41–50 of 408 posts
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.
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.
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 las…
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 Chines…
Are you sure? My impression is that genetics are used to determine when humans spread across the world and how populations mixed.
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.
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.
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.
And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
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.
Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
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.
Scandinavians are pretty proud of this fact. Look up Leif Erikson, supposedly the first European to set foot in America, 500 years before Columbus.
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.
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.
Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
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.
Parallel evolution of two strains of smallpox might have meant still no immunity to the Spanish version several centuries later. And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.