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Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

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Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#221

Post by lostlogin »

vanattab wrote: post #176
bregma wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is evidence that syphillis came from the Americas. There is evidence it was introduced to the Americas by Europeans. One problem is that it's hard to distinguish teritiary syphillis from tuberculosis or leprosy on bones. As for Borreliosis, there are many variants of it endemic to Europe and spread by ticks. No evidence that it came from the Americas. Neither of those spirochetes are zoonotic.

Why is a tic biting a human and transferring Borreliosis not considered zoonotic?

According to everyone favourite source, Lyme disease is zoonotic.

I had never heard the term until today, so take the claim with a pinch.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#222

Post by koboll »

mtoohig wrote: post #207
waserwill wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 old…

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". O…

Wow. You should really, really write a blog post about this, and get some of them on the record about it. A Google search for 'Aneityum "yellow people"' returns only 4 results.

However, one of those four is this dissertation: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794...

Which reads:

>His canoe and his moiety were the first to adopt the chiefly system, and it was brought to Aneityum by natimi-yag (yellow-people), which he now believes to have been Polynesian.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#223

Post by Teknoman117 »

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?

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#224

Post by cogman10 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #223

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?

Syphilis is thought to be a new world disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#225

Post by staticfloat »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #223

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?

Aha! A chance to plug one of my favorite CGP Grey videos that explores this very question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#226

Post by tschwimmer »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #223

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?

Syphilis was thought to have been carried from the Americas to Europe by Columbus' crewmen.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#227

Post by lostlogin »

runarberg wrote: post #78
dragontamer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

> Allies biggest advantage

As a strategy, you could do a lot worse than Liberty ships and a lot of Russians.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#228

Post by CamperBob2 »

hapticmonkey wrote: post #189
chestertn wrote: post #41

There are plenty of valid claims that many other civilizations contacted America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co... But it is meaningless since they did not write about it nor they stablished commerce. The fact is that before 1492, most civilizations in Africa/Asia/Europe did not know that America existed and that other humans lived there. After 1492, that changed forever.

That's like saying The Apollo moon missions were meaningless because they failed to set up commercial hub on the moon.

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."

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#229

Post by RugnirViking »

cestith wrote: post #219
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

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.

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 Eur…

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

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#230

Post by adolph »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #136
BurningFrog wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting! Of course, if the native population died off around them, the Vikings would probably have expanded their settlements and perhaps ruled North America instead.

I don't think it works like that. There seems to be a need for a minimum primary settler population and a decent amount of native assistance- it's fairly easy to build a new town 10 miles from your last but I am not aware of any long distance unsupported settlers. So if the natives around the Mayflower had all died, so would the Founding Fathers. If the Norse diseases had killed off the locals they might not have mad…

Some interpretations of the socio-political context of what is now New England see tribes more affected by disease presumably spread by earlier European contact as aiding incoming Europeans in order to ward off other tribes.

The Narragansetts were the most powerful tribe in the southern area of the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620, and they had not been affected by the epidemics. Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to the east allied with the colonists at Plymouth Colony as a way to protect the Wampanoags from Narragansett attacks. In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge, but Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people

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