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If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would happen, and you might be right if you only change that one variable.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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 .
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.
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.
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?
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 ?
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
Not really. Old World societies had access to many more domesticated animals, a key reason that they also had major diseases.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an...
> The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(island)#First_in...
Of course, if the native population died off around them, the Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and perhaps ruled North America instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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).
And also the Eurasian geography made trade, and exchange of both culture and domesticated animals, and also diseases, easier in the east-west direction. Because in east-west direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone. Cow, horse, pig, sheep, goat, donkey, chicken, duck, goose, cat, dog, these didn't all originate in a single location. But in Eurasia, people were able to adopt domesticated animals and plants from their eastern and western neighbors.
The geography in the Americas makes it more easy to travel and trade in the south-north direction. But this is less useful, because you would only get access to domesticated plants and animals from different climate zones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Outline...
Also, Europeans colonized other regions where they did not have as great a disease or technological advantage.
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.
- 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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
The colonization of North America would have gone quite differently with that many folks to contend with.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europe...
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.
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.
Depends on what you find meaningful! There was almost certainly exchange of goods between Polynesians and South Americans. The presence of early sweet potato agriculture in Polynesia and genetic admixture in both regions points to non-trivial contact. There are even parallels in terms of folk-tales [0]! (Though these are likely older events, more to do with ancient dispersal).
There are also possibly earlier relationships across the Pacific, but these would have been ancient and interesting largely from historical curiousity [1].
[0]https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39445-9_...
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav2621
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28936345
There are also possible contacts between ancient peoples in Europe and the Americas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
But as I mention, the impact of 1492 eclipses it all (that is why is called Pre-Columbian!)
Furthermore, Colombus brought an interpreter with him, Luis de Torres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_Torres
"Their task was to explore the country, contact its ruler, and gather information about the Asian emperor described by Marco Polo as the "Great Khan". "
There is a lot of effort put today to downplay the importance of what happened. I understand that it makes sense politically. But the fact remains that what happened in 1492, for good or bad, changed the world forever.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan Interesting read: https://www.amazon.com/Brendan-Voyage-Sailing-America-Explor...
If this had gone on long enough we might have turned into a ring species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#After_1492
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_international_trad...
It is one of the greatest feats of European civilizations. Don't take that away! Not everything is implicit bias and Eurocentrism.
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."
The first African to climb Mt. Everest, you say? Well he didn’t help build a network of base camps so I’m just going to say that it’s meaningless.
One of the most important feats if not the most important of what we used to call the Age of Exploration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
This led to global trade that changed the face of the earth. It opened philosophical debates about human rights, the legality of wars, etc., which are still important today.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/school-salamanca/#IusGent...
These debates led to the prohibition of American Indian slavery in... 1542!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws
The first recorded christian marriage in current United States was an interracial union in 1565!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_colonial_Spanish_Am...
I could go on an on.
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.
Why does my understanding of history seem to revolve around what Europeans did and did not do/know?
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.
"Connecticut Yankee" type stories underestimate how diffuse culture is, and overestimate the prevelence and prowess of "polymaths" in the weakest sense.
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.
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?
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.
https://phys.org/news/2010-11-vikings-brought-amerindian-ice...
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 ?
Except everyone who saw the kid?
Are you sure? My impression is that genetics are used to determine when humans spread across the world and how populations mixed.
Dead Comment
This sounds like a parody of scientific jargon. Why do people write like this?..
"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.
I guess that's technically not wrong.
> 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.
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What, in particular, are you referring to?
The science that enables that is described in this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2783
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarni_Herj%C3%B3lfsson
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_the_Greenlanders