291–300 of 408 posts
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> I can imagine an indigenous woman having a fling with a viking and just rasing the kid in her village. No one the wiser. Except everyone who saw the kid?
Many mixed raced people can pass as being completely apart of one race. I imagine a Norwegian/Indigenous American kid could just look Indigenous American.
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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.
>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.
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…
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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.
Weird take. I have never read any claims that Europeans were in N America before the indigenous. Even with visiting in 1000 AD, the "indians" have 10-20,000 year lead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man#Race_factor
'The New York Times reported "White supremacist groups are among those who used Kennewick Man to claim that Caucasians came to America well before Native Americans." Additionally, Asatru Folk Assembly, a racialist neopagan organization, sued to have the bones genetically tested before it was adjudicated that Kennewick Man was an ancestor of present-day Native Americans.'
Also the whole "Solutrean hypothesis", also disproven/discredited, but living on among the conspirational and often racist.
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> 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 wher…
> 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 16…
The way they operated was clear evidence of military sophistication.
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Well, there were around 3000 Spanish conquistadors. Could they really conquer the whole Aztec empire (5 mln people) without alliances with local tribes?
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.
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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…
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.
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Weird take. I have never read any claims that Europeans were in N America before the indigenous. Even with visiting in 1000 AD, the "indians" have 10-20,000 year lead.
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 "C…
However, I don't think interest in the Viking archeology from the last 2,000 years can be written off in the same vein.
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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…
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 int…
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.
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.
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?
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.