Marco Polo (1254-1324), who was on a Venetian trading expedition to China in the late 13th Century, related accounts from other traders that certainly sound like they were in contact with Arctic peoples, e.g, stories of "immense white bears" and "sledges" that were drawn across the ice by teams of dogs.
So if the Polo family (and others) were trading Venetian goods into China, and other traders were trading Chinese goods into the Arctic, it's not really too surprising that some of those Venetian trade goods wound up in Alaska.
It's very cool that they've found physical evidence though!
Edit:
This part:
"A growing body of evidence from the Bering Strait region indicates that the movement of non-native materials from northeast Asia to northwest Alaska has been occurring via undefined routes since the first millennium AD, if not longer."
ignores the fact that Native Alaskan and Siberian peoples were regularly crossing the Bering Strait long before Europeans arrived on the scene. Not only did they have excellent boats (good enough to hunt whales!) but in the winter you could just travel across the ice. There's not really much of a mystery here about how trade goods could have flowed.
The same is true of the popular "land bridge" story, by the way. While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait. Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family in Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed.
Yeah, the physical evidence is the cool part; we know people went from A to B even back in those days, but this show just how massive the ancient trade networks were.
>Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family in Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed.
You lost me on this sentence. How is Alaska Natives having family across pond in modern times related to land bridges 2000 years ago and what did the Cold War do to those families?
> While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait.
Crossing in boats, that is, not via land bridge. One assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more physically difficult, but politically impossible due to the mutual suspicion (especially of espionage on the part of the other) between the two powers whose territories it involves.
> One assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more physically difficult, but politically impossible due to the mutual suspicion
Exactly so. While there's reluctance to admit it (even now) there are stories that some Alaska Natives maintained contact with their friends and relatives in Siberia, even during the Cold War. I can certainly believe it. There's a lot of lonely coastline in that area, and not much monitoring -- certainly not back then.
But yeah, the main thrust of what I was saying was that the indigenous people had boats capable of making the crossing long before Europeans arrived on the scene, so the "land bridge" idea is not the pat explanation that many seem to think it is. The "land bridge" may have existed, and was probably used when it did exist, but it's clearly not the whole story.
We know that Alaska Natives were making this trip, and even longer ones, regularly before the arrival of Europeans. Heck, the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska were running water-based slave raids as far afield as California before the Europeans arrived.
There's even a special visa waiver for people with family across the Bering Strait: "the program allows indigenous residents from both sides of the Bering Strait to visit for up to 90 days without a visa. Travelers must have documented invitations from family or other residents living on the other side."
There is a long standing stance in anthropology and archeology that native peoples of the Americas had virtually zero contact with groups outside of their immediate surroundings.
The reason for this is that when they did have contact they all died. The natives in America were vastly more inbread (which really is saying something) than the Europeans who came in. They had so little genetic diversity that when one died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the same strain.
That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Europe and Asia have the same issue compared to Africa, which is why Native Americans have an exceptionally severe case of it.
Secondly, your characterization here shows a really fundamental misunderstanding of the literature. To quote an actually relevant paper [1]:
> The difficulty of finding incontrovertible evidence to support genetic hypotheses has resulted in a variety of alternative perspectives which de-emphasize the genetic hypotheses as missing key points.
No, founder effects are basically sampling bias. You can still have people that are genetically distant reproducing (and in fact, the popularizer of this particular vein of theories in Brazil, Francis Black suggested mandating exactly this to much criticism), but the overall population diversity will remain low. However, founder effects can be associated with inbreeding if it's a sufficiently small population. I'd imagine this probably wasn't a major factor for early Americans, as the effective population size (note, not actual population size!) was on the order of thousands.
Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still not sure I follow how they are different.
Does it not count as inbreeding if mating is occurring between distant relations which have low genetic differences due to low variability in the total population?
Imagine that the base population has alleles A-Z, all at equal frequency. A small population splits from the base population and becomes isolated. Because they're a small sample of the whole, they only have alleles A-M. This is the founder effect. Inbreeding would be A-A pairings (which may be more likely depending on population structure, frequencies, and size), but is not necessary.
In practice, there's a huge array of complications on top of all this that affect frequencies. That's the basic idea though.
Thanks for explaining it to me this way, I think it helps. My understanding from your post is that inbreeding is typically viewed as a more extreme reduction in available alleles and there is a blurry distinction. A founding or bottlenecked population have only A alleles present, but this would generally not be described as inbreeding. The implication seems to be that to be termed inbreeding, there has to be access to more diverse pairings which for whatever reasons are not occurring.
A founder effect population would still have some genetic variance left (Alleles A through M), but it would have less than the base population (A through Z). This is a shift in allele frequencies in the population as a whole due to sampling bias.
Inbreeding is reproduction by two people that are closely related (i.e. have similar alleles). Since people only have one allele in our example, that only occurs when two people with the same allele (e.g. A-A) reproduce. A-B, B-C, or any other dissimilar combination would not be inbreeding because their alleles are different, i.e. the "coefficient of inbreeding" is low.
It seems to be true, with virtually nothing in the way of technological and cultural diffusion between the high population density regions of the Old and New World.
Arctic peoples seem to have traded across the Bering Strait, as this article describes, but this was a very small volume of trade, owing to the low population densities on both sides of the Bering Strait and the areas adjacent to them.
The only contact the peoples far from and on the opposite sides of the Bering Strait would have had was indirect, through a trickle of traded items that made it across the strait and passed through numerous hands across vast distances to reach them.
There’s a lot of evidence indicating little to no contact and a paucity of evidence suggesting otherwise. So much so that “a” find like this is big news - a bead from the 15th century. It would not be big news if these things were found regularly, and they haven’t been, and people have been looking in earnest.
I don’t understand why you would find the conclusion to be insulting or condescending. Do you feel some bias has covered up information or that there is a wealth of contact indicia as yet unfound?
At the time of European contact, the written and archeological records both seem to agree that the indigenous population in North America was a Neolithic one. Some regions West of the Mississippi (out in the dry plains) were even Paleolithic. Even while there is evidence suggesting the Chinese made it to Alaska, and the Vikings to the East Coast much earlier than Columbian contact, it obviously was too expensive to stay. While trade goods trickled out to these far ends of the network, their paucity indicates that there was little worth trading for that far out that couldn’t be found elsewhere for less. In other words, even if western and eastern civilizations knew about the Americas an eon ago or more, the trade routes weren’t valuable enough on the balance to maintain.
I suggest you think of this as a highly valuable distinction for the study of mankind. The indigenous populations of the Americas were human, the same as you and I today. They were wicked smart, capable, and well-adapted to living in insanely hostile conditions. Their until-recent isolation helps inform the understanding of all human societies in time. It further enables every human on earth confront themselves. Two books I would recommend to stir a fascination with these early cultures: Thundersticks by David Silverman, and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn. These contain accessible descriptions of life before the 19th century Plains Indian Wars, which dominates a lot of people’s ideas about the indigenous Americans. In fact, European contact goes back another three centuries and there’s some fascinating, wondrous history and insight in those earliest periods of contact.
Yes, it's condescending because we're rapidly learning the only reason we didn't find the evidence is we weren't looking for it. Genetics in particular has established there was contact between Oceania and South America for something like 500 years before Columbus.
Your description of native Americans as Neolithic or Paleolithic is more of the same problem, including the view that there's some sort of ladder of categories civilizations climb. We again know conclusively by the evidence this is wrong, that ancient cultures were a web of diffusion and adoption of different technologies and practices, where things were always adapted to the local context. In particular we're finding much more physical evidence of wide scale deliberate changing of the Amazon landscape to better suit the people living there. Going back even further, there's a growing body of evidence of exchange of technologies between ancient hominid species as well.
Basically there's a whole lot more to this subject and story, and plenty of evidence out there to find and learn from, but the narrative of linear development and diffusion of civilization has hindered that. Likewise the idea that the only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as advanced are greek/roman style constructions.
Neolithic and paleolithic have definitions concerning material science and agricultural development. I think you are assigning a good/bad valuation to the terms that doesn't have anything to do with science. This is what I'm suggesting you recalibrate dispassionately. That other people are unfamiliar with the proper understanding of these terms is no excuse to acquiesce to ignorance.
>exchange of technologies
This is not a new insight, but a primary focus of archeology and anthropology in any theater.
>we're rapidly learning the only reason we didn't find the evidence is we weren't looking for it
Despite my quibbles with your gratuitous use of the pronoun "we", I think you couldn't be more wrong unless you're talking about more than a century ago. Particularly since the discovery in Clovis (1930s?), the archeological community has been rabidly (if not rapidly) looking for new clues as to how people came to, adapted to, and dispersed into the Americas, with very few theories discarded out of hand. The reality is that there is very little evidence to back up the various hypotheses that stray too far outside of the accepted conclusions today, but generally everybody is almost too eager to find evidence that would upset existing assumptions (i.e. reckless, see Ancient Aliens).
> only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as advanced are greek/roman style constructions
Let's add the cultures from the Middle East (e.g. Persians), Eastern Asia (e.g. China), and parts in between, areas which were not coincidentally all connected by land. This, of course, all depends on understanding the context around "advanced". Typically when that word is used to characterize a civilization, it does imply a linear maturation of energy source and material science capabilities enabling new technologies that feed benefits back into that society for growth - things like employing the wheel, the lever, the screw, beasts of burden, plows, wind, etc for productivity gains, insulation from seasonal variation, defense, medicine, etc. The United States is a more advanced civilization today than it was two centuries ago, as are many (not all) civilizations on Earth today, though this pace of change is (to our knowledge) unprecedented since perhaps the Han dynasty.
This view certainly does hinder many people's appreciation of how obstacles were overcome in societies that were less "advanced" (in the above sense of the word). But at the end of the day it doesn't grant those societies capabilities the evidence shows to be absent. It also doesn't make me any less fascinated in the societies in the Americas or less open to new data. On the contrary, in a way these societies are all the more fascinating because they put us closer to understanding what the human experience was like in those conditions.
As a (former) archaeologist, you're using both terms incorrectly. Paleolithic refers broadly to lithic eras prior to the start of the Holocene. It is not applicable to anything after that and I suggest perusing the relevant wiki page [1] for later periodizations. Neolithic is also strictly improper as a descriptor of the Americas, but it gets some use in comparative work and people will "know what you meant". Similarly, most historians and archaeologists would protest using the term "advanced" unqualified. It's a bad word with lots of incorrect connotations, especially in the public mind.
My rule of thumb is that you should avoid comparing societies that are thousands of years apart if at all possible. They're probably not comparable.
Hunting vs agriculture, nomadic vs settled lifestyle, both without notable metallurgical capability. These are the primary capability differentiators between the paleolithic and neolithic periods [0].
You are absolutely right that these terms are bound up in the study of particular places at particular times. They are generally not applied to the Americas directly for the time element skews the descriptors. However, relative to what the Europeans were encountering in North America upon contact - and indeed in some areas right up into the late 19th century, it was societies that shared these characteristics with their own history. Yes, people know what you mean when you use these terms in this context. I am not the first or last, and could point to contemporary books on early America that make these comparisons.
Societies thousands of years apart are not at all to be strictly understood through the lens of one or the other, but the insights into how hunter-gatherer tribes live even today, and 100 years ago, are highly valuable to gaining insight into the human condition under similar constraints eons ago. This is highly valuable in anthropology and informs archeology, certainly. One must be careful, but to say it should be avoided? That's wasteful.
>> protest using the term "advanced" unqualified
Do you feel my use of the term was unqualified? My intention was to qualify it in the context of energy sources and material science, which I think is not an unreasonable way to understand development. It is iterative, societies can regress or progress along this continuum. Progress is generally synonymous with advancement.
If I may ask, what is your discomfort with the term?
You're falling into a well known thought trap that's had a lot of ink spilled about it. I typically recommend Machines as the Measure of Men. At its core, the idea that the material culture is both the primary organizing mode of society and an unambiguous way to categorize and rank societies is fatally flawed. I'm sure you can find books that make this mistake, but I'm specifically telling you that it's an arbitrary assumption that will lead you to bad conclusions.
> ...the insights into how hunter-gatherer tribes live even today, and 100 years ago, are highly valuable to gaining insight into the human condition under similar constraints eons ago.
Most researchers on this subject will tell you that it's unclear what similarities there are between modern foragers and ancient humans. The people in my social circle (unsuprisingly) mostly approach it the same way I do: modern foragers represent a small, limited subset of the available lifeways and probably differ a great deal from what foragers must have been like in a pre-agricultural world. They're studied because they're interesting in their own right, they're what we have for analogues, maybe optimal behavior constrains the possibilities somewhat, etc.
> It is iterative, societies can regress or progress along this continuum. Progress is generally synonymous with advancement.
The core issue is that progress isn't a linear scale. If everyone in X decides to go live in relatively peaceful communes and give up hierarchical class systems, is that progress? Star trek suggests it's pretty futuristic, but archaeologically we've labeled such things as "collapses". If a society is "neolithic", but has 20th century agricultural yields centuries before the west, is that more or less advanced? Both of these things are (heavily simplified) real examples.
BTW, I appreciate everything you're saying, thanks for hanging in there with me.
But aren't you ascribing some sort of qualitative value to these descriptions that is entirely unnecessary? I'm simply talking about comparative capabilities of energy sources and material science - e.g. this society was using horses to plow fields, this one used oxen, this one was doing it all by hand. There are implications to the net crop yields in each of these societies. This may in turn afford that society different modes of living, social structure, warfare, etc., but who am I to say one is better than another? Those evaluations are irrelevant to anything I believe I've said and frankly contrary to my stated fascination with and the value of societies in the pre-contact Americas a couple posts ago.
To wit, in your example you talk about living in communes and giving up hierarchical systems as progress, which seems completely out of left field relative to the context in which I have used. Now, in Star Trek's world maybe society has developed capabilities that enable sustainable peaceful communes without hierarchy, I don't know, nor would the context of my point care (it's tough to even puzzle out what it implies). But Star Trek's ability to harness new energy sources and develop new materials (transparent aluminum) certainly is more advanced than where we are today (within the context I described, and have remained faithful to in these posts).
> [inferences from modern hunter-gatherers must be carefully harvested, but they are what we have for analogues]
agreed, was trying to point out the need to be careful with this, while preserving the value of what they can teach us. I'm interested in your statement that modern foragers probably differ a great deal from what foragers must have been like in a pre-agricultural world. That's an interesting statement that would be fun to unpack. First, what do we mean when we say "modern"? It's notable that until very recently, the horse represented the top speed any human could travel at. It was that way for eons.
> unambiguous way to categorize and rank societies is fatally flawed
Again, I can't help but think that you're ascribing a value system where I am not. Comparing societies by material science and energy source capabilities is pretty close to an objective way to talk about (categorize) differences between those societies, and it is a pretty linear progression forward or backward, and measured using things like energy inputs, energy outputs, and materials. There is no need to start saying "this one is better than that one", and I feel you're making an assumption that there is that kind of ranking going on. That is foreign to what I'm discussing, subjective, and I disclaim it. It chafes me to feel that's necessary to explain. Now, one could say that the ability of the Comanche to breed horses and employ them directly in combat made them "better" than the Tonkawas from an survivability or evolutionary standpoint. Or that insulation from the variability of hunting seasons made one society "better" in the same sense, but that's an entirely different discussion, and I'm not sure "better" has a place there either. Better equipped, better prepared, perhaps, but you can see how we're adding a different context in at that point.
This is a great point. There's a sadly consistent theme of simply underestimating native peoples throughout history. Polynesians were in contact with south America for centuries before Columbus for example. Their naval technology was capable of reliable navigation over vast distances in the pacific. There's genetic evidence that people went back and forth between SA and Oceania with some regularity, a feat more impressive than crossing the Atlantic, but you almost never hear it talked about.
Not just generic evidence: Polynesian peoples almost certainly imported sweet potatoes to Oceania and east Asia hundreds of years prior to Columbus. In fact, the proto-Polynesian word for sweet potato is likely a Quechua loan word
> Somehow, these blueberry-sized beads made their way from what is now Venice, Italy, to the Brooks Range mountains of Alaska at some point during the mid-to-late 15th century, according to new research published in American Antiquity.
They somehow managed to put the "what is now" hedge in the worst possible place in that sentence.
But, the sentence says “what is now Venice”. It’s Venice now, ant it was Venice then. It’s been Venice for the past 1000 years. I guess that it wasn’t “Venice, Italy”, but “Venice, The Venetian Republic” then, but I ascribe this oddity to there being “Paris, Texas” for the USA audience while the rest of the world knows that when you say Paris, you mean the capital of France and not “Paris, the nail salon down the road”. Likewise, 500 years ago, it wasn’t “Venice, the Venetian Republic” since anyone who would understand what Venice or The Venetian Republic is, would not need any qualifying of Venezia, or whatever local name they used for that city.
Anyway, the OP referred to the weirdest place in the sentence for that qualification because nothing else was qualified (was Alaska even Alaska back then? ;)
Yeah - why there and not "what is now the Brooks Range mountains in what is now Alaska"? Venice was still Venice even back then. Especially back then when it was a major international player, not a damp place populated with tourists.
Haha, I think he meant Venice but I honestly thought GP meant Brooks on first read. But even at its moments of greatest population the Brooks Range was never a major international player except in terms of historical significance to the peopling of North America. See: https://www.blm.gov/programs/cultural-heritage-and-paleontol...
European settlers reached Alaska only in 1741, so the organic material around the beads - which is what was used for carbon dating - would have had to survive wear and tear for centuries. Not very likely.
I sometimes wonder what the value of lines like this are. Should't the reader be convinced of the magnitude of the find by the facts and the way they're presented, themselves, without having to throw some distant third party in for props?
> Ben Potter, an archaeologist from the Arctic Studies Center at Liaocheng University in China who’s not involved with the new study, said it’s a “very cool” discovery.
My wife had one of her research projects get some media attention. For one interviewer, she wouldn't give the quote that they wanted (essentially a value judgment that her research couldn't possibly answer), so they got the quote from someone else who had nothing to do with the project. I can't say that is what happened here as the quote seems quite innocuous.
Alternatively, they do sometimes want to get a view from someone unrelated to the project in order to get a feel for how important/interesting the result truly is.
It’s to demonstrate that other experts in the field, who don’t have a connection to this particular study, found the results significant. Seems useful to me.
Yes, that's the theory, although anybody half competent can cherry-pick the interviewees and the quotes to match what they think the story "ought" to be.
It's not necessary for a Venetian to go to Alaska, for the trade beads to end of there. It's only necessary for neighbors to trade with neighbors, and they can diffuse around the globe. Like an ancient game of Telephone.
Long-range traders can give the process a jump start, but the end result can be indistinguishable from diffusion.
I disagree that it would be indistinguishable. You need to chain together a long series of probabilities that leads to exponentially less product arriving through diffusion than through long-range traders, and a clear trail would result.
The typical approach to direct contact is to look for the signs of the people making the journey (genetic, linguistic, and cultural transmission). If you don't have these, they're often practically indistinguishable because the archaeological record inherently tends to be spotty, without continuous data points for uncommon trade goods. Moreover, the Asian northeast is vast and only lightly surveyed.
You only need time. The probability of any individual product arriving is indeed small. The probability of some item arriving is certainty, given enough time.
This is a really interesting point that seems to be overlooked, but is unbelievably interesting. My understanding is that there was neighborly trading over the Bering strait and from Newfoundland to Greenland...
It makes me wonder, could a merchant sailor in a pub in England have heard a story from the a friend of a friend of a friend about the North American coast?
In addition to random diffusion, big empires between Venice and Alaska, including Persia, India, China, and the Mongols in Central Asia served as cultural "repeaters". Valuable artifacts might have actually been actively promoted in trade and taken on newer and greater significance as they changed hands.
Other even more ancient artifact transmissions across long distances include the Pompeii Lakshmi (first century CE) [1], and Greco-Roman glassware found in Southeast China (third century CE) [2].
The bigger surprise is that this trade took place across the Bering Strait, a very forbidding natural obstacle. But then again, the Yupik peoples have historically spanned the Bering Strait though to central Alaska [3], so they are a probably final link for the artifact between Eurasia and North American populations.
This transfer of beads happened during the time of the mongol empire which stretched from deep within europe to china and all the way to the eastern siberia.
It is no secret that the mongol empire was one of the greatest facilitator of cultural and economic diffusion. Generally the idea was that goods and ideas flowed from the east to the west, but certainly some from the west flowed to the east and eventually to alaska.
It would be interesting to know if anything from alaska made its way westward.
They date the twine used, not the actual beads themselves. It could be the case that the beads were put on some old twine. Or that the twine and beads were old, but landed in Alaska at a much later time.
>It could be the case that the beads were put on some old twine.
The inverse is far more likely. Twine is basically a consumable whereas being non-reactive to most of the things people come in contact with is all but a requirement of jwelry.
The article states that the twin was not directly associated to the beads (so no putting them on some old twine), but was from the accompanying bangle (probably item "o" in the image), which was dated 1397–1488 and "was subsequently affirmed through the testing of charcoal and caribou bones found at the three sites". This is a typical situation when dating items indirectly from their find context. The standard counter-argument is, of course, that the item was added at some other point in time to its find context. So in this case the counter-argument would be that the beads had been added at least a few decades later, while anything else that had been dated is from 1488 or earlier. (A few decades, to allow for some time for their journey from the Atlantic coast to Alaska.) How likely or unlikely is that?
Thanks for clearing that up. So the question is, which direction did the beads take to arrive there... from the Atlantic route (which is cool but not ground breaking), or from the Pacific, which is way more interesting in significance.
You can't date the beads themselves. Or you could, but you'd get the date when the rock formed, which is potentially a few million years ago, not the date when the beads were polished by some jewelers into their current shape. With the twine, you get the date when the carbon was metabolized, which is when the plant or animal where the fiber came from was alive and breathing. This is very close in time to the date when the fiber was actually twisted to form the twine, and to the date the twine was coupled with the beads to form a necklace or pendant.
Most plant families in the arctic are fairly cosmopolitan and exist on both sides of the strait. This particular twine is thought to be from a willow species, which is a particularly widespread family up there.
There was also almost certainly trade between the New and Old World by way of the Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland, which knew about the North American mainland, and very likely visited the Labrador region for lumber.
The short-lived Norse colony built in L'Ance aux Meadows, Newfoundland in 1000 AD had an iron forge [1], which would have produced items in high demand among the indigenous people of that region. It seems unlikely that there wouldn't have been sustained trade once demand for these types of items had been established.
No, it seems the beads came across the Bering Strait. I don't see why Venetian beads entering North America from the Maritimes would head north west across the tundra to Alaska instead of south and south west toward more populated regions.
Plus by the 13th and 14th century, when Venetian trade was rising, the population of the Norse colony in Greenland was dwindling and the colony was approaching its end, due to cooling climate.
If the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple of hundred years - EASILY. Remember that the Inuit of North America only entered from Asia in the last 4000 years or so, and speak a language that is closely related to languages in Siberia...
So these beads could have come to Alaska from east OR west. We will probably never know for sure.
I'm not so sure about the "easily" part: from [1], most part of Greenland was colonized after Vikings settled on Iceland. So I'd imagine it wasn't exactly a leisurely trip from there to Alaska.
It would have been a series of trade network hops, not an express route by one guy. So traded from one village to the next over and over westwards. Going from Venice over the Silk Road and up through Siberia and into Alaska, or up through Eastern Europe into northern Asia and across Siberia, probably would have involved fewer exchanges though, I’d guess. Either way, that bead is a looong way from Venice. :D
Alaska was peopled in the Holocene (>10k years ago). But yeah, i think you’re right: I tend to think of the particularly coastal Arctic people’s across AK/Canada as having more consistent inter-tribal contact and periodic aggregation than between Arctic and more Southerly tribes. Not crazy to think trade goods could flow between the indigenous people of the east and west coasts of the Arctic, albeit slowly. I think far, far more likely that this item would have come to Alaska via Siberia though, if for no other reason than proximity. Fascinating to think of the story of that bead. Blows the mind.
What's interesting about this is that this article suggests nobody else from Europe set foot* in North America before Columbus, but the Norse had a settlement in Newfoundland in approximately 1000CE^[1] and are known to be prolific global traders.
I don't think it makes that suggestion at all. In fact, it is specifically about evidence of pre-Columbus artifacts
>Much of the public imagines Columbus as the only (or first) connection between the old and new worlds, yet there are many instances of cultural connectivity in the Bering Straits region—and this is one
The discovery and article highlight a more nuanced discovery:
>the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent,”
What's fascinating to me about this is how often the Brooks Range keeps popping up in the critical archeological record. I used to assume that people who come from Siberia to North America are crossing the land bridge and taking a direct route southeast to more temperate climates and to get back to the coast asap. However, it makes a lot of sense that they'd stick between the major river and the caribou herds to sustain them in travel east and west. Travel would have been easier, food more plentiful, even if somewhat (okay, significantly) colder than the South Central coast line. The South Central and South East coastlines are arguably less hospitable without specialized knowledge of watercraft and saltwater fishing and hunting skills.
Fishing fleets had been trading with people in the Arctic for some time. The joke is that when John Cabot 'discovered' N. America, he had to sail around all the fishing boats to get to shore.
If we speculate about routes for the beads from the Atlantic instead of from Siberia, there are at least four vage possibilities:
a) A route from the Caribean European settlements established after 1492
b) A route from New Foundland fishermen bases established around 1500.
c) A route from the New Foundland Viking bases from the early 1000s.
d) A route from Norse Greenland (980s to late 15th century).
Possibilities a) and b) are likely too late regarding the dating. Possibility c) is too early (no Ventian beats in the early 1000s). But d) seems to me at least as plausible as a Bering Strait route.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadSo if the Polo family (and others) were trading Venetian goods into China, and other traders were trading Chinese goods into the Arctic, it's not really too surprising that some of those Venetian trade goods wound up in Alaska.
It's very cool that they've found physical evidence though!
Edit:
This part:
"A growing body of evidence from the Bering Strait region indicates that the movement of non-native materials from northeast Asia to northwest Alaska has been occurring via undefined routes since the first millennium AD, if not longer."
ignores the fact that Native Alaskan and Siberian peoples were regularly crossing the Bering Strait long before Europeans arrived on the scene. Not only did they have excellent boats (good enough to hunt whales!) but in the winter you could just travel across the ice. There's not really much of a mystery here about how trade goods could have flowed.
The same is true of the popular "land bridge" story, by the way. While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait. Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family in Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed.
You lost me on this sentence. How is Alaska Natives having family across pond in modern times related to land bridges 2000 years ago and what did the Cold War do to those families?
I just don't understand. What am I missing?
> While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait.
Crossing in boats, that is, not via land bridge. One assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more physically difficult, but politically impossible due to the mutual suspicion (especially of espionage on the part of the other) between the two powers whose territories it involves.
Exactly so. While there's reluctance to admit it (even now) there are stories that some Alaska Natives maintained contact with their friends and relatives in Siberia, even during the Cold War. I can certainly believe it. There's a lot of lonely coastline in that area, and not much monitoring -- certainly not back then.
But yeah, the main thrust of what I was saying was that the indigenous people had boats capable of making the crossing long before Europeans arrived on the scene, so the "land bridge" idea is not the pat explanation that many seem to think it is. The "land bridge" may have existed, and was probably used when it did exist, but it's clearly not the whole story.
We know that Alaska Natives were making this trip, and even longer ones, regularly before the arrival of Europeans. Heck, the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska were running water-based slave raids as far afield as California before the Europeans arrived.
https://apnews.com/article/5e16cfadd90c478d80a374ef1cd99c2d
I find it extremely condescending and stupid.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/
Secondly, your characterization here shows a really fundamental misunderstanding of the literature. To quote an actually relevant paper [1]:
> The difficulty of finding incontrovertible evidence to support genetic hypotheses has resulted in a variety of alternative perspectives which de-emphasize the genetic hypotheses as missing key points.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032
Isn't this a simple matter of WHAT versus WHY (i.e. they were inbred because of founder effects)
Does it not count as inbreeding if mating is occurring between distant relations which have low genetic differences due to low variability in the total population?
In practice, there's a huge array of complications on top of all this that affect frequencies. That's the basic idea though.
Inbreeding is reproduction by two people that are closely related (i.e. have similar alleles). Since people only have one allele in our example, that only occurs when two people with the same allele (e.g. A-A) reproduce. A-B, B-C, or any other dissimilar combination would not be inbreeding because their alleles are different, i.e. the "coefficient of inbreeding" is low.
Hopefully that clarifies how they're distinct.
Yes, when all your founders are first cousins.
Humans as a species are incredibly inbred compared to any other primates. Native Americans even more so.
That’s not a sign of inbreeding. We aren’t dying of covid in vast numbers because we are all inbred (no ‘a’).
Arctic peoples seem to have traded across the Bering Strait, as this article describes, but this was a very small volume of trade, owing to the low population densities on both sides of the Bering Strait and the areas adjacent to them.
The only contact the peoples far from and on the opposite sides of the Bering Strait would have had was indirect, through a trickle of traded items that made it across the strait and passed through numerous hands across vast distances to reach them.
I don’t understand why you would find the conclusion to be insulting or condescending. Do you feel some bias has covered up information or that there is a wealth of contact indicia as yet unfound?
At the time of European contact, the written and archeological records both seem to agree that the indigenous population in North America was a Neolithic one. Some regions West of the Mississippi (out in the dry plains) were even Paleolithic. Even while there is evidence suggesting the Chinese made it to Alaska, and the Vikings to the East Coast much earlier than Columbian contact, it obviously was too expensive to stay. While trade goods trickled out to these far ends of the network, their paucity indicates that there was little worth trading for that far out that couldn’t be found elsewhere for less. In other words, even if western and eastern civilizations knew about the Americas an eon ago or more, the trade routes weren’t valuable enough on the balance to maintain.
I suggest you think of this as a highly valuable distinction for the study of mankind. The indigenous populations of the Americas were human, the same as you and I today. They were wicked smart, capable, and well-adapted to living in insanely hostile conditions. Their until-recent isolation helps inform the understanding of all human societies in time. It further enables every human on earth confront themselves. Two books I would recommend to stir a fascination with these early cultures: Thundersticks by David Silverman, and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn. These contain accessible descriptions of life before the 19th century Plains Indian Wars, which dominates a lot of people’s ideas about the indigenous Americans. In fact, European contact goes back another three centuries and there’s some fascinating, wondrous history and insight in those earliest periods of contact.
Your description of native Americans as Neolithic or Paleolithic is more of the same problem, including the view that there's some sort of ladder of categories civilizations climb. We again know conclusively by the evidence this is wrong, that ancient cultures were a web of diffusion and adoption of different technologies and practices, where things were always adapted to the local context. In particular we're finding much more physical evidence of wide scale deliberate changing of the Amazon landscape to better suit the people living there. Going back even further, there's a growing body of evidence of exchange of technologies between ancient hominid species as well.
Basically there's a whole lot more to this subject and story, and plenty of evidence out there to find and learn from, but the narrative of linear development and diffusion of civilization has hindered that. Likewise the idea that the only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as advanced are greek/roman style constructions.
>exchange of technologies
This is not a new insight, but a primary focus of archeology and anthropology in any theater.
>we're rapidly learning the only reason we didn't find the evidence is we weren't looking for it
Despite my quibbles with your gratuitous use of the pronoun "we", I think you couldn't be more wrong unless you're talking about more than a century ago. Particularly since the discovery in Clovis (1930s?), the archeological community has been rabidly (if not rapidly) looking for new clues as to how people came to, adapted to, and dispersed into the Americas, with very few theories discarded out of hand. The reality is that there is very little evidence to back up the various hypotheses that stray too far outside of the accepted conclusions today, but generally everybody is almost too eager to find evidence that would upset existing assumptions (i.e. reckless, see Ancient Aliens).
> only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as advanced are greek/roman style constructions
Let's add the cultures from the Middle East (e.g. Persians), Eastern Asia (e.g. China), and parts in between, areas which were not coincidentally all connected by land. This, of course, all depends on understanding the context around "advanced". Typically when that word is used to characterize a civilization, it does imply a linear maturation of energy source and material science capabilities enabling new technologies that feed benefits back into that society for growth - things like employing the wheel, the lever, the screw, beasts of burden, plows, wind, etc for productivity gains, insulation from seasonal variation, defense, medicine, etc. The United States is a more advanced civilization today than it was two centuries ago, as are many (not all) civilizations on Earth today, though this pace of change is (to our knowledge) unprecedented since perhaps the Han dynasty.
This view certainly does hinder many people's appreciation of how obstacles were overcome in societies that were less "advanced" (in the above sense of the word). But at the end of the day it doesn't grant those societies capabilities the evidence shows to be absent. It also doesn't make me any less fascinated in the societies in the Americas or less open to new data. On the contrary, in a way these societies are all the more fascinating because they put us closer to understanding what the human experience was like in those conditions.
My rule of thumb is that you should avoid comparing societies that are thousands of years apart if at all possible. They're probably not comparable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_periods...
You are absolutely right that these terms are bound up in the study of particular places at particular times. They are generally not applied to the Americas directly for the time element skews the descriptors. However, relative to what the Europeans were encountering in North America upon contact - and indeed in some areas right up into the late 19th century, it was societies that shared these characteristics with their own history. Yes, people know what you mean when you use these terms in this context. I am not the first or last, and could point to contemporary books on early America that make these comparisons.
Societies thousands of years apart are not at all to be strictly understood through the lens of one or the other, but the insights into how hunter-gatherer tribes live even today, and 100 years ago, are highly valuable to gaining insight into the human condition under similar constraints eons ago. This is highly valuable in anthropology and informs archeology, certainly. One must be careful, but to say it should be avoided? That's wasteful.
>> protest using the term "advanced" unqualified
Do you feel my use of the term was unqualified? My intention was to qualify it in the context of energy sources and material science, which I think is not an unreasonable way to understand development. It is iterative, societies can regress or progress along this continuum. Progress is generally synonymous with advancement.
If I may ask, what is your discomfort with the term?
[0] i.e. https://www.wappingersschools.org/cms/lib/NY01001463/Centric...
> ...the insights into how hunter-gatherer tribes live even today, and 100 years ago, are highly valuable to gaining insight into the human condition under similar constraints eons ago.
Most researchers on this subject will tell you that it's unclear what similarities there are between modern foragers and ancient humans. The people in my social circle (unsuprisingly) mostly approach it the same way I do: modern foragers represent a small, limited subset of the available lifeways and probably differ a great deal from what foragers must have been like in a pre-agricultural world. They're studied because they're interesting in their own right, they're what we have for analogues, maybe optimal behavior constrains the possibilities somewhat, etc.
> It is iterative, societies can regress or progress along this continuum. Progress is generally synonymous with advancement.
The core issue is that progress isn't a linear scale. If everyone in X decides to go live in relatively peaceful communes and give up hierarchical class systems, is that progress? Star trek suggests it's pretty futuristic, but archaeologically we've labeled such things as "collapses". If a society is "neolithic", but has 20th century agricultural yields centuries before the west, is that more or less advanced? Both of these things are (heavily simplified) real examples.
But aren't you ascribing some sort of qualitative value to these descriptions that is entirely unnecessary? I'm simply talking about comparative capabilities of energy sources and material science - e.g. this society was using horses to plow fields, this one used oxen, this one was doing it all by hand. There are implications to the net crop yields in each of these societies. This may in turn afford that society different modes of living, social structure, warfare, etc., but who am I to say one is better than another? Those evaluations are irrelevant to anything I believe I've said and frankly contrary to my stated fascination with and the value of societies in the pre-contact Americas a couple posts ago.
To wit, in your example you talk about living in communes and giving up hierarchical systems as progress, which seems completely out of left field relative to the context in which I have used. Now, in Star Trek's world maybe society has developed capabilities that enable sustainable peaceful communes without hierarchy, I don't know, nor would the context of my point care (it's tough to even puzzle out what it implies). But Star Trek's ability to harness new energy sources and develop new materials (transparent aluminum) certainly is more advanced than where we are today (within the context I described, and have remained faithful to in these posts).
> [inferences from modern hunter-gatherers must be carefully harvested, but they are what we have for analogues]
agreed, was trying to point out the need to be careful with this, while preserving the value of what they can teach us. I'm interested in your statement that modern foragers probably differ a great deal from what foragers must have been like in a pre-agricultural world. That's an interesting statement that would be fun to unpack. First, what do we mean when we say "modern"? It's notable that until very recently, the horse represented the top speed any human could travel at. It was that way for eons.
> unambiguous way to categorize and rank societies is fatally flawed
Again, I can't help but think that you're ascribing a value system where I am not. Comparing societies by material science and energy source capabilities is pretty close to an objective way to talk about (categorize) differences between those societies, and it is a pretty linear progression forward or backward, and measured using things like energy inputs, energy outputs, and materials. There is no need to start saying "this one is better than that one", and I feel you're making an assumption that there is that kind of ranking going on. That is foreign to what I'm discussing, subjective, and I disclaim it. It chafes me to feel that's necessary to explain. Now, one could say that the ability of the Comanche to breed horses and employ them directly in combat made them "better" than the Tonkawas from an survivability or evolutionary standpoint. Or that insulation from the variability of hunting seasons made one society "better" in the same sense, but that's an entirely different discussion, and I'm not sure "better" has a place there either. Better equipped, better prepared, perhaps, but you can see how we're adding a different context in at that point.
They somehow managed to put the "what is now" hedge in the worst possible place in that sentence.
Also Venice isn't located strictly on the peninsula.
Anyway, the OP referred to the weirdest place in the sentence for that qualification because nothing else was qualified (was Alaska even Alaska back then? ;)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26053821
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033759
It's pretty amazing to think of something traveling from Venice all the way to a place that's very remote in this day and age.
Like me carrying a roman coin and loosing it in today Siberia for example?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
> Ben Potter, an archaeologist from the Arctic Studies Center at Liaocheng University in China who’s not involved with the new study, said it’s a “very cool” discovery.
Alternatively, they do sometimes want to get a view from someone unrelated to the project in order to get a feel for how important/interesting the result truly is.
Long-range traders can give the process a jump start, but the end result can be indistinguishable from diffusion.
It makes me wonder, could a merchant sailor in a pub in England have heard a story from the a friend of a friend of a friend about the North American coast?
Other even more ancient artifact transmissions across long distances include the Pompeii Lakshmi (first century CE) [1], and Greco-Roman glassware found in Southeast China (third century CE) [2].
The bigger surprise is that this trade took place across the Bering Strait, a very forbidding natural obstacle. But then again, the Yupik peoples have historically spanned the Bering Strait though to central Alaska [3], so they are a probably final link for the artifact between Eurasia and North American populations.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii_Lakshmi
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serica#/media/File:Green_glass...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples
It is no secret that the mongol empire was one of the greatest facilitator of cultural and economic diffusion. Generally the idea was that goods and ideas flowed from the east to the west, but certainly some from the west flowed to the east and eventually to alaska.
It would be interesting to know if anything from alaska made its way westward.
Looks like they compared to the site as well, confirming the beads were there in pre-columbian times.
The inverse is far more likely. Twine is basically a consumable whereas being non-reactive to most of the things people come in contact with is all but a requirement of jwelry.
https://news.uaf.edu/blue-beads-in-the-tundra/
The short-lived Norse colony built in L'Ance aux Meadows, Newfoundland in 1000 AD had an iron forge [1], which would have produced items in high demand among the indigenous people of that region. It seems unlikely that there wouldn't have been sustained trade once demand for these types of items had been established.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
Plus by the 13th and 14th century, when Venetian trade was rising, the population of the Norse colony in Greenland was dwindling and the colony was approaching its end, due to cooling climate.
So these beads could have come to Alaska from east OR west. We will probably never know for sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
>Much of the public imagines Columbus as the only (or first) connection between the old and new worlds, yet there are many instances of cultural connectivity in the Bering Straits region—and this is one
The discovery and article highlight a more nuanced discovery:
>the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent,”
Vikings were there way before that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
a) A route from the Caribean European settlements established after 1492
b) A route from New Foundland fishermen bases established around 1500.
c) A route from the New Foundland Viking bases from the early 1000s.
d) A route from Norse Greenland (980s to late 15th century).
Possibilities a) and b) are likely too late regarding the dating. Possibility c) is too early (no Ventian beats in the early 1000s). But d) seems to me at least as plausible as a Bering Strait route.