Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 408 posts

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

#301

Post by tptacek »

seph-reed wrote: post #257
jcranmer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 fa…

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.

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

#302

Post by bobthepanda »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #125
irrational wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's exactly the point. Epidemic disease alone is an insufficient explanation for the demographic collapse of indigenous Americans.

Is it not?

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.

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

#303

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #89
ilamont wrote: post #4

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…

> the exchange of human genetic information This sounds like a parody of scientific jargon. Why do people write like this?..

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".

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

#304

Post by jcranmer »

sampo wrote: post #212
ren_engineer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there any explanation for why disease didn't kill in the reverse direction? Why weren't Europeans wiped out by Native American diseases?

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…

> 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.

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

#305

Post by jcranmer »

tptacek wrote: post #301
seph-reed wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

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.

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

#306

Post by jjk166 »

barbacoa wrote: post #292
jjk166 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#307

Post by ytdytvhxgydvhh »

cheaprentalyeti wrote: post #197

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?

Apparently no evidence of Norse activity there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Rosee

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

#309

Post by munk-a »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #274
munk-a wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget Southern Italy and Sicily!

Hrm - I'd avoided including those because the Normans were sooooorta not what you'd call Vikings at that point - but yup those Normans got everywhere.

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

#310

Post by jcranmer »

WalterBright wrote: post #295
jcranmer wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Post reply on HN