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.
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If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would happen, and you might be right if you only change that one variable.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?
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.
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.
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]
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.
I'm surprised that paper got published, considering the basic spelling errors ("jaws" for "yaws") and errors of fact ("Española Island…a part of the Galápagos Islands").
There are several islands in the world that have had the name Española. 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.
Ah, yeah that make sense. I just looked at the immediate sentence, rather than question which island it referred to. I'm assuming that's the cause for the error too - just someone wanting to reference location and popping the name into Google -, though it's certainly a much more serious error than the spelling mistake.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 Mesoamérica & northern South America, where most of the total post contact population drop occurred.
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.
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.
The book "1491" describes the Americas before Columbus, and is very interesting. In particular, the population density was much higher than generally realized.
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.
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
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.
Of course, if the native population died off around them, the Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and perhaps ruled North America instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I don't quite understand. Ansgar was quite connected to Rome, as much as you would expect from a missionary in a foreign country. There was, as I understand it, correspondence between Ansgar and the pope, at the very least there had to be a letter appointing him as bishop. Think of how much harder it would have been to send a letter from Vinland.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mentioned it because you said Norse, and while I'd agree that the Normans weren't vikings (the Viking Age is typically bookended by the Norman conquest of England in 1066), I would definitely consider them Norse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
>>> 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.
>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.
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?
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.wikipedia.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.
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
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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. Cortés got his ass handed to him repeatedly in military conflicts.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More than 90% collapse in Mexico from 1520 to 1580, mostly from three epidemics. Starting from ~22m, 8m (37%) dead from a 1520 smallpox epidemic, 12-15m dead (~80%) from a 1545 cocolitzli epidemic, and another ~2m dead (~50%) from a 1576 cotolitzli epidemic. Mexican population didn't recover to its previous highs until the 20th century.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I strongly recommend reading this for anyone who's interested. It's a really interesting view of what Mexico looked like prior to Spanish colonization, told from a Spanish perspective of course.
It also became clear that the Spanish, despite their superior technology, were so outnumbered that they wouldn't have been successful if it weren't for their local allies. They were nearly all killed in a desperate escape from Tenochtitlan when things went downhill.
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.
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.
Well, there were around 3000 Spanish conquistadors. Could they really conquer the whole Aztec empire (5 mln people) without alliances with local tribes?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
> ”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.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!
> But it is meaningless since they did not write about it
The story of Leifur Eiríksson lived in the oral tradition and was eventually written down in Grænlendinga 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 Grænlendinga 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 Grænlendinga 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 Eiríksson on their way to Rome.
Third. Flateyarbók (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 Grænlendinga 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
The existence of Grönländinga 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.
One remarkable person from this time period is Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, 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.
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.
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.
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 contains an actual pineapple, which is 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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
"These sudden increases were caused by cosmic radiation events, and appear synchronously in dendrochronological records all around the world"
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> This is one of the dumbest things I've read today. Your take would mean literally nothing could be discovered.
Guess what was one of the dumbest things I've read today.
Their take would mean nothing could be "discovered" again, after it already was discovered by someone else.
Can't really see any big problem with that... Except for bullying Johnnie-come-latelies who've been used to thinking of nothing as discovered until it's been "discovered" by them. Big boo-fucking-hoo.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Everyone agrees Native Americans / First Nations / Indigenous population have been in the Americas for over ten thousand years. The Vikings went there about -- or, according to this discovery, exactly -- a thousand years ago.
Absolutely nobody thinks proving the Viking journeys can in any way deligitimize the native's claim to primacy. Well, absolutely nobody who isn't totally befuddled.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
