[HN Gopher] Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD...
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Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021
Author : bcaulfield
Score : 638 points
Date : 2021-10-20 18:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| runjake wrote:
| The debate on whether Vikings were in Pre-Columbus America is
| starting to sound a lot like the back and forth of "$food is
| (good|bad) for you".
| goto11 wrote:
| There is no doubt Vikings were in Pre-Columbus America.
| Thrymr wrote:
| I do not think this has been in serious dispute in the last 50
| years. This paper just puts a more precise date on the
| settlement in Newfoundland that was already well known.
| moksly wrote:
| As a Danish person it's sort of interesting to see how much
| focus this particular area gets in comparison to other Norse
| history, but no, it hasn't really been disputed in any
| serious manner for a while.
|
| A lot of the evidence doesn't really prove anything. The map
| turned out to be a forgery, and wood having been worked by
| metal tools could have happened through trade.
|
| L'anse aux Meadows is a Norse settlement similar to those
| found in Greenland, however, and that's sort of the evidence
| you need.
|
| This is the only settlement found however, and it may never
| have had contact with the indigenous people considering how
| isolated it was. The "vikings" weren't there to raid, they
| were there to find some decent farmland, and if that's what
| they found, they could have died out without anyone knowing
| about it until a thousand years later.
|
| But what they actually did is anyones guess.
| chalcolithic wrote:
| I can't quite recall who eloquently described this discovery as
| "Christopher Columbus was the last person to discover America"
| nixpulvis wrote:
| "Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the
| Americas"
|
| Is "cognisance" really the right term here? I didn't really
| follow the whole article and it seemed mostly unrelated to my
| question anyway, so sorry if I missed something. It just seems to
| me that for there to be any European awareness, there would have
| to be proof of a return voyage, no?
|
| Is this not really just talking about "European presence"? I'm
| being highly pedantic, I'm well aware.
| CRConrad wrote:
| The existence of Gronlandinga Saga -- specifically, the bits in
| it about Vinland and Markland and Helluland -- is in itself
| proof of European cognisance of the Americas. And yes,
| obviously at least some of them must have made it back, or
| their exploits would never have been recorded in the saga(s?).
| There's a couple of timelines in the article, reconstructing
| the sequence of events both from the artefacts and from the
| sagas; ISTR the fact-based one also mentions the return trips.
|
| I think what they mean by "lays down a marker" is that this
| finding marks that already-established-as-existing cognisance
| _in time,_ since they established the exact year those trees
| were felled and the Viking settlement built. (And, nice
| coincidence -- or did they sit on it for a while to make it so?
| -- it 's apparently exactly a millennium ago.)
|
| OK, since the Vikings then had to winter in their in their new-
| built settlement before returning in the spring, and if you
| want to count "Europeans know of it" as pertaining to at least
| Icelanders in general[1], you could argue that the specific
| marker for _" European cognisance"_ goes a year or two later.
| But that's academic -- literally, as in, let the academics
| discuss it. But now they have a starting year to hange their
| discussion on, so this finding marks not only the age of the
| settlement and discovery of North America, but ultimately also
| of Europeans' consciousness thereof.
|
| ___
|
| [1]: Not just the also rather precarious settlement on
| Greenland, which I suppose _could_ have died out after the
| return of the Vinlanders but before anyone went from there to
| Iceland, so without ever getting word back to Europe at large.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Thank you for the very informative reply. I think that
| basically resolves my confusion about this.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| What I find most amazing in the article is the technology of
| radiocarbon dating individual year rings in a piece of wood,
| correlate that to known cosmic radiation events, and get the
| precise year when the tree was felled.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Yeah that was the most interesting part to me too; we already
| knew about Vikings in Greenland, but now they have a specific
| year to pin it too.
|
| The science that enables that is described in this paper:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2783
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse
| Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them,
| then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and
| keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of
| not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.
| eurusd wrote:
| It is exactly one of the starting points of this uchrony,
| Civilizations from Laurent Binet (in french, i believe not
| translated to english), where native get sick during first
| venue of Vikings then when Colombus appears they just don't get
| sick at all + kill him and get to Portugal back on their boats
| and then travel in Europe, meet Luther, Erasme & Charles Quint,
| convert people to Sun god religion and create an Empire in
| Europe. Good book btw
| goldenshale wrote:
| I highly recommend you read (or listen, the audiobook was
| great) to Conquistador by Buddy Levy. It might change your mind
| on this point. It tells the story of Cortez from the day they
| arrive on the shores of Mexico to when they take over the Aztec
| empire, where there were still many, many native peoples. The
| European advantages were many more than just disease... for
| better and worse.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| Not really. The disease was a important bio-weapon, but the
| technological gradient was what allowed the conquering and
| exploiting. There was no basis for a American Native
| Confederacy and a renaissance like fast build up towards a
| industrial basis. None of the American Native Factions ever
| showed the reaction that japan had - which is the only correct
| approach to a invading external force with technological
| superiority.
| hnbad wrote:
| Others have cited _Guns, Germs and Steel_ but I hope I don 't
| have to explain that its premises have in many parts been
| debunked by actual historians who specialize in these subjects.
|
| It's easy to forget that most of the Indigenous peoples in
| North America didn't die simply from "catching" diseases but
| were directly and intentionally killed or worked to death. Most
| people are hopefully familiar with the extent of the genocide
| in what is now the US (with everything from "plague blankets"
| to eradicating the bison to literally paying bounties for dead
| Indians) but Columbus' treatment of the Natives was also so
| violent and brutal that other Spanish colonialists complained
| about it.
|
| In other words, the problem wasn't so much settlers bringing
| their diseases with them than settlers capturing the natives,
| working them to death, destroying their livelihoods and then
| actively trying to genocide them.
|
| Having some level of immunity to smallpox or other diseases
| wouldn't have changed much.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Most of the time, Europeans fought one tribe at a time, rather
| than a large alliance of Native Americans.
|
| Then, in many cases, they made natives fight each other, and
| they recruited "auxiliary indians".
|
| The siege of Tenochtitlan involved 200,000 Tlaxcalans fighting
| on the European side.
|
| In other cases, such as the Battle of Cajamarca, they used
| their horse + armor advantage to kidnap the leader and ask
| everyone else to stand down.
|
| If natives had fought together as an alliance since the
| beginning, they would have time to adapt and catch up. Like the
| Mapuche did (they won the Arauco war).
| sillyquiet wrote:
| "They made" natives fight each other is a weird way of
| putting it. Warring tribes were more than happy to use the
| Europeans against their enemies. And many of those enmities
| long predated the arrival of Europeans.
| [deleted]
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Yes, that characterization is a bit more accurate.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Yes, many of the Central American tribes had been oppressed
| by the Aztecs for a long time, and were happy to have an
| advanced ally to fight against them.
| toxik wrote:
| There's something to learn here about calling on a bigger
| bully to stamp out the local bully...
| Brakenshire wrote:
| The Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxons a similar lesson!
| cestith wrote:
| There are quite a few branching subthreads talking about the
| spread of different diseases, different living conditions
| leading to different immunity levels, and all sorts of ideas
| around why it didn't seem to spread deadly illnesses back to
| Europe as much as Europeans spread deadly ones to the Americas.
| One I don't see much about is that in the initial exploration,
| settlement, and colonizing groups the traffic of Europeans was
| largely one way and screened for serious diseases as best they
| could before being allowed on a ship.
|
| If Europeans became deathly ill in the Americas, they were
| probably left in the Americas to die rather than being taken
| back to Europe. The First Peoples from the Americas were not on
| average traveling to Europe and staying there for months,
| years, or lifetimes. They were staying among people in the
| Americas where they could continue to spread the illnesses.
| Healthy young soldiers, sailors, and merchants could bring both
| asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases of illness across an
| ocean to populations who weren't traveling nearly as much in
| the opposite direction. When entire colonies of mixed ages,
| genders, professions, and social roles moved permanently from
| Europe to the Americas, likewise the trips back to Europe also
| for former Europeans were far less common and included far
| fewer than the number of people continuing to interact with
| others in the Americas.
|
| In short, it was probably easier for mass migrations of
| Europeans to spread one or more cases of a disease to the
| Americas where it then spread from more prolonged contact with
| the population than it was for a European to contract a serious
| illness in the Americas and take it back to Europe on a
| military or merchant ship.
|
| As to the Norse and smallpox, the Crusades of the late 11th
| century and the 12th century were a big part of its spread to
| most of Europe. There's a very good chance I think there was
| little risk of a Norse ship spreading it in the early 11th
| century. As you said, it could be a very different world if
| they had.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| while true that infectious diseases would have been unlikely
| to make it back to europe, at least in the early colonialism
| period, surely if there were a mysterious new disease that
| was affecting colonists it would still be known about, and
| probably still be around
| steve76 wrote:
| Turns out, it belonged to Columbus all along. Put his his
| statue back up, or get off his land. Europeans did not have
| smallpox then. Europe got hit with germs from foreigners too.
| munk-a wrote:
| Additionally - if natives had adopted and continued the
| domestication of animals that norse greenlanders brought over
| (probably pigs at least) then there might have been a counter-
| plague when europeans again visited in 500 years.
| [deleted]
| kypro wrote:
| Not quite a plague, but syphilis likely came from Native
| Americans.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's unlikely. Part of the reason for the one way
| transmission of disease is simply the fact that Europeans
| were the ones making the crossings. Plenty of europeans got
| sick in the new world, but they either died in the new world
| or died on the ships during the long return journey. For a
| disease to cross the ocean, a carrier who is adapted to the
| disease must make the crossing. A few natives did go to
| Europe, but they were likely to die en route while surrounded
| by Europeans in rather unsanitary conditions.
|
| Further, the europeans making these journeys were typically
| young and fit individuals who, again, could survive long
| voyages at sea and the difficulties of setting up new
| colonies. The elderly and infirm stayed in Europe. Thus the
| europeans were far less likely to suffer an outbreak of
| disease simply by virtue of having fewer human incubators.
| For the natives, however, there was nothing to prevent their
| most vulnerable from being exposed, nor any way to stop
| isolated cases from blowing up into large scale pandemics.
|
| The only ways for a counter plague to get to Europe would be
| for either large numbers of natives to successfully cross the
| atlantic, which is unlikely when their population is
| simultaneously being decimated by disease, or for the
| Europeans to pick up a disease that took a long time to cause
| serious problems and thus could survive the return journey,
| which may have been the case for Syphillis. Either way, an
| "America Pox" is highly unlikely.
| Cyberthal wrote:
| I doubt you can assume that such diseases would spread and
| persist in the Native American dispersed population. European
| immivasion created adjacent disease reservoirs of urban and
| concentrated agriculturalists.
|
| Also, Europeans colonized other regions where they did not have
| as great a disease or technological advantage.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| maybe that 1/few ships just happened to didn't carry smallpox
| and other nasties aboard
| sillyquiet wrote:
| yeah, unfortunately (I guess??!) smallpox didn't reach Europe
| until the Crusades.
| queuebert wrote:
| Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant
| still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries
| later.
|
| And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the
| colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of
| the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for
| example.
|
| I don't know how you get there. I'm pretty sure diseases went
| ahead of the colonists in many cases and wiped out entire
| civilizations before the colonists ever made contact. Even if
| it didn't wipe out literally everyone, it would have
| significantly destabilized or collapsed all significant
| political or economic systems.
|
| Relatively speaking, any advantages of guns versus bows and
| arrows seem small. If I were inclined to make arguments about
| military technology, I'd speculate that plate armor and
| horses were more significant advantages than guns, but all of
| these pale in comparison to contagion.
| polartx wrote:
| >I'm pretty sure diseases went ahead of the colonists in
| many cases and wiped out entire civilizations before the
| colonists ever made contact. Even if it didn't wipe out
| literally everyone, it would have significantly
| destabilized or collapsed all significant political or
| economic systems.
|
| This is absolutely what happened to the Incan empire
| predatory to its subjugation to a few hundred conquistadors
| led by Francisco Pizarro. For those interested check out
| Last Days of the Incas.
| dragontamer wrote:
| In the context of military technology, ships and wagons are
| the big thing. Ships and wagons to carry food to troops and
| establish supply lines.
|
| Logistics wins wars. With exception of WW1 and WW2,
| soldiers didn't really die in large numbers to the enemy.
| Soldiers died to the cold, to disease, and deserted due to
| lack of food / supplies / morale.
|
| There are occasional exceptions where large numbers of
| soldiers died in battle... but those exceptions become
| remembered for centuries. It certainly wasn't a regular
| event (except in WW1 / WW2, which truly were horrific).
| runarberg wrote:
| Even in WW2 it can be argued that the Allies biggest
| advantage on the western front was the USA build Liberty
| ships, which were built really quickly and mainly used
| for supply.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Allies biggest advantage
|
| As a strategy, you could do a lot worse than Liberty
| ships and a lot of Russians.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Keep in mind that the technological advantage was eroded
| rapidly. People happily sold all of it to the locals,
| including firearms. There's something of a stereotypical
| image of a native American warrior on horseback, but
| that's not a native animal.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >There's something of a stereotypical image of a native
| American warrior on horseback, but that's not a native
| animal.
|
| ..with a lever action, effectively fighting a US army
| lead by battle hardened civil war veterans.
|
| The natives weren't military slouches. What they lacked
| was the population and material resources to field
| fighting forces that could go toe to toe with the
| Europeans.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Was this generally the case for the native populations of
| the Americas? I'd actually be very interested in some
| works on native american supply line( problem)s.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't know much about Native American war theory.
|
| But I know that Medieval English Longbowmen were only
| given something like 6 arrows per battle. And even that
| was enough to stretch the capacities of Medieval
| Britain's supply chain. 10,000 Longbowmen x 6 arrows is
| 60,000 arrows per battle.
|
| IIRC, it was said that during wars, there wasn't any
| gooses or ducks to be found in all of Britain. They've
| all been killed, and their feathers plucked for the war
| arrows.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> Medieval English Longbowmen were only given something
| like 6 arrows per battle.
|
| IIRC records for Henry in the Tower of London show a
| total of 3/4 Million arrows paid for and collected for
| the invasion that lead to Agincourt. With an estimated
| 5,000 archers at Agincourt.
|
| Modern reconstructions show about 6 arrows per minute -
| and again IIRC ten minutes of volley fire against the
| French lines - something like 60 arrows per archer, or
| around 300,000 arrows. Even in plate armour that shits
| gonna hurt.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Between "discovery" and permanent settlement of the
| continental US, an estimated 55 million Native Americans died
| of disease. [1]
|
| The colonization of North America would have gone quite
| differently with that many folks to contend with.
|
| 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-
| europe...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > estimated 55 million Native Americans died of disease
|
| These estimates vary wildly, by more than a factor of 10.
|
| One large source of error is the accounts by Spanish
| Conquistadors. They are suspected of greatly inflating the
| numbers they conquered, in order to boost their prestige
| back in Spain. It also seems doubtful their censuses were
| more than just wild guesses.
| kibwen wrote:
| In particular we can imagine it might look more similar to
| how China, India, Africa, etc. turned out, with subjugated
| local populations serving under foreign imperial governors.
| The eventual collapse of the empire might then result in
| most of the Americas being populated by ethnically Native
| American states.
| pasabagi wrote:
| Not sure. China, India, Africa etc were colonized for
| much shorter periods of time.
|
| One point of comparison would be Ireland. They didn't
| suffer from colonist-brought diseases, because obviously
| they had all the same diseases already, but they did
| suffer a precipitous decline in population.
|
| Another example would be the west coast of Africa, which
| was similarly colonized from early modernity on.
| paganel wrote:
| > but they did suffer a precipitous decline in
| population.
|
| That was a TIL for me, because I was about to say tat the
| "precipitous decline in population" only happened in the
| mid-19th century, i.e. a couple of centuries after
| Cromwell's campaign (the point where the English power
| over Ireland really became a colonial one), but then I
| skimmed through the History section of the Ireland
| wikipedia page [1] and I read this:
|
| > This control was consolidated during the wars and
| conflicts of the 17th century, including the English and
| Scottish colonisation in the Plantations of Ireland, the
| Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Williamite War.
|
| and
|
| > Physician-general William Petty estimated that 504,000
| Catholic Irish and 112,000 Protestant settlers died, and
| 100,000 people were transported, as a result of the
| war.[66] If a prewar population of 1.5 million is
| assumed, this would mean that the population was reduced
| by almost half.
|
| Again, I personally had no idea that Ireland's population
| was reduced by almost half immediately after the English
| conquest that happened during Cromwell's time, that's
| kind of gruesome and imo not studied enough outside of
| Ireland and the UK (I suppose that this subject is
| studied in there).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#The_Kingdom_of_
| Ireland
| InitialLastName wrote:
| In a lot of ways, though, the European subjugation of the
| Americas was the "tutorial mode" for European subjugation
| of Asia and Africa. Among other things, note that the
| business end of European colonization of subsaharan
| Africa and South and East Asia started ~a century after
| the colonization of the Americas (thanks to proximity,
| the Middle East and North Africa were much more tightly
| coupled to European history, and colonization played out
| differently there). The scramble for Africa and the
| opening of Japan didn't happen until the mid-late 19th
| century!
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have
| meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several
| centuries later._
|
| Though by the same token it could also have produced a plague
| that was devastating to the conquistadors, and might then
| have been carried back to Europe for Black Death Round 2,
| devastating the imperial powers and generating a long-lasting
| fear of New World contact. Lots of interesting AU scenarios
| to consider here.
| queuebert wrote:
| That's a very good point.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of
| the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for
| example.
|
| That's quite the claim to toss out. I can certainly imagine
| gunless conquistadors taking over New Spain in a slightly
| longer span just by waiting for people to die.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Also, the guns the conquistadors had kinda sucked and at
| that time not massively better than bow and arrow (they
| required less strength and skill, but skilled archers were
| just as good, and the conquistadors could've sent them
| instead). Arguably the steel swords and armor, plus horses,
| were much more important.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Fun fact, the battle of Tenochtitlan was one of the last
| times trebuchets were used in war.
| irrational wrote:
| Is that true? I've read that 90+% of the population died from
| diseases, the vast majority without ever knowing about the
| European conquerors (that is, they never saw a gun). Imagine
| if 90% of the people in your nearest city died. How difficult
| would it be for a new group, immune to whatever killed almost
| everyone in the city, to move in and take over?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This is not accurate. Individual epidemics did not have
| mortalities even approaching the 90% range. What actually
| happened were dozens of epidemics over decades or
| centuries. Moreover, outside the Northeast, Columbian
| epidemics are closely associated with persistent European
| contact and colonization.
|
| It should also be noted that human populations are
| incredibly resilient to epidemics. In the absence of "other
| things", populations suffering catastrophic virgin soil
| epidemics will typically rebound to pre-epidemic levels in
| decades. It's not a sufficient explanation for the
| centuries-long decline of indigenous American populations.
| The black death was no less severe and successor epidemics
| continued throughout Europe in the 15th century, yet we see
| nothing like the demographic collapse of the Americas post-
| contact.
| irrational wrote:
| Isn't that because Europe was able to bounce back while
| in the Americas, the diseases were immediately followed
| up by the European colonizers who didn't give them time
| or space to repopulate?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's exactly the point. Epidemic disease alone is an
| insufficient explanation for the demographic collapse of
| indigenous Americans.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Is it not?
|
| We have a more recent example in Hawaii. Hawaii was not
| subjugated by any foreign power until the 1890s. That
| being said, the Native Hawaiian population pretty much
| collapsed from a high of 300,000 in 1770 to 20,000 in
| 1920.
| irrational wrote:
| Yes, but guns are an insufficient explanation for the
| complete overthrown of indigenous Americans. Or even the
| primary cause.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street.
| Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?
|
| I know the imperialists weaponized their diseases and
| intentionally tried to spread it and that may be the
| difference.
|
| Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that
| removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's
| always struck me as remarkably convenient and quite
| unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some wondrous
| land without their own disease. Oh really now ... we're
| talking the Caribbeans here.
|
| Even the Wikipedia page on the matter (https://en.m.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Car...), does it cite
| epidemiological sources with someone looking at like bone
| sample DNA? No. It's economic and social science. Excuse me
| for questioning the qualification of economists for being
| able to authoritatively make confident statements about
| historical virology.
|
| It may be true but I'd like more evidence than convenient
| stories by the descendent of a conquerer about how by sheer
| coincidence his/her ancestors were actually not guilty of
| genocide and as of by miracle, North America became a land
| without people; it just happens to follow Frederick Jackson
| Turners Frontier Thesis a little too closely to be called a
| coincidence.
| [deleted]
| space_fountain wrote:
| I think parts of it are deeply controversial, but Guns,
| Germs, and Steel argues this was because Europe had
| higher population densities for longer + more
| domesticated livestocks providing a more potent breading
| ground for deadly diseases. I also think that disease
| being a factor hardly removes culpability from the
| conquers, there are plenty of quotes of some of them
| saying things about how the plagues were a gift from god
| and similarly terrible things. I also am not an export,
| but I believe there was some transfer in the other
| direction, particularly syphilis.
|
| If we're just speculating though, I wonder if the fact
| that one group was traveling by boat could have insulated
| the disease transfer a bit. Most really bad diseases
| would run their course by the time a sailing ship made it
| back across the ocean and certainly people knew to
| quarantine ships with sick people on them in Europe. For
| a disease the ship crews were resistant to reach the
| Americas they just had to visit a village, where to go
| the other way it had to survive an in built month plus
| quarantine which is plenty of time for most diseases to
| show up
| dleslie wrote:
| > Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?
|
| Not all diseases are equally harmful, right? Perhaps the
| indigenous populations of the Americas simply lacked a
| disease as deadly as those brought by the Europeans.
| handrous wrote:
| IIRC a lot of Eurasian diseases were a result of long-
| term close contact with domesticated animals. Guess which
| side of the Atlantic didn't really have domesticated
| animals....
| antasvara wrote:
| I think the key is density in Europe vs North America.
| Europe was living in densely packed cities with
| domesticated animals in close proximity, while North
| America had smaller communities and less domestication.
| As a general rule, this makes disease spread and zoonotic
| viruses much less likely.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| IIRC that certain aspects of how livestock were raised in
| Europe contributed to a long history of more virulent
| illnesses so that when the European population eventually
| met the North American it was the North American that
| suffered.
| not2b wrote:
| It's possible that syphilis was brought back to Europe
| from the New World by the Spanish. That hasn't been
| proven though.
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis :
|
| The first recorded outbreak of syphilis in Europe
| occurred in 1494/1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French
| invasion ...
| gameman144 wrote:
| From what I've read, native populations had less frequent
| interactions with livestock (through which many diseases
| arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings
| (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave
| European settlers more exposure to transmissible
| pathogens in the centuries before settlement.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The usual explanation is that the Europeans lived in much
| closer proximity with livestock... smallpox probably came
| from cows, etc.
|
| Also it's generally believed that syphilis didn't exist
| in the Old World before 1492, so there's at least one
| disease that probably made the opposite journey.
|
| However, the disease narrative doesn't absolve the
| Europeans. Nobody _forced_ the European powers to
| colonize the Americas. If they 'd packed up and gone
| home, even if the Americas had still been decimated by
| smallpox, they would have bounced back, given the
| opportunity. Human populations tend to do that.
|
| (The Black Death is sort of an exception, it suppressed
| European population for a _long_ time, because it kept
| coming back, killing a bunch of people, and then going
| away again. But- Europe thrived during that period, the
| Renaissance was coterminous with very bad bubonic plague
| outbreaks)
| [deleted]
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street.
| Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?
|
| Cities are a breeding ground for diseases. America wasn't
| densely populated at the time.
| sharikous wrote:
| Well, syphilis went the other way
| sjburt wrote:
| First, it was a two-way street. Syphilis, for one, is
| believed to have originated in the new world and have
| been brought to Europe post-contact.
|
| But Europe, Asia, and Africa combined was a much bigger
| population pool, so more opportunities for mutation and
| transmission leading to more types of infectious
| diseases.
| seph-reed wrote:
| CPG Grey has a great video on this exact subject:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
|
| In short, you need cities to develop these types of
| viruses. Cities where the virus can just keep killing,
| without ever hitting a dead end.
| johncessna wrote:
| I think the other, more important, factor CPG Grey
| mentions in the video is domesticated animals.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Sorry. You're correct. I haven't watched the video in a
| bit.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Fwiw that's based on "Guns, Germs and Steel" which is not
| very respected as an academic work
| seph-reed wrote:
| So, I just went down a rabbit hole of criticisms on Guns,
| Germs, and Steel... it's largely coming from the far left
| and far right. Very few moderates.
|
| The far left says it's a cop out on racism, blaming white
| evil on natural conditions. The far right says that it's
| too PC, that plenty of other places had the right
| conditions and gives no credit to culture or innovation.
|
| So both the far left and far right want to take credit
| from chaos and put it on the people: either to hate them,
| or to take pride.
|
| This in and of itself is not proof of anything. But if
| something pisses off far left and right at the same time,
| I tend to think of it as a green flag.
| jcranmer wrote:
| You're not looking at any of the criticisms I've seen,
| then. Here's a brief summary, off the top of my head:
|
| * Jared Diamond posits an explanation of megafauna
| extinction in North America that's heavily predicated on
| the Clovis-first hypothesis and the overextinction
| hypothesis. The former hypothesis is very thoroughly
| discredited, and the latter is also generally disfavored,
| especially in the it's-the-primary-cause way that Jared
| Diamond uses it. (Specifically, it should be noted that
| the megafauna extinction in North America also coincides
| pretty closely with the Younger Dryas, whose climatic
| effects were most pronounced in North America).
|
| * The primary north-south/east-west transmission
| hypothesis doesn't actually hold that well up to
| evidence. The two things I'd note are a) local topography
| has a major effect on climate that's not accounted for,
| and b) if you look at the transmission of cereal crops,
| there's very little transmission between the
| Mediterranean/Mesopotamian basin and China basin but
| universal spread of maize along the vertical axis of the
| Americas--the complete opposite of what the theory
| predicts.
|
| * I don't have a link handy, but I've seen someone more
| versed in the history of infectious diseases point out
| that the killer diseases that Diamond identifies don't
| appear to have actually become epidemic in the manner
| that Diamond asserts.
|
| * Diamond also places way too heavy on emphasis on the
| unreliable accounts of the conquistadors in explaining
| how the Spanish conquests happened.
|
| In short, the main problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is
| that... it gets the facts wrong. And people have brought
| these complaints to Diamond previously, so it's not like
| he's aware that there are facts which destroy his thesis,
| and Diamond's response is to double-down on the thesis
| without trying to explain why the countervailing facts
| might be incorrect interpretations or whatnot, or
| providing other nuggets of insight to bolster his thesis,
| just continually reassert that he's right.
|
| Try reading Charles Mann's 1491. It goes into more well-
| researched explanations of pre-Columbian cultures that
| would help you understand why Diamond's thesis is wrong.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Most of these points don't seem central to Diamonds
| thesis as I interpreted it.
|
| They do negate some of the spurious theories, but the
| central theory (IMO) is that there's a whole lot of luck
| involved in global domination, and that luck is not
| evenly spread.
|
| The one about germs being less of a killer is definitely
| very interesting though. That's totally central, though
| -- if not germs doing the killing -- it'd just fall back
| onto guns. If you happen to dig up the link, I'd love to
| read through it.
| tptacek wrote:
| If it's just guns, you have to account for the number of
| failed attempts, and the century-long military effort it
| took to hold territory. Cortes got his ass handed to him
| repeatedly in military conflicts.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > century-long military effort it took to hold territory
|
| Centuries, actually. Indigenous peoples in the Americas
| were able to hold out against European, and later
| successor state, attempts to acquire their territory
| until around 1900.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Uh, go to a place like r/badhistory where they actually
| cite sources for their problems with it for a start
|
| Actual academics have problems with it
| seph-reed wrote:
| I went down another rabbit hole on r/badhistory.
|
| There's definitely plenty of holes in the theories of
| GG&S, if that's what you mean by "academics have problems
| with it" === "it is not a perfect theory."
|
| But overall, it seems most of the points hold more than
| enough water to be worth merit. None of them perfect, but
| vastly better than throwing the whole thing out.
|
| -----
|
| Also, holy crap I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt
| here, but the first few threads I went into were...
| blatantly far left (as Reddit tends to be). Seriously
| though: spiraling into tangents of communism, your
| classic woke/sassy "dunk" lingo, clearly had some
| external bias bone to pick. I'm not sure r/badhistory is
| a community worth considering the acme of academia, only
| based off my short interactions with it. But maybe the
| worst just came up first?
| bnralt wrote:
| Yeah, in my experience there's a lot of misinformation
| floating around r/badhistory. It's not uncommon to have
| some comments halfway down (below all the highly upvoted
| snark and attempts at humor) that point out the
| inaccuracies in a post, so that's something at least.
|
| But a large part of the problem with r/badhistory, and
| r/AskHistorians as well, is that it seems like most of
| the users don't realize that being better at history than
| most of Reddit is an extremely low bar. There's certainly
| some good stuff that ends up there (well, in
| r/AskHistorians, less so in r/badhistory), but there's
| still a lot of junk as well, and too many people act as
| if the stuff there is equivalent to published work by
| professional historians.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I don't read r/badhistory but occasionally
| r/AskHistorians instead (where why GG&S is bad is
| literally in the FAQ), and in perusing old threads there,
| I came across this take that might be interesting to you:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4o1n26/i_
| wan...
|
| While I think you are probably more likely to sympathize
| with restricteddata than anthropology_nerd, I do think
| that anthropology_nerd's comments may be able to
| elucidate a little bit why GG&S provokes such hostility
| among academics.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Thanks a ton for sharing that. This is -- so far -- the
| highest calibre of this debate I've seen.
|
| I think both parties are talking passed each-other,
| having missed a very, very important statement:
|
| > You recommended people read GG&S with a grain of salt,
| but the vast majority of casual readers lack that salt
| when it comes to understanding the flaws in the book.
|
| Whether or not this salt is there seems like the addition
| / omission from which each side argues. With salt, it's a
| fine enough book. The broad strokes are close enough.
| Without salt -- as in "I'm a professional because I read
| this book" -- it probably gets really, really annoying.
|
| I definitely agree that nuance is important, and the book
| should put more effort into not presenting itself as
| fact. But it's pop-history. It wouldn't be pop if it
| didn't, and what would be pop would be even worse IMO.
| VHRanger wrote:
| IDK, I'm generally on r/badeconomics which is the best
| one of the badX gang, but as far as I saw, badhistory was
| very informal but generally fine?
|
| Like, sure there's probably a bias to the left but it's
| not the hellhole of r/badphilosophy for instance there.
| They won't advocate for nonsense stuff,just use the
| terminology from social sciences
| vintermann wrote:
| A lot of what he says in it is uncontroversial stuff that
| he didn't come up with himself. But you don't get much
| academic respect for things others have said before you,
| even if you succeed at bringing it to a new audience
| (especially if you don't pepper it with source
| references, which I don't recall GGS doing!)
|
| Being a wildly successful popularizer is always risky for
| an academic. The most serious criticisms I've seen have
| been about tangential stuff.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street.
| Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?
|
| They did: syphilis! But the Europeans had far more
| diseases to share because there was far more animal
| domestication going on in the Old World. And most of our
| diseases came as a result of that animal domestication,
| so they had already spread through the population which
| developed immunity in the millennia between the first
| human infection and the Columbian Exchange.
|
| > Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that
| removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's
| always struck me at remarkably convenient and quite
| unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some welder
| land without their own diseases, oh really now ... we're
| talking the Caribbeans here
|
| Typically I hear "the smallpox theory" presented as
| "Europeans killed 90% of Native Americans including by
| disease" as though Europeans collectively set out to
| exterminate Native Americans. To be certain, there was a
| lot of brutality and genocide and even some _deliberate_
| spread of disease, but no European could have credibly
| believed that the disease would spread throughout the new
| world to such effect.
| alwillis wrote:
| _but no European could have credibly believed that the
| disease would spread throughout the new world to such
| effect._
|
| Certainly not, but once they figured out what was going
| on, they certainly aided and abetted the spread of these
| new diseases.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Which particular people? Was it like military people
| under orders from European leaders?
|
| Maybe someone could help me understand -- with such a
| prolific practice it must have been diaried and such?
| What are the best primary/secondary sources detailing the
| practice.
|
| I've heard the "they gave blankets but they knew the
| blankets had smallpox infection". But we presumably know
| who the they were.
|
| Presumably a lot of the colonists were sick as well. But
| not sick enough that the indigenous population noticed
| and stayed away.
|
| I guess people's capacity for evil is always greater than
| one can imagine.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| They didn't find out what was going on until the 20th
| century... Before that they thought it was God's judgment
| on the heathens or something.
| tomrod wrote:
| They sent blankets used by infected people. They didn't
| understand germ theory, but they understood contagion.
| wwtrv wrote:
| Didn't the first documented cases of this occurs a
| hundred of more years after most of the natives had
| already died (18th vs the 16th century)? By the time
| Europeans started colonizing NA most of locals had
| already died to the diseases spreading from the south.
| tomrod wrote:
| In my reference, I acknowledge that how I used "they" was
| ambiguous. I meant people practicing war before germ
| theory.
|
| If we ignore this example, we still have dead and
| infected bodies/livestock being catapulted into cities.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I acknowledged that much, but my point is they had no
| idea that these "new people" had no immunity and that the
| sickness would tear through the population so
| effectively. Moreover, "they" isn't "all Europeans"--we
| need to be careful who we blame or else we verge on
| racism ourselves.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Population density and totals, and their proximity to
| animals and their waste, matter. Extensive trade and
| empire building exposes people to new pathogens and
| allows new ones to develop, as well.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Source? Guns of the period weren't very effective in that
| period. Most accounts I've seen attribute the conquistadors
| success to disease and political instability.
| Swizec wrote:
| If I'm remembering Guns, Germs, and Steel correctly, a
| popular/pluasible theory is that even without the disease
| conquistador swords and armor were so much better than the
| natives, they'd eventually win regardless. Something about
| more advanced metallurgy.
|
| Having horses may also have helped. There were no beasts of
| burden (iirc) in North America until the Spanish arrived.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Well, there were around 3000 Spanish conquistadors. Could
| they really conquer the whole Aztec empire (5 mln people)
| without alliances with local tribes?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Without local tribes? Probably not, but that's almost
| always how conquering actually happens (by exploiting
| existing fault lines). The situation with Alexander the
| Great is kind of representative. Alexander the Great had
| an army of about 30,000 people and conquered the Persian
| Empire which had a population of about 50 million. The
| Conquistadors had 3000 and conquered the Aztec Empire
| which had a population of 5 million, although the
| Conquistadors also had the benefit of disease traveling
| before them and not just better tactics but also far
| superior metallurgy. It doesn't necessarily take an
| enormous advantage to conquer large territories, and the
| Conquistadors had numerous advantages.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| The biggest advantage the Conquistadors has was everyone
| else in the area fucking hated the Aztec. They were
| horrible to have as neighbors and when any chance to fuck
| them over, the Spanish, came everyone jumped on board.
| queuebert wrote:
| That was my point above that everyone seems to have
| missed. Even if diseases wiped out 90+% of the local
| population, they would still greatly outnumber the
| conquistadors. So it wasn't purely a balance of manpower.
| Sure, the diseases weakened the resistance, but it wasn't
| the deciding factor. Diamond says as much in his book.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Disease was still very much the deciding factor. The
| europeans had an advantage in technology, but not a
| staggering one. Cortez's forces were successfully
| defeated by the Aztecs on more than one occasion, and it
| was only after disease wiped out a large portion of
| Tenochtitlan's population and a protracted siege that
| Cortez and his allies could wear down their defenses
| enough to seize the city. When Pizarro entered Peru, the
| area had already been severely depopulated by disease and
| civil war, the civil war itself being kicked off by the
| death of both the Emperor and his heir dying of small
| pox. He convinced the winner of that civil war to visit
| him unarmed and then captured him and masscred his
| retinue, and used his hostage to get the Inca generals to
| stand down. When the Incas eventually rebelled, they too
| were successful in the field against the spanish - Manco
| Inca managed to wipe out 4 relief columns sent to break
| his Siege of Cuzco. Guerilla tactics were common but
| Manco also defeated the Spanish in open battles, such as
| the Battle of Ollantaytambo. While Manco was ultimately
| unsuccessful in seizing control of Cuzco, the Spanish
| likewise were unable to defeat him, and his Neo-Inca
| state survived for decades.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It would also mean smallpox would spread the other way. It's
| interesting that the transfer of disease was so heavily one-
| sided.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's not surprising at all. If you assume naively that
| development rate of a novel disease is proportional to
| population, then the World, which had a 6:1 greater
| population would have 6 times as many communicable
| diseases. Similar argument if you base it off of land mass,
| number of wild animals, number of domesticated animals,
| etc.
|
| (Actually, I do think the New World peoples were
| particularly prolific when it came to domesticating
| plants... they punched way above their population size in
| terms of number of today's staple foods they
| domesticated... plus chocolate, vanilla, etc...)
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| You also had millions of years for diseases to evolve to
| infect people in the Old World. Then there were fairly
| small populations that traveled to the New World. If they
| didn't bring the diseases with them, there was only about
| 10,000 years for disease evolution, and a much smaller
| population for much of that time.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I've read that most human viruses jumped from
| domesticated animals. The pre-Columbian American peoples
| notoriously had almost no domesticated animals, with I
| think just one exception being the llama. So I think
| that's supposedly the primary factor, less so raw
| population.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Indeed, I even mentioned that. ;)
|
| > _"Similar argument if you base it off of... number of
| domesticated animals..."_
|
| But again, I think that fact isn't surprising, either,
| considering the Old world is much larger and had more
| wild animals and more humans than the New World.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of
| the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for
| example.
|
| I'm not so sure about that. Writing gave a huge advantage to
| the Western forces. By that I mean military men had access to
| a couple thousand years of military tactics books. Having
| advanced weapons is one thing, knowing strategy and tactics
| is quite another.
|
| For example, there are battles where the Romans were
| outnumbered 10:1 and still defeated a better armed barbarian
| army. The Romans were organized, disciplined, and trained to
| fight as a unit. They would just slaughter the barbarians who
| fought as individuals.
|
| Remember, guns at the time were muzzle-loading, and had some
| rube goldberg contraption to light the powder. They were
| unreliable, inaccurate, and very slow to reload.
| bumbada wrote:
| People in America were not stupid, there were not
| repetition guns yet, like Repeating rifle or early machine
| guns.
|
| The biggest significant factor for Spanish people was
| getting the support of the local population. It was not
| foreign powers against local powers. But local powers
| against local powers.
|
| And that was because local empires were terrible with the
| subdued tribes. There was human sacrifices with subdued
| tribes and they were slaves. Under Spanish rule those who
| supported the Spaniards were soon considered Spanish
| citizens, a huge improvement.
|
| And Rome usually worked the other way around. Rome did
| outnumber everybody and squashed any opposition. First they
| did because mandatory Conscription ("the draft")in the
| army, an army of peasants that was way more numerous than
| anybody else and a population that will replace casualties
| much faster than anybody else.
|
| The Army of peasants did fight against elite warriors that
| were much better trained and equipped but were way less
| numerous, for example against the Macedonian Army,and they
| won.
|
| Finally, after growing and organizing themselves much more,
| Rome will use infrastructure that only they had like the
| Mediterranean sea and specially roads to move massive
| amounts of soldiers very fast from one part of the Empire
| to another.
|
| This was the equivalent of the train that will make it
| possible for Germany, Russia or the US moving so much
| people to the war front fast.
|
| It was the Romans those who did outnumber everybody else
| concentrating the army at one point, defeating the enemy
| and moving the Army to another place.
|
| And it was Julius Caesar who wrote "divide et impera"
| because that was the Roman way of doing things, dividing
| their enemies, and fighting them isolated with a much
| bigger army.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > People in America were not stupid
|
| I didn't say they were. I said they lacked writing.
| Writing preserves orders of magnitude more information
| for others than oral tradition possibly can.
|
| Yes, I know the Mayans had writing, and their books were
| burned by the Spanish. But the Spanish conquered the Inca
| and the Aztecs, not the Mayans.
|
| The ideas of recruiting the locals to your side, and
| divide and conquer, are part of western military
| tradition. If the Aztecs and Inca used such tactics, I'd
| be interested if you have sources.
|
| There were battles that the Romans fought and won against
| the barbarian much greater numbers. That isn't going to
| happen without superior organization, discipline,
| training and tactics.
|
| And finally, the Roman idea of conquest was to
| assimilate, not exterminate.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_of_Boudica
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia
|
| And, of course, this triumph of discipline, tactics,
| organization and training:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Writing gave a huge advantage to the Western forces. By
| that I mean military men had access to a couple thousand
| years of military tactics books. Having advanced weapons is
| one thing, knowing strategy and tactics is quite another.
|
| If memory serves me correctly, military tactics didn't
| really become a genre until the late 16th century, after
| the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. And
| during the early 16th century, it's quite likely that most
| of the soldiers (including the commanders!) would have been
| illiterate and thus not really able to read any extant
| military tactics books, especially whatever survived of
| Greek or Roman military texts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Since the Conquistador commanders sent back written
| reports, I doubt they were illiterate. And even if they
| _were_ illiterate, they were trained by military people
| who were. And even if those were also illiterate, they
| were steeped in military traditions of discipline,
| organization, tactics, etc., that went back to the
| greeks.
|
| The way they operated was clear evidence of military
| sophistication.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > And even if those were also illiterate, they were
| steeped in military traditions of discipline,
| organization, tactics, etc., that went back to the
| greeks.
|
| And why couldn't, say, the Inca draw on the Wari, who
| could draw on the Moche, who could draw on the Chavin,
| who date back even before the Greeks?
|
| The problem with claiming the utility of writing in
| developing military tactics is that Western Europe
| doesn't have a tradition of discussing military tactics
| in written texts until the Early Modern period. There's
| nothing like Sun Tzu's Art of War that keeps getting
| passed down and talked about; any transmission of tactics
| is going to happen via practical experience in a kind of
| apprenticeship--which is exactly the same method of
| transmission an illiterate society is going to do for
| military tactics.
|
| Or you could do what the Aztecs did and send all of your
| boys (rich or poor) to school to learn how to become
| warriors, come to think of it.
| anthk wrote:
| No, you are wrong. The Western Europe inherited a lot of
| experience, tactics and fighting methods from the Roman
| empire.
|
| And OFC from their enemies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The only reason we know how Pizarro conquered the Inca is
| because he wrote it down. The bulk of what we know about
| Inca life comes from the Spanish who wrote it down. Most
| of the rest comes from archaeology and guesswork.
|
| If you've got evidence that the Inca military had
| organized tactics, like units, feinting maneuvers,
| flanking attacks, procedures for taking fortified
| positions, covering fire, strategic retreat, breastworks,
| defense in depth, etc., I'm interested.
|
| We do know the Inca had no plan for when their leader was
| captured but not killed. But Pizarro knew about that one,
| and that's how he defeated an empire. Disrupting the
| enemy's command and control is a well-understood
| technique in Western military tradition.
| godelmachine wrote:
| Greenland is a cold country. I doubt if viruses can survive
| there for so long unlike a tropical country like Spain.
| anthk wrote:
| Spain is not tropical. It has three main climates:
|
| - Atlantic. Windy and coldish climate, with lots of rain.
| Like the UK, or worse.
|
| - Continental Mediterranean. Hot Summers (over 40c) and cold
| Winters (below 0).
|
| - Mediterranean. Overall a warm climate with a few days of
| slight cold in Winter, with OFC some spots of cold winter
| depending on the location.
|
| - On top of that, the mountain climate, chill and always
| snowy in winter.
|
| Then the Archipielagos (Canaries/Balearics) are their own
| thing, and Iberia has several distint microclimates and
| terrains everywhere because the highly mountainous orography
| distorts the overall climates a lot.
|
| Think of Spain as a micro-condensed US, where you have near
| every climate in the Earth.
| chestertn wrote:
| Spain is not tropical
| kens wrote:
| The book "1491" describes the Americas before Columbus, and is
| very interesting. In particular, the population density was
| much higher than generally realized.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Especially in Aztec cities
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Newfoundland is an island and it was, at best, extremely
| sparsely populated when the Vikings arrived. According to
| Wikipedia [1] the estimated local population when Europeans
| arrived in 1497 was 700 (that's on an area only slightly
| smaller than England). So I'm thinking that contacts were very
| limited and the potential for any disease to spread minimal.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_in...
| coliveira wrote:
| Smallpox only spread in Europe starting in the 15th century.
| Before that it was known mostly in Asia (China and India). It
| was probably the increased trade with Asia that was responsible
| for spreading smallpox in Europe.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's really interesting!
|
| Of course, if the native population died off around them, the
| Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and
| perhaps ruled North America instead.
| munk-a wrote:
| It depends if they kept coming back. Smallpox worked to the
| settlers' advantage because colonizers were establishing
| themselves in the carribean and south america before any
| serious ventures into north america got going - so there was
| time for a pandemic to actually spread before folks really
| started getting serious about settling. I think with
| statistics and spread rates and all that it's likely that
| viking settlers would need to stick around for a decade or
| two to really see the effects in terms of population
| thinning.
| runarberg wrote:
| I doubt it. The distances are simply too large to maintain a
| supply lines needed for a self sufficient colonies to thrive.
| The Norse needed the natives both to trade with and to learn
| from if they were to settle these lands, they couldn't do it
| on their own.
|
| Now you might think of Iceland and Norse Greenland as a
| counter example. But Norse Greenland never really thrived,
| and was eventually abandoned. Iceland however thrived, but it
| is so much closer to Norway about 7 days at see with the
| potential to stop at the Faeroe Islands.
|
| The voyage between Greenland and Iceland is similar (only a
| bit longer + sailing up the west coast of Greenland). And
| finally you need another week or two to cross the Labrador
| sea from Greenland. However that route is much harder in the
| winter then between Iceland and Norway, and Greenland is not
| nearly as populated as Iceland or Norway and don't generate
| enough surplus food which they can supply to a potential
| colonies on the North American mainland.
|
| So the logistics of supplying a colony in North America
| without help from the people already living there must
| include a summertime only supply line from Iceland with
| enough supplies to last the whole year. Where each voyage
| from Iceland is going take maybe a month, maybe more, just
| one way. These ships are still pretty small and not a lot of
| room for cargo, so you'll need a few of them. I'm not sure
| the economy on Iceland could have afforded such an expensive
| endeavor.
| vintermann wrote:
| Not to mention that the ships, while nice by 11th century
| standards, were not exactly airline level safety. A
| significant number of would-be traders (and raiders for
| that matter) ended up on the bottom of the sea, with the
| implications that would have for prices.
| gremloni wrote:
| Maybe but the Viking's modus operandi seemed like it was
| pillage/rape/kidnap the best looking women and then head out.
| I can only think of one settlement the Vikings set up in
| Gaul.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| > I can only think of one settlement the Vikings set up in
| Gaul
|
| Are you calling Normandy one settlement? As they certainly
| spent most of the Viking age colonizing from Iceland to
| Sicily.
| [deleted]
| gremloni wrote:
| Most of the "colonizing" happened in prehistory. It was
| also based out of Ukraine, don't know if you can
| attribute that to the Vikings.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I think you may be misinformed.
|
| Viking was a lifestyle or temporary occupation, not a
| people. The people were the Norse, and they did a massive
| amount of settling in the Viking Age.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| This is akin to saying "most of the pillaging in history
| happened by people besides vikings, so you can't really
| attribute that to them." Yes, others colonized the areas.
| The Vikings also did during the Viking age.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Not really - they had a three-pronged business model based
| on ranching sheep, trading and, yes, raiding. Wasn't it
| Erik the Red who had two brothers, and their father asked
| all three what they were going to be when they had grown
| up. Says the first he is going to be a farmer and his
| sheepflock is going to be so large that he will have to dig
| another waterhole. Says the second he will go trading and
| he will have to build another barn to keep his wares in.
| Says Erik, who was the youngest, he is going to be a Viking
| and he is going to raid both of them.
| vintermann wrote:
| Not even close. For one thing, Leif was a Christian. For
| another, his father, who more lived up to the stereotype of
| the murderous psycho Viking, had been twice banished for
| murder already, which was why he found himself in Greenland
| in the first place. The Norse were never a lot like the
| rapey pagan party Vikings they're portrayed as in popular
| culture, and certainly not by 1021.
| munk-a wrote:
| There were norse settlments all over the place - Russia,
| Normandy, Lower and Central Germany, England (the Danelaw
| was a thing for a while), Ireland and, famously, Byzantium.
|
| For settling uninhabited locales you've got Shetland, Mann,
| the Isles, Iceland and some seasonal settlements on
| Greenland.
| gremloni wrote:
| Byzantium? I would love some reading material on that.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Here's a short podcast series that talks about the
| Normans, including Bohemond, who set up a crusader state
| in Antioch, which had been Byzantine territory not long
| before: https://normancenturies.com/
|
| You might also check out the podcast History of
| Byzantium. Although you'll have to go many hours before
| encountering the Norse, in the form of the Varangians.
|
| And I also recommend the excellent book Children of Ash
| and Elm for a very recent overview of Viking history.
| gremloni wrote:
| Awesome, thank you.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians#Byzantine_Empire
|
| It's not much, but it's a start.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Don't forget Southern Italy and Sicily!
| munk-a wrote:
| Hrm - I'd avoided including those because the Normans
| were sooooorta not what you'd call Vikings at that point
| - but yup those Normans got everywhere.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I don't think it works like that.
|
| There seems to be a need for a minimum primary settler
| population and a decent amount of native assistance- it's
| fairly easy to build a new town 10 miles from your last but I
| am not aware of any long distance unsupported settlers.
|
| So if the natives around the Mayflower had all died, so would
| the Founding Fathers. If the Norse diseases had killed off
| the locals they might not have made it through winter.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is very far from my expertise, but surely you can also
| live off the land?
|
| Hunting and fishing shouldn't be very different in
| Newfoundland compared to Norway/Iceland. Bring a few
| chickens along, and you have another food source.
|
| I assume/guess the vikings were better at this stuff than
| the Mayflower crowd.
| vintermann wrote:
| They didn't want to live like that. It's one of the
| things Jared Diamond argues in Collapse: sure, they could
| have survived longer in Greenland if they adopted more of
| the customs of the Inuit, but this went against
| everything they considered important and valuable in
| life. They wouldn't be themselves any more if they did
| (and for all we know, a few of them may have been
| assimilated into the native population and stopped being
| Norse in any sense recognizable to us).
|
| Not least of all, Leif Eriksson was a Christian, a
| Catholic in modern terms. It's reasonable to assume most
| of his followers were, too. He had gained the epithet
| "the lucky" due to his habit of coming across and
| rescuing castaways at sea. To the Norse, luck was
| evidence the cosmos was on your side, and one of the most
| important attributes a leader offered to potential
| followers was a share in this cosmic luck. This probably
| helped Leif the missionary securing a lot of conversions!
|
| But the heart of Christianity at the time was in Rome.
| They were already profoundly cut off from the mystical
| fellowship of believers, the communion. How much worse
| wouldn't it be for their sense of self if they were not
| only to go off in an impossibly distant land, but to live
| as the savages there?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Simply put, living off the land is HARD, even with an
| established settlement and some trade, mass starvation is
| a pretty likely outcome.
|
| Reality is more complex and challenging than Farmville or
| AnimalCrossing.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Provided you're fit and capable it's not too hard until
| winter rolls around.
|
| Surviving winter solo or in a small group is damned near
| impossible.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That really depends on the location, tools you have, and
| familiarity with the environment.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| In Animal Crossing, you've got Tom Nook, a whole
| commercial infrastructure, and an airport to help you
| out.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I'm just wondering why the same process how vikings
| settled Greenland would not work in the (IMHO much more
| hospitable) North America.
| vintermann wrote:
| The Norse mostly settled Greenland because they had to,
| not because it was such a great place to be. It was a
| frontier, settled by desperate people. Leif's father, the
| chieftain Eric the Red, had moved there because he had
| been banished from Iceland over a murder.
|
| And of course the Greenland colony wasn't really
| sustainable, which is why it died out when a couple of
| hard turns came their way (climate change and getting cut
| off from trade for a few years).
| jcranmer wrote:
| That's an excellent question. The answer I would give is
| that the process by which the Norse settled Greenland did
| not actually ultimately work out in the first place.
| Colonization isn't a simple matter of gathering enough
| people to form a colonizing party, staking out an
| empty(-ish) piece of land, and building a new settlement
| there. Once that settlement is built, there needs to be a
| steady stream of consumable goods being provided, and
| until the new settlement can produce or trade for those
| goods on its own right, the colonizers are effectively
| subsidizing that settlement.
|
| The settlements in Greenland never really reached that
| point. The leading hypothesis at this point for why
| Greenland collapsed was that the Arctic trade routes
| dropped far-off Greenland from their destinations--and
| without that trade, the settlements couldn't sustain
| themselves and collapsed. Newfoundland may be a more
| hospitable place than Greenland, but from a trade
| situation, it's even worse: it's not offering any trade
| goods to Europeans that Greenland or Iceland could be
| providing (at much shorter journeys), but it's still
| probably not able to tap into the North American trade
| network--I think you have to make it to Nova Scotia or
| New Brunswick to do that.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The Greenland settlements had 2000+ people between
| 1000-1350. Last written record is from 1408.
|
| Ten generations is completely sustainable by my
| standards.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#Norse_
| set...
| runarberg wrote:
| Stories of Norse Greenlanders visiting Iceland mention
| their poverty. They would come to Iceland and taste beer
| and bread for the first time in their lives. They lived,
| yes, but they definitely did not thrive over there.
| Perhaps they were sustainable, but they were on the very
| edge of being so, and when conditions worsened (worse
| climate, lost trade routes, competition, etc.), they
| weren't any more and these settlements were abandoned.
| adolph wrote:
| Some interpretations of the socio-political context of what
| is now New England see tribes more affected by disease
| presumably spread by earlier European contact as aiding
| incoming Europeans in order to ward off other tribes.
|
| _The Narragansetts were the most powerful tribe in the
| southern area of the region when the English colonists
| arrived in 1620, and they had not been affected by the
| epidemics. Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to the east
| allied with the colonists at Plymouth Colony as a way to
| protect the Wampanoags from Narragansett attacks. In the
| fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows
| wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening
| challenge, but Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the
| snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The
| Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack
| them._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people
| eesmith wrote:
| > long distance unsupported settlers
|
| There were 18 years between the European settlement of
| Pitcairn island and the next visitors - https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands#European_sett... .
|
| Your constraints are pretty strict. There aren't many
| places which could be settled (in recorded history) where
| there weren't already people living there, and where there
| was a reason for not continuing contact with the place of
| origin.
|
| Another possibility is Te Pito O Te Kainga / Rapa Nui /
| Easter Island. The first explorers met one person already
| there (Nga Tavake), then they go back to Hiva, and a double
| canoe returns to Easter Island carrying the settlers. They
| left "because a rising tide was destroying their land"
| and/or a power struggle with the Hanau Eepe, if I read
| http://archive.hokulea.com/rapanui/hotu.html correctly. In
| either case, the oral history suggest little continued
| connection with Hiva.
| vintermann wrote:
| I agree with this. It's about economic and social support.
| Leif Eriksson was the son of the notorious murderer Eric
| the Red. Eric was twice outcast, first from Norway to
| Iceland, then from Iceland to Greenland. On top of that,
| Leif was an enthusiastic convert to Christianity, which
| somewhat alienated him from his still pagan father. They
| lived on a fringe of a fringe of the European economic,
| cultural and religious community. They didn't even really
| have the economic support to sustain a settlement on
| Greenland (where they were more by necessity than
| opportunity, due to Eric's crimes), let alone Nova Scotia.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I dunno, the Norse settlers were apparently getting a lot out
| of trading red died cloth for native produce and if it hadn't
| been for the altercation that somehow grew up around that cow
| or bull the possibility of trade might have drawn a lot more
| Norse in, the way the fur trade did in French North America.
|
| But then again farming populations can expand really fast
| with low population pressure. The 13 colonies were seeing
| their populations double every generation just from natural
| fertility even before immigration.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| is there any explanation for why disease didn't kill in the
| reverse direction? Why weren't Europeans wiped out by Native
| American diseases?
| sampo wrote:
| According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond,
| Europeans had a history of living in close encounters with
| farm animals, so they had adopted diseases from the animals.
|
| And also the Eurasian geography made trade, and exchange of
| both culture and domesticated animals, and also diseases,
| easier in the east-west direction. Because in east-west
| direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone.
| Cow, horse, pig, sheep, goat, donkey, chicken, duck, goose,
| cat, dog, these didn't all originate in a single location.
| But in Eurasia, people were able to adopt domesticated
| animals and plants from their eastern and western neighbors.
|
| The geography in the Americas makes it more easy to travel
| and trade in the south-north direction. But this is less
| useful, because you would only get access to domesticated
| plants and animals from different climate zones.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline.
| ..
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Because in east-west direction the exchange happens
| inside the same climate zone.
|
| This is almost trivially refuted by _reading a climate
| map._ Traveling along the Silk Road takes you from a
| Mediterranean climate into a semi-desert alluvial flood
| plain, into mountains and high steppes, then back into
| desert, then low steppes, then mountains, then high desert,
| then more mountains, and then rich alluvial flood plain of
| East China, without deviating all that much in latitude.
| Travel north from West Texas, and you start with high
| altitude steppe, then continue with high altitude steppe
| until you reach Edmonton. Indeed, looking at a climate map
| of the Americas, you 'll notice that it's pretty much a
| smooth gradient in latitude.
|
| Now Eurasia does have some similar climatic belts on an
| east-west axis--namely the tundra, taiga, and steppes of
| Russia. Which are regions that are not known as being
| founts of civilization.
|
| Indeed, if you actually look at the history of the Americas
| versus the history of Eurasia, there's good evidence for
| transfer of what we might term foundational technologies of
| civilization along the north-south axis of the Americas
| (metallurgy, pottery, and most importantly of all, maize),
| while there's not really any evidence of such transfer
| between the Mediterranean and Chinese worlds in Eurasia.
| felipeerias wrote:
| The diffusion of domesticated plants and animals across
| Eurasia did not happen in a single trip, not even in a
| single lifetime. For example, chickens were first
| domesticated in Southeast Asia but it took millennia for
| them to spread to China and the Mediterranean.
| mek6800d2 wrote:
| It's been a good while since I read _Guns, Germs & Steel_
| (and Diamond's equally excellent _Collapse_ ), but my
| remembrance is that physical obstacles in the north/south-
| oriented Americas and Africa -- e.g., deserts and extremely
| dense jungles -- inhibited the relatively "easy" transfer
| (given time) of technology, culture, etc. that happened in
| Eurasia. Climate would have affected the exchange of
| domesticated animals and plants to some extent, but such
| animals and plants or variants seem to have adapted to
| different climates in Eurasia. (It's been a while and I
| haven't read the Wikipedia article, so take what I say with
| a grain of salt!)
| noselasd wrote:
| There were few, if any, diseases in the americas that was new
| to the europeans.
| headcanon wrote:
| I do think about that idea as well, but population density (on
| both sides) is an important factor though. Both the Vikings and
| the native populations had far lower population densities than,
| say, 15-century Spain and Italy, which is likely why the
| diseases didn't spread in the first place.
|
| Mesoamerica a few centuries later did end up having the density
| required for disease transfer as history shows, but it was also
| helped along by the Spanish's active invasion. If the Spanish
| hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was
| allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own
| diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have
| helped fight Smallpox. But the Spanish got there before they
| had that opportunity.
|
| If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe
| of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would
| happen, and you might be right if you only change that one
| variable. But who knows?
| bhickey wrote:
| > If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the
| Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would
| likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent
| immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox.
|
| The most charitable reading of this is "if cowpox, monkeypox
| or some other zoonotic pox virus had an opportunity to spread
| through Mesoamerican society, they might've fared better with
| smallpox."
|
| A less charitable reading is "they might've faired better
| with smallpox if they had some other disease exposure prior
| to invasion."
|
| Either of these cases seems implausible. I don't know of any
| pox virus from the Americas that provides immunity to
| smallpox. In Europe we know that cowpox provided immunity
| among milkmaids. We also know that it didn't spread between
| people. There's no reason to believe that the only missing
| element was time for some other pox to emerge. As for the
| less charitable reading, prior infection with a pathogen is
| unlikely to provide any benefit against an unrelated
| pathogen. In the decades after smallpox swept through Aztec
| society the Cocoliztli epidemics killed twice again as many
| people.
|
| Fundamentally the problem was the introduction of a virus
| with a high mortality rate to an immunologically naive
| population. There's a major difference between a disease
| killing 50% of your under 12 population and 50% of everyone.
| The former is a disaster, the latter will collapse society,
| particularly one already fighting against an invasion.
| shele wrote:
| I remember that this is not the whole story, the Spanish
| invasion and then European invasion was on the larger scale
| moving slower than the diseases.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the
| Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would
| likely have developed their own diseases
|
| Not really. Old World societies had access to many more
| domesticated animals, a key reason that they also had major
| diseases.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Mesoamerica had high population densities long before Spain
| was even a thing.
|
| Indigenous Americans didn't carry over many of the serious
| diseases from the old world and the animals that were there
| mostly didn't contribute serious new ones. There are a few
| cases where we can see things like tuberculosis (from seals),
| but they're limited and evidence of them largely hasn't
| survived in extant populations. Likewise, Icelandic
| populations were isolated and relatively healthy. Those that
| survived the long trip to Greenland and the Americas would
| have been even more so.
| afarrell wrote:
| > before Spain was even a thing
|
| note: Spain was unified in 1491.
| anthk wrote:
| Not all. Navarre was out, then it was conquered in 1512.
| And yet, it was not fully integrated into Spain. They had
| their own currency and customs. Also, they had no
| military service duties. That until mid 1800s.
| voz_ wrote:
| > Mesoamerica had high population densities long before
| Spain was even a thing.
|
| Citation needed?
| nl wrote:
| _According to NASA archaeologist Tom Sever, the Mayan
| civilization in Mesoamerica was one of the densest
| populations in human history. Around 800 A.D., after two
| millennia of steady growth, the Mayan population reached
| an all-time high. Population density ranged from 500 to
| 700 people per square mile in the rural areas, and from
| 1,800 to 2,600 people per square mile near the center of
| the Mayan Empire (in what is now northern Guatemala). In
| comparison, Los Angeles County averaged 2,345 people per
| square mile in 2000._ [1]
|
| [1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Maya
| voz_ wrote:
| Right, agreed entirely, this is higher than the numbers I
| recall from reading, but same order of magnitude. It was
| the flippant reference to Spain regarding chronology that
| I took umbrage with. Thats ~700 years after the area of
| Spain was named Spain (Latin Hispaniola in the Roman
| empire, iirc).
|
| I always find the slightly emotional charge discussions
| (and subsequent downvotes) odd. There seems to be a very
| strong interest in certain groups to downplay or deride
| either the colonized, or colonizing side on measurements
| such as perceived development.
| nl wrote:
| > It was the flippant reference to Spain regarding
| chronology that I took umbrage with. Thats ~700 years
| after the area of Spain was named Spain (Latin Hispaniola
| in the Roman empire, iirc).
|
| Obviously the land area of Spain has "always" existed. I
| think referring to "Spain's existence" as the socio-
| political entity established during the Reconquista is a
| reasonable position for a throw-away line during a HN
| discussion.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's true even if we're very pedantic. Mesoamerica has
| had urbanization and high population densities for quite
| a long time. Michael Smith has pointed out pretty high
| urbanization rates (approaching 20%) even in the terminal
| formative period. Typical numbers I've seen are somewhere
| in the 8-12+ish people/km^2 range. That's roughly
| comparable to the western Roman empire at the time. But
| yes, I did mean the kingdom, not a separate term in
| another language for a peninsula that doesn't really
| correspond to the modern area.
| jeltz wrote:
| Roman Spain had high population densities much earlier.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Not true. Large Maya cities existed hundreds of years
| before Romans colonized Hispania. Nakbe was abandoned,
| hundreds of years after its peak, ca. 200-100 BCE.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakbe
| danjac wrote:
| > the animals that were there mostly didn't contribute
| serious new ones
|
| Aren't syphilis and Lyme disease of New World origin?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There's quite a lot of debate over the precise origins of
| syphilis. I'm only peripherally familiar with the
| literature, but my understanding is that recent work
| suggests (but not concludes) that it might have been
| endemic to afroeurasia rather than or as well as the
| Americas. Lyme disease is indeed wholly American, but
| it's not epidemic or even particularly mortal.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Yaws is found in Africa and was there before 1492. But
| syphilis was in the Americas before 1492 as well..
| COGlory wrote:
| I enjoyed this paper on the origins and distribution of
| Treponema (the bug that causes syphilis and a few other
| skin diseases).
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956094/
| Telemakhos wrote:
| I'm surprised that paper got published, considering the
| basic spelling errors ("jaws" for "yaws") and errors of
| fact ("Espanola Island...a part of the Galapagos
| Islands").
| vidarh wrote:
| > considering the basic spelling errors ("jaws" for
| "yaws")
|
| Missing a single erroroneous instance of a word that
| won't get caught by spell check may be embarrassing, but
| it's hardly material.
|
| > ("Espanola Island...a part of the Galapagos Islands")
|
| https://www.galapagos.org/about_galapagos/about-
| galapagos/th...
|
| What is the error here?
| Telemakhos wrote:
| There are several islands in the world that have had the
| name Espanola. The one that is relevant to the discussion
| about syphilis is now more commonly known as Hispanola,
| home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Columbus
| visited in 1492/3 and supposedly brought back Syphilis in
| 1493. The Galapagos islands are in the Pacific, and were
| never visited by Columbus.
| klyrs wrote:
| Lyme disease is not wholly American, though its incidence
| may be in more recent times.
|
| "Otzi the iceman" had it 5kya:
| https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-researchers-find-
| ancient-ic...
|
| An ancestor to that bacteria was found in a tick that
| lived 15Mya: https://www.livescience.com/46007-lyme-
| disease-ancient-amber...
| foxhop wrote:
| Lyme is a scary to go through, I've had it twice now,
| here is my latest encounter: https://youtu.be/xbPr7DHwSIw
| bregma wrote:
| There is evidence that syphillis came from the Americas.
| There is evidence it was introduced to the Americas by
| Europeans. One problem is that it's hard to distinguish
| teritiary syphillis from tuberculosis or leprosy on
| bones.
|
| As for Borreliosis, there are many variants of it endemic
| to Europe and spread by ticks. No evidence that it came
| from the Americas.
|
| Neither of those spirochetes are zoonotic.
| vanattab wrote:
| Why is a tic biting a human and transferring Borreliosis
| not considered zoonotic?
| hoseja wrote:
| I agree, Lyme disease definitely isn't primarily human.
| lostlogin wrote:
| According to everyone favourite source, Lyme disease is
| zoonotic.
|
| I had never heard the term until today, so take the claim
| with a pinch.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis
| littlestymaar wrote:
| My understanding is that if the tick was only a vector
| between two humans (for instance, malaria isn't a
| zoonosis, because the mosquito is just transmitting the
| disease between humans), then it would not be a zoonosis.
| But in most cases with Lyme disease, the tick is actually
| transmitting the disease from another animal to a human,
| therefore it is indeed a zoonosis.[1]
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Transmission
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| They were "living in the future", but that doesn't always
| work out so well.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Indigenous populations started dropping centuries before
| Columbus and we don't know why. (Of course they dropped further
| after Columbian contact)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an...
|
| > The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th
| century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| The Cahokia region did, certainly, but that would have been a
| minor blip in the total North American population, especially
| compared to the ~90% loss that happened following European
| arrival.
| barbacoa wrote:
| The population decline of the Mayans happened around the
| same time. This decline was steep enough to be called a
| collapse. There has been much discussion as to the cause.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Yeah, no. The Classic Maya collapse dates to around 900,
| which is before Cahokia even gets going.
| culi wrote:
| This. I don't know why people think of the Mayan empire
| or Cahokia as fundamentally different from the numerous
| "failed states" of the Mediterranean. I use quotes
| because there's increasing consensus that it's not so
| much a matter of failure as a matter of political
| revolution amongst the enslaved class forced to work in
| agriculture for the ruling class
| thoweuroi24324 wrote:
| This is just part of the narrative of denialism of the
| European genocide of the Native Americans.
|
| "Oh no! these poor natives just died by themselves."
|
| We've heard similar things about the barbaric
| Turks/Portuguese/British ... "civilizing" the (East)
| Indians, in order to cover up and detract from their
| history unhinged greed, violence, destruction and theft.
|
| In both cases, the Anglo-Saxon stand is clear: "kill the
| Indian, save the man".
| beaner wrote:
| I think by "around the same time" he probably just means
| "plus or minus a few hundred years, before the
| Europeans". Point being that native collapse happened at
| large scale in multiple areas prior to European settling.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's like saying the Roman and Carthaginian empires
| both fell around the same time, and thus were part of the
| same event. Pre-industrial populations naturally
| fluctuate over time, and some regions may have been in a
| slight decline prior to European contact, but nothing at
| all comparable to after contact, when population
| decreased by about 90% in 50 years.
| barbacoa wrote:
| Maya is notable because a region that once supported a
| large population quickly underwent large scale
| depopulation for reasons that are not clear to us today.
| This wasn't a matter of one nation collapsing only to
| absorbed by another. We're talking about a population in
| the millions to 10s of millions that just faded away. All
| of this occurred pre-Columbian.
|
| >That's like saying the Roman and Carthaginian empires
| both fell around the same time, and thus were part of the
| same event.
|
| Not trying to say they were caused by the same event but
| it does seem to be a trend that Native America had issues
| sustaining permanent population centers like you saw in
| other parts of the world.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > We're talking about a population in the millions to 10s
| of millions that just faded away.
|
| Okay, this is just plain false. The Classical Maya
| collapse could be compared to the Fall of Rome or the end
| of the Han dynasty (although perhaps I should use Tang
| instead for historical proximity). That is to say, the
| Maya didn't disappear. Completely the opposite--the
| Classical Maya collapse is actually reflected in the
| _rise_ of the Yucatec and other lowland Mayan city
| centers, notably Chichen Itza, which would _itself_
| decline a few hundred years later, before the city of
| Mayapan rose to prominence, again declining again a
| hundred-ish years later. Mayan city states remained
| independent and following Mayan cultural and religious
| practices even after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs,
| with the last Mayan kingdom falling only in 1697. Even
| then, while no longer independent, Mayan culture still
| persists _to this day_.
|
| There are civilizations that are hard to trace. What
| happened to the people of, say, Cahokia or Teotihuacan
| are still a mystery to this day. But the Maya are
| absolutely not one of those.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Europe also quickly underwent large scale depopulation
| when the western roman empire collapsed. That's how
| civilization collapse works. But in both cases these were
| isolated events, there is no such trend. Cities like
| Cholula have been continuously inhabited for over 2000
| years. How long people remain in an area depends on the
| geography - in arid valley environments like mesopotamia
| or central mexico, both cities and civilizations tend to
| only last a few centuries as river patterns change,
| resulting in droughts and migrations, and a lack of
| natural barriers makes invasion common.
| finiteseries wrote:
| No, there's no indication of population dropping in that
| article, only the dissolution of a city.
|
| I'm not read up on Cahokia, but it's probably more similar to
| the dissolution/dispersal of the (lowland) Maya vs something
| like a mass die off.
|
| Pre contact population centers were additionally in
| Mesoamerica & northern South America, where most of the total
| post contact population drop occurred.
| gremloni wrote:
| That's no indication at all. That's like saying everyone in
| the old world was dying because gobekli tepe was abandoned in
| 3000 BC.
| noetic_techy wrote:
| There are stories of Roman and Asian contact with the
| America's. Perhaps disease was brought over earlier then we
| thought.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-
| oceanic_co...
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Is there a reason to assume disease couldn't have come into
| existence in this native population itself?
| krrrh wrote:
| If a disease native to the Americas emerged and became
| endemic, it would have infected Europeans when they
| arrived. There's a good CGP Grey video on this called
| Americapox.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
| lkrubner wrote:
| As Fernand Braudel said, populations in Europe, China and and
| North America seems to roughly mirror one another for most of
| the last 5,000 years. The only possible explanation is the
| climate. Some centuries were good in the northern hemisphere,
| and some were bad. Not all at once, and not uniformly, but
| enough that we can see some link.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Misread "1021" as "2021" and got excited
| mseepgood wrote:
| I misread it as "1024" and got excited, too.
| beschizza wrote:
| This was the era of the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, formed in
| Britain and Scandinavia under the king of England, Canute, a
| Danish prince. It didn't outlast him by long (and Norway was
| independent until the 1020s) but the coincidence of political
| consolidation in northern europe with brief settlement in north
| America is interesting.
| sleepyhead wrote:
| Norway was independent until 1397.
| beschizza wrote:
| It was part of Canute's empire
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Empire) for a few
| years in the early 11th century, until his death.
| zw123456 wrote:
| Apparently there is some evidence about Vikings bringing Native
| Americans back to Iceland. https://phys.org/news/2010-11-vikings-
| brought-amerindian-ice...
| bcaulfield wrote:
| A millennia from now, I think people may well be kind of shocked
| to learn that we got to the moon in 1969 if a collapse, global
| recession or some other calamity derails the latest efforts to
| get back there within the next few years.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| I've never understood the significance of this.
|
| The vikings were in North America for a few years and then went
| back to Europe. They brought back (almost?) nothing, left a few
| scattered settlements, and completely forgot about it.
|
| So what.
| [deleted]
| wnscooke wrote:
| There are some who think that if the First Nations weren't "the
| first", that diminishes modern day claims and grievances,
| making it easier for modern day Canada and the USA to ignore
| legitimate claims, and treat us as they've always wanted to
| treat us. So, this sort of research is important for many.
| goto11 wrote:
| Since the Norse met native Americans (according to the Saga),
| I don't see how this changes who was there first? It was only
| a thousand years ago after all.
| iammisc wrote:
| It doesn't matter if they were first, or if they themselves
| slaughtered whomever lived here before... being 'first' to be
| somewhere doesn't give you automatic rights over something.
| That is not how human civilization has ever worked.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Weird take. I have never read any claims that Europeans were
| in N America before the indigenous.
|
| Even with visiting in 1000 AD, the "indians" have 10-20,000
| year lead.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| There's all the nonsense that happened around Kennewick man
| and all the controversies around it. Various bits of bad
| physical anthropology that tried to identify the skull as
| "Caucasoid", some dispute over the control over the
| remains, and in the end DNA testing showed continuity with
| today's indigenous populations; but white nationalists
| tried to seize on its initial description as "Caucasoid" as
| some evidence of "Caucasian" presence in the new world long
| ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man#Race_factor
|
| _' The New York Times reported "White supremacist groups
| are among those who used Kennewick Man to claim that
| Caucasians came to America well before Native Americans."
| Additionally, Asatru Folk Assembly, a racialist neopagan
| organization, sued to have the bones genetically tested
| before it was adjudicated that Kennewick Man was an
| ancestor of present-day Native Americans.'_
|
| Also the whole "Solutrean hypothesis", also
| disproven/discredited, but living on among the
| conspirational and often racist.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the examples, certainly an interesting
| read.
|
| However, I don't think interest in the Viking archeology
| from the last 2,000 years can be written off in the same
| vein.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| It begs the question then of what happened to them? Did they
| integrate with existing Native Americans? Or did they just die
| out? Are there stories from Native Americans in the area that
| report Norsemen in the area?
| aww_dang wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbY-GrM8pI
|
| There are different theories. I enjoyed this exploration of the
| topic.
|
| >One of the most unlikely tales of a society's fall is the
| incredible saga of the Vikings of Greenland. Find out how these
| European settlers built a society on the farthest edge of their
| world, and survived for centuries among some of the harshest
| conditions ever faced by man. Discover how this civilization
| was able to overcome the odds for so long, and examine the
| evidence about what happened to cause its final and mysterious
| collapse. Including Viking poetry, Inuit folktales and
| thousands upon thousands of walrus.
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| Neither the Dorset nor Beothuk people overlapped in that
| particular place at that time. Newfoundland is an (enormous)
| island, and while there were various migrations over time there
| is no record of other peoples c1000 in that (rather
| inhospitable) site.
| belval wrote:
| I wonder if they could check the DNA of the natives that were
| originally from that area for any "old" Europeans markers or if
| there was too much mixing from the colonization for such a
| thing to work.
| mig39 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the aboriginal population of Newfoundland
| didn't survive contact with subsequent European settlers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beothuk
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You can still get DNA from their bones.
| larrik wrote:
| They probably just went home.
| amackera wrote:
| They sailed home to Greenland, presumably, and wrote about
| their adventures in sagas.
|
| Unfortunately the indigenous peoples of Newfoundland (the
| Beothuk) were forced into starvation by the encroachment of
| European fishermen, so we don't have a lot of knowledge of
| their folklore or oral traditions.
| fullstop wrote:
| > Did they integrate with existing Native Americans?
|
| According to the article, no:
|
| "The Icelandic sagas suggest that the Norse engaged in cultural
| exchanges with the Indigenous groups of North America. _If
| these encounters indeed occurred, they may have had inadvertent
| outcomes, such as pathogen transmission, the introduction of
| foreign flora and fauna species, or even the exchange of human
| genetic information. Recent data from the Norse Greenlandic
| population, however, show no evidence of the last of these._ It
| is a matter for future research how the year AD 1021 relates to
| overall transatlantic activity by the Norse. Nonetheless, our
| findings provide a chronological anchor for further
| investigations into the consequences of their westernmost
| expansion. "
|
| edit: re-reading this, they may have if they never returned to
| Greenland
| roywiggins wrote:
| They probably went home and/or died out, like in Greenland.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_North_...
| bcaulfield wrote:
| Strange to think this discovery was made at the apex of the
| Byzantime Empire under Basil II. The Roman Empire was still
| somewhat of a thing.
| sb057 wrote:
| Even more interesting to consider is the imperial Varangian
| Guard, comprised of Norse recruits. It's entirely possible that
| one of these Viking explorers in North America (or their
| descendants) later resided at court in Constantinople.
| datameta wrote:
| And it is also possible that a Varangian that visited North
| America ended up as a chief or advisor of a slavic tribe.
| davidw wrote:
| It's interesting to contemplate some of these overlaps that
| don't normally come to mind. The Republic of Venice, for
| instance, was still a going concern, albeit on its last legs,
| when the United States was founded.
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| There's a fun wikipedia article [1] on various theories of pre-
| columbian contact with the Americas. Some of these are very
| dubious, of course, but the Roman fruit bowl from 2000 years ago
| does look like it has an actual pineapple, an American fruit [2].
| There is also evidence of nicotine and other substances found in
| Egyptian mummies from even longer ago, which could indicate at
| least some sort of indirect trade/contact across the ocean.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-
| oceanic_co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-
| Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
| ilamont wrote:
| _The Icelandic sagas suggest that the Norse engaged in cultural
| exchanges with the Indigenous groups of North America34. If these
| encounters indeed occurred, they may have had inadvertent
| outcomes, such as pathogen transmission7, the introduction of
| foreign flora and fauna species, or even the exchange of human
| genetic information. Recent data from the Norse Greenlandic
| population, however, show no evidence of the last of these._
|
| Is it possible the Vikings were not in that location long enough
| for populations to mix? Or they were so remote (physically,
| culturally, and linguistically) that limited opportunities arose?
| Or something else?
| sb057 wrote:
| Genetic research suggests American Indian descendants in modern
| day Iceland.
|
| https://phys.org/news/2010-11-vikings-brought-amerindian-ice...
| INTPenis wrote:
| Yeah but it can only be traced back to the 17th century iirc.
| Around that time many native americans were stolen or just
| shipped out of north america for various reasons.
| zw123456 wrote:
| you guys are too fast :) sorry for my dupe post.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > the exchange of human genetic information
|
| This sounds like a parody of scientific jargon. Why do people
| write like this?..
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Because of context. They're not just talking about "sex", the
| entire research is concerned with evidence of the exchange of
| "stuff" between societies": objects, pathogens, culture, and,
| yes, "human genetic information".
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Reminds me of the all time great line from the Simpson's
| House of Horrors episode where Kang and Kodos impersonate
| Bill Clinton and Bob Dole -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgBFiCmYedc
| zw123456 wrote:
| oops just saw you post, you are way ahead of me.
| https://phys.org/news/2010-11-vikings-brought-amerindian-ice...
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I think the consensus has been for some time that they showed
| up, caught some fish, logged a few trees, decided it sucked,
| and left, all in probably less than a decade.
| ravenstine wrote:
| _" On second thought, let's not stay in America. It is a
| silly place."_
| mig39 wrote:
| Sounds like my summer vacation in Newfoundland in July 2021.
|
| Not much has changed! Kidding.
|
| Unless they were fishing for cod (usually offshore), they
| weren't doing so well on the Northern Peninsula of
| Newfoundland. And the trees in that area of Newfoundland are
| skinny, short, and useless for most construction.
|
| I think they just landed on the part of Newfoundland that has
| the least to offer. It's still that way 1000 years later.
|
| Had they landed in one of the bays on the East Coast of
| Newfoundland, they might have enjoyed better weather, better
| shelter, better fishing, and more contact with the local
| aboriginal population.
| simonklitj wrote:
| I love that idea. "Man, this is just like back home, let's go
| boys."
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Newiceland
| daveslash wrote:
| Niceland.
| irrational wrote:
| This is the part I don't get. These guys were awesome
| sailors. It didn't occur to them to sail down the coast until
| they got to the Florida Keys and set up a little surf shop?
| PeterisP wrote:
| They most likely had a family and a harvest to return to
| back home - viking raids generally were seasonal in between
| farming, so they had a built-in time limit.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| This was the extreme end of the supply chain so to speak.
| Iceland was sparsely populated, Greenland even more so.
| They simply didn't have the people to set up new colonies
| further west, or much need to. Perhaps, if they had
| stumbled on a particularly rich area, they may have done
| so, but to get any significant number of settlers, they
| would have had to go all the way back to Scandinavia.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The major sea currents run towards north here
| kzrdude wrote:
| And they had no base nearby to launch from. Go back home
| and stock up? Noo.. home was Greenland, there's no riches
| there, and they went to Vinland to try to stock up.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Greenland wasn't a frozen wasteland back then. The
| climate was warmer. Climate change is a large part of
| what drove the Norse out of Greenland.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It was no paradise
| philwelch wrote:
| According to some sources, one factor is that Newfoundland
| was so heavily populated with indigenous people that there
| wasn't enough room for a Norse colony to grow. By the time
| the English made it back to Newfoundland, smallpox and other
| epidemics had devastated the indigenous population.
| mig39 wrote:
| Can you cite one of these sources? The archeological record
| doesn't seem to show a large aboriginal population in
| Newfoundland around 1000 C.E.
|
| I don't think the Beothuk, for example, were ever very
| numerous, certainly not as numerous as other aboriginal
| people in Labrador and Greenland at the time.
|
| It wasn't just the Norse that had a hard time living in
| Newfoundland at the time. It wasn't very hospitable to any
| humans.
| philwelch wrote:
| A good start is the book _1491: New Revelations of the
| Americas Before Columbus_ by Charles Mann. That book
| fundamentally changed my understanding of the pre-
| Colombian Americas.
|
| > It wasn't just the Norse that had a hard time living in
| Newfoundland at the time. It wasn't very hospitable to
| any humans.
|
| I don't think it was as crowded as, say, New England
| (early explorers of the coast of New England, IIRC, wrote
| that there wasn't enough open shoreline to even make
| landfall on). However much or however little of
| Newfoundland was habitable, though, was already inhabited
| by the time the Norse got there.
| [deleted]
| datameta wrote:
| There is a Norse description in the Saga of Icelanders of
| what the indigenous skraelings looked like, as the norse
| called them, as well as accounts of repelling assaults from
| the native populations.
|
| > They were short in height with threatening features and
| tangled hair on their heads. Their eyes were large and
| their cheeks broad.
|
| > despite everything the land had to offer there, they
| would be under constant threat of attack from its prior
| inhabitants.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling
| bjornsing wrote:
| "Inadvertent exchange of human genetic information"... :)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I can imagine an indigenous woman having a fling with a viking
| and just rasing the kid in her village. No one the wiser.
|
| It would be impossible to know if this happened. Even if you
| found someone with both indigenous and Viking genetics, you
| don't know if it's because his great grandfather came from
| Norway in the 1920s.
|
| The history of early American immigration is absolutely
| fascinating, there was a story of a Chinese man who just told
| everyone he was an indigenous American in order to avoid
| discrimination. I've actually met people from Eastern Europe
| who ended up working at Telemundo, no one can tell that they're
| not ethnically Hispanic. In fact, who to say what Hispanic is.
| There are plenty of Asians in Latin America, if some decide to
| migrate to America are they not still Hispanic ?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| My (Punjabi) great grandfther told the Census takers this in
| the twenties in Detroit. Worked like a charm apparently.
| hobs wrote:
| > I can imagine an indigenous woman having a fling with a
| viking and just rasing the kid in her village. No one the
| wiser.
|
| Except everyone who saw the kid?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Many mixed raced people can pass as being completely apart
| of one race.
|
| I imagine a Norwegian/Indigenous American kid could just
| look Indigenous American.
| [deleted]
| anthk wrote:
| In Northern Spain sometimes you could even distinguish if
| someone who crossed behind you was an Spaniard, Portuguese,
| French or half-German over the day.
|
| Heck, I can put several people in a photo from the North,
| the inner Castilles, the Eastern Mediterranean, Andalusia
| and Canary Islands and you could never, ever say every one
| in that photo would be from Spain.
|
| We have been invaded over so many times from European
| tribes that we are utterly mixed.
| desktopninja wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. Human migration and mixing has
| always happened. Look at any trade route and you'll see
| it clear as day.
|
| Concepts like race are a fantastical vanity construct
| (things that should never have taken a foot hold during
| the Enlightenment period). Really it's tribalism.
|
| Our view of what a viking looked like is a very
| romanticized image of a "blond blue eyed" person:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/science/vikings-
| DNA.html
|
| Just like what an Asian looks like or an African or an
| American (both North, everything in between and South :)
| ) ... and than funny word Caucasian
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Even if you found someone with both indigenous and Viking
| genetics, you don't know if it's because his great
| grandfather came from Norway in the 1920s.
|
| Are you sure? My impression is that genetics are used to
| determine when humans spread across the world and how
| populations mixed.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Those findings are based on the genetics of larger
| populations and specific samples of ancient DNA. If there
| were a only a handful of children born of both groups, that
| genetic trace would likely have faded out over time.
| anthk wrote:
| Hispanic can be any race. Blacks in Cuba/Haiti, white in
| Argentina/Spain, mostly mixed across the pond, native South
| American, some Japanese descendants in Peru...
| golemiprague wrote:
| Hispanic is not a race, it is a combination of geographical
| and cultural denomination loosely defined by the USA
| perception of the lands south to their border.
| pradn wrote:
| One remarkable person from this time period is Gudrid
| Thorbjarnardottir, who had the first European child in the
| Americas (outside Greenland) and then made a pilgrimage to Rome.
| She's probably the most well-travelled woman of the 11th century.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudrid_Thorbjarnard%C3%B3ttir
| chestertn wrote:
| There are plenty of valid claims that many other civilizations
| contacted America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-
| Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
|
| But it is meaningless since they did not write about it nor they
| stablished commerce. The fact is that before 1492, most
| civilizations in Africa/Asia/Europe did not know that America
| existed and that other humans lived there. After 1492, that
| changed forever.
| waserwill wrote:
| > But it is meaningless since they did not write about it not
| they stablished commerce
|
| Depends on what you find meaningful! There was almost certainly
| exchange of goods between Polynesians and South Americans. The
| presence of early sweet potato agriculture in Polynesia and
| genetic admixture in both regions points to non-trivial
| contact. There are even parallels in terms of folk-tales [0]!
| (Though these are likely older events, more to do with ancient
| dispersal).
|
| There are also possibly earlier relationships across the
| Pacific, but these would have been ancient and interesting
| largely from historical curiousity [1].
|
| [0]https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39445-9_
| ...
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav2621
| mtoohig wrote:
| I live in Vanuatu and is it very far to the west side of the
| Pacific yet the almost southern most island of Vanuatu,
| Aneityum, has stories of what they called the "Yellow People"
| that were on the island before they, Melanesians, arrived
| from northern islands. These people on the island were
| excellent stone carvers and could make stone walls which the
| current locals admit they never learned from the "yellow
| people". Old engravings exist still of these original people
| that to me sound like those may have come from the east,
| South America. I don't have photos though, this is a story I
| just heard recently from family members of that island.
| koboll wrote:
| Wow. You should really, really write a blog post about
| this, and get some of them on the record about it. A Google
| search for 'Aneityum "yellow people"' returns only 4
| results.
|
| However, one of those four is this dissertation: https://sc
| holarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794...
|
| Which reads:
|
| >His canoe and his moiety were the first to adopt the
| chiefly system, and it was brought to Aneityum by natimi-
| yag (yellow-people), which he now believes to have been
| Polynesian.
| chana_masala wrote:
| I don't think I've come across anyone on HN from Vanuatu.
| If you're open to answering, I wonder if you work in tech?
| What's the tech industry like there?
| davidw wrote:
| That is really cool isn't it? I was awestruck when I
| discovered in the early 90ies that I could converse
| online with people in locales very, very far from me.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Could also be that last push of Denisovans that was
| recently discovered through the genetic record.
| chestertn wrote:
| I have talked about this a bit more in another comment below:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28936345
|
| There are also possible contacts between ancient peoples in
| Europe and the Americas:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-
| oceanic_co...
|
| But as I mention, the impact of 1492 eclipses it all (that is
| why is called Pre-Columbian!)
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > But it is meaningless since they did not write about it nor
| they stablished commerce.
|
| The first African to climb Mt. Everest, you say? Well he didn't
| help build a network of base camps so I'm just going to say
| that it's meaningless.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Come to think of it: none of Buddha's followers even _wrote_
| about him or Buddhism itself until several centuries after
| his death. Meaningless.
| chestertn wrote:
| Yes, but they continued the Buddhism tradition (orally).
| The Vikings did not continue commercing and tell other
| people... hey! there are humans in this place! its a new
| continent!
| MichaelMcG wrote:
| "Meh--same climate, different continent. We'll stick to
| raiding the shorter commute South, they have stuff worth
| taking."
| chestertn wrote:
| Yes. Meaningless. 1492? Very meaningful.
|
| One of the most important feats if not the most important of
| what we used to call the Age of Exploration:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
|
| This led to global trade that changed the face of the earth.
| It opened philosophical debates about human rights, the
| legality of wars, etc., which are still important today.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/school-
| salamanca/#IusGent...
|
| These debates led to the prohibition of American Indian
| slavery in... 1542!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws
|
| The first recorded christian marriage in current United
| States was an interracial union in 1565!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_colonial_Spanish_Am.
| ..
|
| I could go on an on.
| anthk wrote:
| Yeah, we had the School of Salamanca, and the state-of-the-
| art Liberal Constitution from Cadiz, but somehow, we the
| Spaniards fuck things over spectacularly, as if we had a
| curse.
| chestertn wrote:
| A nuance here. Why is this important? Slavery was very
| common back then and the New Laws were revolutionary.
|
| The Ottomans were famous for their slave trade and did
| capture tons of Europeans.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire
|
| Not only that, Aztecs and other indigenous peoples from the
| americas had Slavery as an institution:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_slavery
|
| Indigenous slavery ended with the New Laws
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > But it is meaningless __to western european cultures__ since
| they did not write about it __in the dominant languages__ nor
| they stablished commerce __with europe__
|
| Added the implicit bits. That doesn't take anything from your
| point, I just think having the perspective explicited helps
| grasp it better.
|
| It will also cover the discussions when ancient China will be
| found to have had extensive links as well, etc.
| chestertn wrote:
| No, no. To China and the Ottoman Empire as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#After_1492
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_international_trad.
| ..
|
| It is one of the greatest feats of European civilizations.
| Don't take that away! Not everything is implicit bias and
| Eurocentrism.
| cschmidt wrote:
| A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
| https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/09/25/a-monk-
| in-14th-century-italy-wrote-about-the-americas
|
| There was an interesting recent Economist story about that.
| There is a 14th century Italian monk that _did_ write about
| Newfoundland based on the oral testimony of "sailors who
| frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway". It is possible
| Columbus was aware of this.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Discussed here a few weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28648793
| chestertn wrote:
| Colombus was trying to find India and he explored the area
| trying to find proof that he indeed found India.
|
| Furthermore, Colombus brought an interpreter with him, Luis
| de Torres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_Torres
|
| "Their task was to explore the country, contact its ruler,
| and gather information about the Asian emperor described by
| Marco Polo as the "Great Khan". "
|
| There is a lot of effort put today to downplay the importance
| of what happened. I understand that it makes sense
| politically. But the fact remains that what happened in 1492,
| for good or bad, changed the world forever.
| bebop wrote:
| There is a possibility that this was known much earlier than
| the 14th century. St. Brendan may have been speaking about
| the americas as early as 500 AD.
|
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan Interesting
| read: https://www.amazon.com/Brendan-Voyage-Sailing-America-
| Explor...
| Retric wrote:
| It's not commerce but native peoples where apparently regularly
| crossing the barring straight without realizing anything
| unusual was going on.
|
| If this had gone on long enough we might have turned into a
| ring species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
| nashashmi wrote:
| This brings up a good point about what does discover mean.
| People lived in north America but they did not write about it
| to Europeans so they had to be discovered.
|
| Why does my understanding of history seem to revolve around
| what Europeans did and did not do/know?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| For better or for worse, different civilizations took
| different approaches to keeping written records. The Chinese,
| many European people, the Arabs, the Persians, the Indians,
| the Mayans, the Aztecs, many African people all had detailed
| written records. So we tend to tell history from their point
| of view, since this is the info we have.
|
| Do we have written info from the Native Americans who met the
| Vikings or from the Caribbean peoples about Columbus? Not
| that I know of. We have the Vikings view of things and
| Columbus' view, so we tend to rely on them.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| That's like saying The Apollo moon missions were meaningless
| because they failed to set up commercial hub on the moon.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Sadly, while Apollo was important as a proof-of-concept
| exercise, it was up to future generations of spacefaring
| explorers to give it meaning by following through on the
| initial achievement. Unlike the post-Columbian European
| settlers, we've dropped the ball.
|
| By the time we get back to the Moon, my guess is that over
| half our population will believe that the Apollo missions
| never happened at all. There can't be much of a leap from
| "Bush blew up the WTC" and "Trump won the election" to "The
| moon landings were faked in Hollywood."
| hnbad wrote:
| In a way they're meaningless because they were just a way to
| extend the "space race" to an arbitrary milestone the US
| could claim for itself after having lost almost everything
| else to the reds.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I hate to say it, but in a sense, they _were_ meaningless
| because there was no followup. We haven 't had a machine that
| could even get us back there for 50 years now.
| maldeh wrote:
| One could argue that we are doing the followup even to this
| day (with the China CLEP programme, India's Chandrayaan,
| USA's ongoing Artemis campaign and others). The deed was
| done, the minimum bar was set and humanity has been as
| determined as ever to breach the peak it had achieved back
| in the sixties even as government funding waxes and wanes.
| Public interest has not changed in the least.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Public interest has not changed in the least.
|
| Declining public interest cancelled the Apollo program.
| Modern rocket scientists had to dismantle the Saturn V
| engines to figure out how they worked.
| runarberg wrote:
| > But it is meaningless since they did not write about it
|
| The story of Leifur Eiriksson lived in the oral tradition and
| was eventually written down in Graenlendinga Saga around 250
| years later (which is still another 250 years before Columbus).
|
| I bet that possible Polynesian contact would have lived in the
| oral tradition in a similar manner. Though way more time passed
| until the stories Polynesian were written down so I would
| expect them to be a bit more fantastical with the added time.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I find it highly likely that crucial bronze age inventions like
| smelting, Eridu/Elamite 'pyramids' and writing were introduced
| to America in one way trips between 4000 and 0BC, however until
| we find artifacts or mummy DNA it's pure speculation.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I don't doubt there were "rafting" events, like that which
| brought over the new world monkeys, but I don't think
| isolated individuals can transmit culture like that.
|
| "Connecticut Yankee" type stories underestimate how diffuse
| culture is, and overestimate the prevelence and prowess of
| "polymaths" in the weakest sense.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Rafting is not the term I'd use for post Ubaid sailing and
| rowing explorations. Look at the rock art of that time,
| especially in egypt and slightly later scandinavia. If you
| believe the essence of Gilgamesh, some of these expeditions
| to far countries might have even made it back (though
| unlikely from America).
| Laremere wrote:
| Civilizations around the world definitely acquired similar
| technology with suspicious timing, but the common factor
| doesn't need to be humans. One theory I'm fond of is river
| deltas. The major ones all formed around 7,000 years ago (see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A47ythEcz74) as a geological
| result of the end of the ice age. After humanity spread to
| the Americas during the ice age, the end of the ice age seems
| to have created the conditions necessary for agriculture to
| flourish. Once you have agriculture you get cities, writing
| to track harvest numbers, pyramids from laborers working in
| the off season, and metalworking from craftspeople .
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Suspicious timing is a good term. As far as I know the 4000
| years of development which preceded the Eurasian bronze age
| are absent in america (tokens, cold hammering, accounting,
| step by step increases in architectural complexity), even
| though agriculture must have been part of a much earlier
| package or human condition as you said. Wooden idols and
| totems go back to ice age times, I give you that.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| I think there's also a point everyone who talks about other
| "discoveries" of America purposely ignores. This is about the
| discovery of it not for Europe the continent. This is about its
| discovery for what was the civilized nations in Europe. So if
| we look at Iceland - a place that's essentially a standalone
| island already half way to America - where a bunch of vikings
| lived who at the time weren't hanging out with people from
| places like Spain or Italy or France - it's an apples to
| oranges comparison.
| runarberg wrote:
| This might be a simplistic view of history.
|
| First Iceland is only half way to North America if you
| consider Greenland (which is kind of weird since both Iceland
| and Greenland are islands between the two continents). The
| distance between Iceland and Labrador is twice as long as the
| distance between Iceland and Norway. And the double distance
| is on top of much much rougher seas of the Labrador sea then
| the North Atlantic. So for small sailboats Europe is
| definitely close while North America isn't.
|
| Second, people traveled a lot both to Iceland and from
| Iceland in the centuries after the voyages mentioned in
| Graenlendinga Saga. Ships went to Iceland to trait, or fish
| and people went from Iceland to continental Europe for
| pilgrimage, trade, etc. These people definitely talked to
| each other and told each other stories of their ancestors. I
| wouldn't be surprised if some Portuguese fishermen were told
| Graenlendinga Saga while wintering in Iceland sometime in the
| 14th century after their trip home was delayed for some
| reason. Or that a pilgrim from Iceland told a fellow Spanish
| Christion in broken latin about Leifur Eiriksson on their way
| to Rome.
|
| Third. Flateyarbok (which contains written stories about the
| norse settlements in North America) was written down in the
| mid 13th century. The Icelandic sagas were coveted by
| Scandinavian royalty and I bet royalty in both Norway and
| Denmark knew about it's existence, and might even have heard
| Graenlendinga Saga recited.
|
| Now it probably wasn't common knowledge that there were lands
| west of the Atlantic which people once tried to settle, but
| it probably wasn't unknown either.
|
| It is not hard to imagine an alternative scenario where by
| some freak luck Christopher Columbus happens to talk to a
| person who's great grandfather told a story about an
| Icelander they walked part of the way to Rome with. "Curious
| folks those Icelanders", they say, "in the old times they
| used to sail all around the world. Even going West of
| Greenland".
|
| "Greenland? You mean the icy land way north in the Atlantic
| where they get those Walrus husks?" Columbus replies.
|
| "Yes, there! Apparently there are some much more favorable
| lands south west of there. I wonder how much further south it
| reaches, maybe as far south as Africa?"
|
| Or maybe a scenario where a common crewman on Columbus'
| voyage knew about these stories from a Basque fisherman who
| in turn heard them while on a fishing trip to Iceland. "This
| isn't Japan", he claims. "An old friend of mine heard stories
| about lands as far west as this--albeit further north as
| well. Maybe these islands are of the same island chain which
| lie between Europe and Asia". This crewman is promptly
| laughed at. "Off course this is Japan, our captain says so."
| They say, and the crewman never mentions it again.
| privatdozent wrote:
| Scandinavians are pretty proud of this fact. Look up Leif
| Erikson, supposedly the first European to set foot in America,
| 500 years before Columbus.
| broof wrote:
| I still would say that Columbus was the first to "discover"
| America, in the sense that Leif Erikson showed up, left, and
| didn't really make a big deal out of it. which to be fair,
| makes sense if you look on google earth and zoom in and follow
| from Iceland up to northern Canada. It just all feels more or
| less the same, so eventually they turned around and left.
| burkaman wrote:
| Why do you think he didn't make a big deal out of it? I feel
| like any event we know about from thousand-year-old sagas
| must have been a big deal, otherwise it wouldn't have been
| preserved and recorded.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| That dude who was first to the South Pole wasn't "really"
| first, either; he just showed up and, you know, left before
| some arbitrary time limit that I made up.
| broof wrote:
| well yeah Erikson was first, but he didn't "discover" it in
| the sense that Columbus did. I would say they're
| categorically different. See my comment below.
| krapp wrote:
| Columbus never even set foot in North America. He
| "discovered" some islands in the Caribbean and Bahamas.
|
| The narrative of Columbus "discovering" the land that
| would become the United States has never been anything
| but propaganda[0].
|
| [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/15/colu
| mbus-n...
| edgyquant wrote:
| I've never heard anyone say the Columbus discovered North
| America except maybe if you include the Caribbean as part
| of North America.
| krapp wrote:
| It's an old and very popular misconception, persistently
| believed by most in the US.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Yeah yeah, you're just repeating yourself. Setting your
| own idiosyncratic/arbitrary rules.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It isn't their arbitrary rules, it's the general
| consensus of most of the world
| capableweb wrote:
| Is "making noise about it" what we consider discovery now?
| I'd say the first person finding and visiting the place is
| indeed the discoverer of that place. Maybe Columbus
| popularised it rather.
| kypro wrote:
| When I was a kid I remember seeing weird bugs in the garden
| and wondering if I was the first person to find that bug.
| I'm sure I wasn't, but in theory I could have "discovered"
| loads of new species - but would it even matter if I wasn't
| aware enough of my own discovery to share it?
|
| Did the Vikings even realise they were on a new continent?
| My understanding is that they "settled" a tiny area and may
| have thought it was just an island off of Greenland or
| something.
| burkaman wrote:
| Columbus also didn't realize he was on a new continent.
| If that's the standard, then Amerigo Vespucci discovered
| it, because he's generally considered to be the first to
| realize it was a new continent.
| broof wrote:
| I would say yes, "making noise about it" would be a
| relatively important part of discovery. Did Erikson know
| that there was an entire continent with advanced societies
| completely seperated from the "old world"? Because that is
| what Columbus discovered. I'm making the distinction
| between Leif Erikson discovering a tundra-like landmass
| beyond Greenland that they didn't think was significant,
| and Columbus's actions which ended up connecting the old
| world to the new. Those two things are very different from
| each other. If I google "who discovered america" and got
| Leif Erikson, I think that would be more confusing than
| Columbus.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > Did Erikson know that there was an entire continent
| with advanced societies completely seperated from the
| "old world"?
|
| Did Columbus know that?
| CRConrad wrote:
| > Did Erikson know that there was an entire continent
| with advanced societies completely seperated from the
| "old world"? Because that is what Columbus discovered.
|
| If knowing it was separate from the Old World is what
| makes it a discovery, then for all we know Columbus
| absolutely _didn 't_ discover any such thing. He went to
| his grave convinced he'd found a route to India, which
| was very much the Old World. Conquered by Alexander and
| everything; stuff doesn't get much older than that.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If
| someone discovers something and nothing really comes of it,
| is it really a more significant discovery than one which
| changes the world profoundly, immediately, and forevermore?
| zardo wrote:
| By the standards of his culture, Leif Erickson's discovery of
| Vinland had as much publicity as any distant event.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_the_Greenlanders
| jfengel wrote:
| Seems like a weird thing to be proud of. "We found this whole
| new continent, sparsely populated and rich with all kinds of
| resources, but only explored a tiny piece of it and then
| basically ignored it/forgot about it."
|
| I suppose it's better than "We found a whole new continent,
| killed vast numbers of inhabitants, and then brought over
| millions of others to subject to horrific abuse".
| PeterisP wrote:
| Didn't Columbus die without ever claiming or even knowing
| that he found a whole new continent? As far as he was
| concerned, he succeeded in finding another trade route to
| Asia.
| jfengel wrote:
| Yeah, though that was hardly the worst of it. He himself
| was personally involved in horrific abuse of the natives --
| so much so that the Spanish imprisoned him over it.
|
| Lots of other people realized what Columbus had found, even
| though he never did. He was wrong about the size of the
| earth, and everybody knew it. So he managed to find
| something he had no reason to expect, and didn't understand
| it. Others did.
| tim333 wrote:
| It showed they had decent boats a long time ago though.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| also interesting:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarni_Herj%C3%B3lfsson
| efa wrote:
| I thought this has been known for awhile. I visited the site in
| Newfoundland like 15 years ago.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Anse_aux_Meadows
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wolverine876 wrote:
| From the paper:
|
| > The received paradigm is that the Norse settlement dates to
| the close of the first millennium9; however, the precise age of
| the site has never been scientifically established.
|
| The paper is about more precise dating, afaict, not a
| revelation that they arrived around then.
| sleavey wrote:
| Anyone else learn about the Viking landings on North America
| from Age of Empires 2 (1999)?
| not2b wrote:
| The news is the accurate dating, not the existence of the site
| (which is so well known that it is a UNESCO World Heritage
| site).
| pvaldes wrote:
| That depends entirely on the species of tree. Absolutely
| crucial in this case. Do they mention this data in the
| article?
| flyingfences wrote:
| The species is actually not absolutely crucial in this
| case. The trees were dated by looking for solar flare
| activity in the rings; the trees are known to have been cut
| by Vikings because they were cut with steel tools.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Yes, at least two species of tree. You can read which ones
| in the paper!
| dboreham wrote:
| From tfa: "However, it has thus far not been possible to
| determine when this activity took place"
| roywiggins wrote:
| The research is about pinning the date down.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > I thought this has been known for awhile
|
| What, in particular, are you referring to?
| Afforess wrote:
| Leif Erikson? Popularized by Spongebob, no less.
| cguess wrote:
| This is about nailing the exact date that this settlement
| was built. Leif Erikson was almost certainly earlier
| anyways.
| z3c0 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, he died in 1020.
|
| So technically, you're correct. Which is the best kind of
| correct.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I was taught that Leif Erikson led an expedition to
| Newfoundland over 20 years ago in public school.
|
| "Transatlantic exploration took place centuries before the
| crossing of Columbus. Physical evidence for early European
| presence in the Americas can be found in Newfoundland,
| Canada1,2. However, it has thus far not been possible to
| determine when this activity took place3,4,5. Here we provide
| evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in AD
| 1021. We overcome the imprecision of previous age estimates by
| making use of the cosmic-ray-induced upsurge in atmospheric
| radiocarbon concentrations in AD 993 (ref. 6). "
|
| Seems that before hand the evidence was circumstantial and
| while everyone was confident it was the case, they can now
| prove it with better dating techniques.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Leif Erikson led an expedition to Newfoundland over 20
| years ago
|
| I guess that's technically not wrong.
| elwell wrote:
| > guess that's technically not wrong
|
| Hey, don't command me to guess things.
| elwell wrote:
| > Downvotes
|
| I was merely quoting mid-sentence as OP did
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I'm just impressed that Leif Erikson was leading
| expeditions while still in public school.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I too love dangling modifiers
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier
| e0m wrote:
| Happy 1000th anniversary Vikings!
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| I was hoping they'd have found out more about other settlements
| in Newfoundland besides L'anse aux Meadows. Did they ever find
| out more about that possible settlement in SW Newfoundland?
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| Apparently no evidence of Norse activity there:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Rosee
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean
| Area (c. 1340)
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...
| justinzollars wrote:
| This is so cool. So much earlier than I could have imagined!
| tim333 wrote:
| I was curious how the solar storm giving radiocarbon works. It
| seems approx:
|
| In the storm the sun chucks out hydrogen and helium ions.
|
| >It is not uncommon for [these] to collide with an atom in the
| atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an
| energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide
| with nitrogen atoms. When the neutron collides, a nitrogen-14
| (seven protons, seven neutrons) atom turns into a carbon-14 atom
| (six protons, eight neutrons) and a hydrogen atom (one proton,
| zero neutrons).
| newfriend wrote:
| The media is really pushing this (and related) story hard this
| year. Anything to delegitimize Columbus.
| anthk wrote:
| Columbus was a bastard by himself, and I say this as Spaniard.
| The local Castillian-Aragonese kingdom (proto-Spain maybe)
| punished Columbus because of his overseas behaviour.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| What is wrong with that?
|
| Don't you prefer accurate history?
| mandmandam wrote:
| ... Good.
|
| Listening to the story in school it was obvious there was some
| stuff being glossed over; like, how did he discover America if
| there were people there already? ... And those people just gave
| their land to Europeans because ... ?
|
| And, in the years since grade school, the answer to those
| questions have led to darker questions, with dark answers.
|
| And oh shit, we're actually still pulling this shit. So again -
| good. Fuck that guy, and fuck his fake myth.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Ok then fuck the Vikings too. Do you realize how much
| violence and destruction they wrought?
|
| At least keep your shit logically cohesive.
|
| While you're at it do a little research on "indigenous"
| culture and how they treated each other. I assure you it
| wasn't butterflies and kisses before Columbus got here.
|
| > how did he discover America if there were people there
| already
|
| He discovered it in relation to Europeans who didn't know of
| its existence. This is one of the dumbest things I've read
| today. Your take would mean literally nothing could be
| discovered.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Do people credit the Vikings for discovering Ireland?
|
| The fuck they do.
|
| And I don't know why the fuck you're putting "indigenous"
| in quotes but man it looks kinda racist. As does the idea
| that "discovering things" is by default actually
| "discovered in relation to Europeans".
| CountDrewku wrote:
| I'm putting "indigenous" in quotes because no one owns
| rights to a place by virtue of being there first. It's a
| ridiculous silly idea when you actually understand what
| has happened throughout history. Are you going to start
| calling Europeans indigenous when you go to Europe? I
| didn't think so.
|
| Stop throwing the r word around so nonchalantly or people
| might start realizing you don't really care about racism
| and just want sjw internet points.
|
| The funny thing is you people throw that word around so
| much that I don't even care if you call me one. White's
| are inherently racist by default anyway right? I guess
| there's nothing I can do about it since I have a certain
| skin color. My bad, I'm sorry you hate my skin color.
|
| Just a tip- name calling makes it look like you lost the
| debate.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| A few of the other comments had me curious, but while it's widely
| known that diseases brought over from Europe were devastating to
| the native populations of the Americas, are there any notable
| examples of transfer in the other direction - i.e. new diseases
| the Europeans encountered in the Americas that got brought back
| to Europe?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Syphilis is thought to be a new world disease.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis
| staticfloat wrote:
| Aha! A chance to plug one of my favorite CGP Grey videos that
| explores this very question:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| That's a super interesting video. Thanks!
| tschwimmer wrote:
| Syphilis was thought to have been carried from the Americas to
| Europe by Columbus' crewmen.[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History
| 0000011111 wrote:
| "These sudden increases were caused by cosmic radiation events,
| and appear synchronously in dendrochronological records all
| around the world" #### That is a pretty interesting method for
| dating historical sites. I wonder how much it will change the
| records as future research is done globally.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's neat, but practically speaking it's an incremental
| improvement over what already exists. Dendrochronology is
| already capable of dating the felling year (which may be years
| or decades removed from the actual construction date). This
| allows you to date certain fellings to a particular season
| under ideal circumstances, and to start local
| dendrochronological records from a different fixed point.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The evidence for collapsing agriculture in the Amazon basin a
| couple of centuries before Columbus hints at disease spreading
| from contact there, such as from a (historically attested, well
| equipped) African expedition in 1311 that might not have
| returned.
|
| The Amazon has proof positive of tree domestication 10000 years
| ago. The coincidence of collapse right about then seems hard to
| account for without contact. But we may never know.
| [deleted]
| mkrazzledazzle wrote:
| So what? This news reads to the rest of the world as.. Europeans
| squabbling between each other as to who amongst them first
| visited a continent they'd previously not known about, already
| brimming with other populations of humans. End of story. It's
| 2021 folks, no one cares about eurocentric land grab claims.
| culi wrote:
| It truly is bizarre. The amount of effort and research into
| this very difficult to answer, and ultimately not all that
| useful, question is insane. Even the anthropologists arguing
| about the Polynesian sailors (~1200AD), the Chinese
| boats(~1421AD), or even the African sailors (~400AD). The
| overall point is somewhat useful. We know there's clearly been
| points of contact between all sorts of people from Afroeurasia
| and the Americas. But this inane squabbling over who was
| technically first is honestly kinda cringey
| bigyikes wrote:
| Couldn't you say that about any piece of history you're not
| interested in? This comment is needlessly dismissive.
| olvy0 wrote:
| Tangentially related: Kim Stanley Robinson's early story Vinland
| The Dream, in which an archeologist discovers that those very
| remnants here were actually planted there as an elaborate hoax
| 100 years ago.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Literally the article states that they know exactly when and
| where Norse vikings were because of "cosmic rays"
| sharmin123 wrote:
| How to Protect Your Privacy And Personal Data from Hackers?:
| https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-p...
| jjallen wrote:
| I hope someone else noted that this is not new evidence. What
| they did is reanalyzed existing wood samples and determined an
| exact year that they were definitely in Newfoundland.
|
| They did through dating of tree rings based on known cosmic
| radiation events from the year 993 (if I recall the year
| correctly). Very interesting paper to read.
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