:
| Ireland is an island lying less than 100 miles west of
| England.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds
| could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with
| twigs and leaves from somewhere
|
| The Portuguese settled the Azores before Columbus was born,
| so this sounds like a weird reason to believe India was
| closer.
| thevardanian wrote:
| A lot of early voyages funded by the various crowns was
| actually put under extreme secrecy so much so that many sailors
| would only later be told of the real voyage...
|
| At least that's what I recall reading awhile back. If anyone
| could corroborate that would be nice.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The value of secrecy in matters of commerce and state has
| probably been recognized from the get-go. Beyond that, nobody
| thought sailors had much in the way of rights; in 1571,
| almost a century later, there were tens of thousands of
| galley-slaves on both sides in the battle of Lepanto.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave#Europe
|
| Unfortunately, I don't know anything about what Columbus's
| crews were told. It does seem they were free men (four of
| whom signed up in return for an amnesty) and were paid:
|
| http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/ships-crew.htm
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he
| miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone
| else was saying they 'd starve before reaching Asia._
|
| In the late 1400s people thought the Asian continent was larger
| than it is in reality. So when Columbus _et co_ saw islands
| they thought they had hit Japan+... roughly where all the best
| maps of the day said it would be.
|
| See Toscanelli's 1474 map, which is what Columbus was going by:
|
| *
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Tosc...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli
|
| + _Cipangu_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jipangu
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| It's interesting that in Toscanelli's map it also appears the
| "Antillia"[0] island mentioned in another comment. There was
| definitively some knowledge of land in between, maybe they
| just didn't know it was a huge continent.
|
| [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia
| throw0101a wrote:
| Phantom island have been around for a while:
|
| > _Sandy Island (sometimes labelled in French Ile de Sable,
| and in Spanish Isla Arenosa) is a non-existent island that
| was charted for over a century as being located near the
| French territory of New Caledonia between the Chesterfield
| Islands and Nereus Reef in the eastern Coral Sea.[1] The
| island was included on many maps and nautical charts from
| as early as the late 19th century. It was removed from
| French hydrographic charts in 1974. The island gained wide
| media and public attention in November 2012 when the R /V
| Southern Surveyor, an Australian research ship,[2] passed
| through the area and "undiscovered" it. The island was
| quickly removed from many maps and data sets, including
| those of the National Geographic Society and Google
| Maps.[3]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Island,_New_Caledonia
| arp242 wrote:
| If you look to the west from Europe you see a _vast sea_.
| It doesn 't take a great deal of effort to imagine some
| form of land beyond or in that sea. You would be quite a
| boring and unimaginative person to _not_ wonder about this.
|
| Edgar Allen Poe's novel _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
| of Nantucket_ details a fictional account of what might be
| in the Antarctic, an unexplored area in his time. We now
| know that Poe 's imagined account is a far cry from the
| reality of the Antarctic continent, but he could have been
| "right" in that there are people living there. That doesn't
| really imply any _knowledge_ of such lands though. If Poe
| had lived several hundreds years earlier he might have
| written a similar story with s /Antarctic/across the
| Atlantic/.
|
| Add a few hundreds years with confusion between "fiction"
| (or "myth" or "legend", if you will) and "science" (a
| concept which didn't really exist in the first place, at
| least not in the same form) and things get very murky fast.
|
| I don't think that the mere existence of the concept of
| "Antillia" really proves any _actual_ knowledge; there
| needs to be some additional evidence; reading that
| Wikipedia page there doesn 't seem to be any. We'll likely
| never know for certain if the roots of Antillia were based
| in reality or entirely fictional.
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| > We now know that Poe's imagined account is a far cry
| from the reality of the Antarctic continent, but he could
| have been "right" in that there are people living there.
|
| Which people do you mean?
| arp242 wrote:
| The natives Poe imagined to be living in the Antarctic in
| his novel.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| It's interesting how deeply wrong we were at that time, while
| we precedently knew all the dimensions and distance of most
| parts of the globe with pretty high accuracy.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| We "did." [0]
|
| What we did _not_ know was an accurate way to determine
| longitude, specifically on a ship, until 1761. [1] [2]
|
| Consequently, any voyage before 1761 knew its latitude
| exactly, but dead-reckoned its longitude.
|
| 33 days of speed-estimated dead reckoning in 1492, plus
| having no idea of the speed or orientation of the
| underlying current you're in, leaves a lot of room for
| error.
|
| [0] For values of "did" that include "the correct answer
| had been derived and was documented (Eratosthenes, within
| ~2.5% in ~240 BC, working at the Library of Alexandria),
| but it wasn't broadly accepted as the correct answer." Thus
| leading to Columbus believing an incorrect value instead ht
| tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Colu.
| ..
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
|
| [2] Except via some very complicated planetary transits
| that were pre-calculated and could only be used as they
| occured. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitu
| de#Satelli...
| hirako2000 wrote:
| So we knew the right answer but we didn't accept it as
| correct so most people followed suit.
|
| It's fascinating. We are on the same track today. We know
| the truth but most of us jump on the same entirely wrong
| band wagons.
|
| One could argue that ignoring the truth is worse than
| pure ignorance.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with
| public health & vaccine development information during
| early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well
| exercised with respect to uncertainty.
|
| Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with
| unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate"
| facts, because there were few accepted ones to have
| alternatives to.
|
| On the one hand, we know more than they did (stronger &
| longer mandatory education + post-primary + informal
| access). On the other hand, we've forgotten how to
| responsibly handle uncertainty.
|
| Or, as I sum it all up: science should be a verb (aka
| process), not a noun (result).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly
| handle uncertainty.
|
| No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than
| 15th Century Europe.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Local minima aren't the historically average bar to
| exceed.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Local minima aren't the historically average bar to
| exceed.
|
| I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well,
| not intentionally); I was picking out the times being
| compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of
| the discussion.
|
| But really, the same applies to the whole of history from
| the ancient period up through and including all of the
| early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th
| century on, to avoid any problems with overspecificity on
| either end.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| History renders comparisons murky and imprecise, but my
| point was more contingent on the availability of quality
| information than behavior.
|
| Now, we know many things. Then, we did not _know_ many
| things (although we perhaps believed more).
|
| So an every-person (I'm talking generally, not only of
| the most scientific), plucked from a more ignorant time
| of history, would have a more developed method of dealing
| with confusion.
|
| I don't quite buy the counter-argument (if this is
| yours?) that we're a more scientific society. I would
| have before COVID, but not now...
| hirako2000 wrote:
| We don't know more than we did. We have a strong belief
| that our cumulated knowledge, tools and infrastructure
| are leading to more accurate knowledge. We accomplish
| technological advancements that comfort us in the idea we
| know better. That's all.
|
| Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling
| something science doesn't de facto make it so.
| Beldin wrote:
| We actually do know more. Sure, physics is basically
| modelling and observations. Our current models might be
| completely wrong - even if their predictive power is far
| greater.
|
| But we've also made some genuine proofs. For example, we
| know that Fermat's last theorem is correct. That was
| suspected, but not known.
|
| Yes, this applies basically to all of maths - and even to
| other disciplines that produce proofs. Another example:
| we know that one model of gravity permits black holes,
| wormholes, and warp drives. Sure, the model might not
| accurately reflect reality. But still: this is something
| we know nowadays, that we didn't know 105 years ago.
|
| Not to mention all the things we collectively have done -
| we know it's possible to leave Earth, to live in orbit
| for a while, to convert sunlight directly into
| electricity, that it is (barely) possible to run the 100m
| in under 10 sec, what the earth looks like from a
| distance, how to make fusion bombs, how to fly... we know
| a lot more than folks from even the early 1900s, let
| alone further back.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Not sure if you're arguing from an epistemological or
| objective basis, but I'll assume the latter.
|
| We know that our knowledge better describes the results
| we reliably reproduce in the world around us.
|
| We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did
| not.
|
| If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did,"
| I'm not sure what does.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| It's a new theology ...
| chmod600 wrote:
| I think decades of diluting the word "science" with
| observational studies and other psuedoscientific junk was
| a mistake.
|
| Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things
| mentioned in the media as science that really is actually
| science.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Yes and no. The public's (and media's) inability to
| differentiate between preprints, efficacy vs safety trial
| stages, and basic statistics boggled my mind.
|
| I guess pre-COVID I would have said "Some people are
| ignorant." Post-COVID experience, I'd agree more with
| "Some people are ignorant _and_ refuse to admit their
| ignorance, to the extent of cherry picking reality. "
|
| It's like expecting some people were bad at math, but
| getting a stack of tests back where half have multi-page
| essays on why numbers don't exist.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Ireland looks pretty big there compared to the British
| mainland, and Scotland pretty diminished.
|
| Funny how those parts are also disproportioned.
| phil_folrida wrote:
| It is highly speculative to say Japan, even today we
| reference Native American as Indians.
|
| He was thinking they reached India.
|
| Same mistake today people do with Miles and Kilometer, when
| you are raised in one or another it is difficult to switch.
|
| Erastothene was speaking in stadium, Columbus in Nautic
| miles.
|
| The Spanish crown was motivated by greed.
| mannykannot wrote:
| At the time, the term "indies" was widely used for eastern
| Asia and eastern lands generally.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/Indies
| dboreham wrote:
| Probably fake history. Modern thinking is that Columbus had a
| pretty good idea where he was going because others had already
| been there.
| koheripbal wrote:
| That is not modern thinking
| weswpg wrote:
| Why is the area referred to as "the west Indies" unless he
| thought it was India
| tremon wrote:
| "The Indies" referred to the known archipelago in the
| Indian Ocean (now Indonesia and the Philippines). The
| Caribbean is also an archipelago, so if Columbus believed
| himself to be in the Indian Ocean, it's not that odd for
| him to assume he'd reached the western end of the same
| archipelago.
|
| India is not a collection of islands, it's unlikely that
| Columbus mistook an archipelago for a known vast land mass.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| You mean Eastern end of the archipelago?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If he thought it was India then it should have been the
| East India ...
|
| Also, I think Indies was used to refer to Asia in general,
| rather than specifically India. But am open to correction.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| My theory is that it means not the actual Indies, but a
| place like the Indies, but to the west. I suspect Europeans
| at the time though of India less as where the Indians live
| and more like a place to get cool stuff, and cool stuff was
| indeed found in the West Indies too.
|
| A bit like chicken of the sea. It's not that they're saying
| that tuna is a form of waterfowl, just that the two have
| common applications.
| buescher wrote:
| Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe.
| Columbus' miscalculation was... hopeful. There's a sort of
| conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he
| going to get funding?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It reminds me of Amundsen. He wanted to be the first man at
| the north pole and raised funds to mount an expedition.
| However while he was planning his expedition other explorers
| beat him there. Without telling anyone but his crew, on the
| day of departure he headed south and was the first man to
| reach the south-pole, using funds raised for arctic
| exploration.
| JudgePenitent wrote:
| Columbus made a voyage to Bristol in the UK and certainly
| came across merchants who had travelled in the northern
| reaches, Iceland in particular. It is suggested that he did
| indeed travel to Iceland although the source we have for it
| is quite a few degrees removed from Columbus claiming it.
|
| The Vikings/Norsemen had already spread awareness of Vinland
| to monks in Iceland, as the sagas regarding Vinland were
| written down about 100 years before Columbus visited Bristol.
| Did Columbus or other merchants in the North hear of these
| sagas? Did they come into contact with the written versions
| of these sagas?
|
| Italian merchants had a serious incentive to find alternative
| trading routes.
|
| There is a deeper question of why a man would go on a
| theoretically suicidal voyage, and on top of that, be funded
| by royalty to do so. Believing in your miscalculations is
| courageous I suppose, but its your life at stake; would a
| pious man be willing to kill himself chasing possible
| alternative geographic calculations?
| hasmanean wrote:
| Humans are not very good at seeing patterns when they have
| preconceptions.
|
| Norse mythology talked about a land full of woodland elves
| who had very long life spans, that could only be reached
| after a journey of many months through the land of the
| frost giants and across a rainbow shaped bridge. Odin and
| Loki are said to have made this trip.
|
| The real life explanation is probably that 2 Norseman
| crossed Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait to visit B.C.
|
| The way we imagine it? An interdimensional gate leads to a
| spiritual realm in the sky called Asgard filled with gods
| (whatever the hell that means) who are immortal.
| simonh wrote:
| Or someone ate some trippy mushrooms.
| Andrex wrote:
| I believe in current parlance that is called "hustle."
|
| (Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| "Startup."
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| "Disrupting navigation"
| yissp wrote:
| European contact with the new world was pretty disruptive
| indeed.
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Conspiracy" would mean somebody else was in on it. By
| definition.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Magellan must have been.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| No, that was just the story he told to his venture investors.
| Fishermen probably had lots of circumstantial evidence for
| America at the time, but explaining that to a venture
| capitalist is much harder than spinning some fantabulous tall
| tale. (People do this sort of thing today too.)
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Columbus knew the distance around the globe. That was
| accurately determined by ancient Greeks.
|
| What Columbus (and the Greeks) did not know was the size of
| landmasses in proportion to each other.
|
| They thought Europe was much, much larger than it was. Large
| enough to leave little room for ocean between the Azores and
| East Asia.
| zeteo wrote:
| I always find it fascinating that people are so much more
| interested in _why_ he sailed for America rather than _how_.
| Columbus was a navigator, not a geographer. His true discovery
| was not America (which plenty of people, including some
| Europeans, had reached before) but the replicable transatlantic
| voyage.
| [deleted]
| tootie wrote:
| Given that nobody knew about this book for centuries, it seems
| pretty unlikely that Columbus saw it. Let alone, saw it and
| believed it and discounted the giants and also didn't mention
| it to anyone.
| blfr wrote:
| I think the idea is that he heard the same tales because he
| was in the same milieu, not that he read that book.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| TIL a cool new word; "milieu"
|
| > the physical or social setting in which something occurs
| or develops
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu
| ochrist wrote:
| The Danish (Scandinavian) word 'miljo' usually translates
| to 'environment'.
| tgflynn wrote:
| Milieu is a French word. My guess is that your Danish
| word is also derived from the French.
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| link without paywall
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210924231520/https://www.econo...
| tucosan wrote:
| That link is paywalled all the same.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Worked for me.
| j1elo wrote:
| I just read the whole article from the archived link. So I
| can confirm it _Works for me_ (tm).
| muststopmyths wrote:
| if you are running a script blocker, you might need to block
| economist.com. That's what made it work for me with this
| link.
| [deleted]
| magneticnorth wrote:
| The first time I clicked it I also still saw the paywall;
| when I tried again it was gone - very odd.
| onetimename wrote:
| For those downvoting the user, it was also paywalled for me.
| On mobile if that matters.
|
| Edit: but revisiting worked.
| zokier wrote:
| The actual journal article
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...
| j56no wrote:
| paywall shows up there too for me
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