For a good run-down of the various folks that may (or may not) have crossed the Atlantic, see Simon Winchester's book Atlantic (ISBN13: 9780061702587):
It was 16,000+ years ago, so calling them "Far East Asian naives" kinda undersells that the natives at the time were a completely different group than the ones we think of as current East Asian natives.
It's hard to call it "discovered" when the landbridge was still there and they were hunter-gathers (although "settled" is accurate). "Migrated to" maybe?
The History Channel aired this documentary which summarizes multiple theories about the discovery of America, from either the Atlantic or Pacific. Ice age explorers, Vikings, Polynesians, etc., are all covered:
I do recommend Tim Severin's book on his recreation of the alleged voyage, firstly for their attempts to use period correct construction techniques, and also how the boat itself handled in the Atlantic.
If you get a chance, the leather currach which Tim Severin built and sailed across the Atlantic is now on display and can be visited at the Irish Heritage Museum at Craggaunowen, Co. Clare. It's a remarkable vessel and hard to imagine a monk from the 5th century climbing aboard one and sailing across the Atlantic, although stranger things have happened.
Depends on your definition of "discovery". Christopher Columbus's trip to America changed the course of history. Any previous visits by the lost at sea sailors are not important.
And what of significance did they accomplish? Learnt how to build tents? Got proficient at making human sacrifices? Built a few pyramids? As i said, the real history of America started when Europeans came in.
You can dismiss any region by ignoring everything they've accomplished.
If you absolutely insist on silly "comparative metrics" though, many areas of the pre-columbian Americas were home to incredibly advanced agricultural civilizations whose productivity far exceeded that of their European contemporaries. This isn't a useful perspective for academic work, but maybe it'll help you come to grips.
Buddy, Cahokia may have had as many people as London. Disease ravaged the Native American population and estimates are that 90% died. History doesn’t start with European arrival.
Why do you need beasts of burden to develop industrialized society?
In terms of agricultural resources, you don't need the plow to effectively farm the land in most of urbanized Pre-Columbian America (the Great Plains are a different matter). Aquaculture is a wonderful supplement--it's suggested that the founding agricultural crop in the Norte Chico region may be a flax instead of a staple food crop, and the early date of its monumental architecture may predate agriculture for food (although this is very much in debate right now). In terms of population, Tenochtitlan achieved a size greater than all but the very largest cities in Europe, and had no issues feeding its population out of the resources in the Central Mexican Valley.
It's also not necessary for trade: the vast trade networks of North America are pretty well-documented, and they continue down into the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Indeed, it's been suggested that pottery was introduced to the Mississippians via trade with Amazon tribes across the Caribbean. Waterborne transport makes a lot more sense in the Americas: the Mississippi and its tributaries provides a strong link for much of North America, and of course the Amazon region even today relies almost entirely on water transport. If you look at Andean civilizations instead, the topography makes any form of cart completely impractical, and llamas and alpacas were already domesticated for use as pack animals.
I was thinking more in terms of raw power than agriculture: before we could develop coal-fired industry it was useful to have draught animals to carry heavy loads and drive equipment.
Not an expert, but it's clearly a lack, and the correlation between variety of domesticated animals and industrialization is interesting.
However, in that entire thread, no one is saying that having large, domesticated animals wasn’t useful.
I’m not saying Diamond was right about everything, I’m saying it seems self-evident that you can get farther down the technology path, faster, if you have more power available.
Animals were a very important part of the power story in pre-industrial times.
I followed the second link and while I can't evaluate all the claims made there (many of which seem to be substantive), there are enough that are silly and transparently political so as to cast doubt on the project of "discrediting" his work. Stuff like this:
"Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel."
This kind of psychologizing looks pretty silly to me and I'm not sure what any of it has to do with the arguments made in the actual book.
Honestly these read like a list of political charges that accuse Diamond of saying bad things about indigenous people (which is sort of the opposite of his thesis) rather than a substantive critique of that book. Is there a critical response that goes deeper into the scientific merits of his claims?
I found the book an interesting meditation on the connections between land, plants and animals, the kind of society that can form as a result, and knock-on effects from that process (like the dependence of diseases on city living). The level of hostility to this work in the linked reviews seems out of proportion to its alleged deficits.
The AskAnthro comment isn't great, but has links to much better sources. The sci-hub cite I gave, though, isn't political. It opens by pointing out basic errors in Diamond's work --- his omission of agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, his just-so story about lack of domestication of animals in the Americas being a result of over-hunting. In fact, the Sluyter article seems to go out of its way not to accuse Diamond of disfavored politics, and focuses on its research and reasoning.
You can do better on this, though; for instance, it turns out there's a whole subsection of the AskHistorians wiki covering GGS, with entries observing:
* Diamond's understanding of genetic data for the human disease load during colonization is faulty
* The inability of Spanish conquistadors to hold conquered territory once captured
* That Diamond risibly oversimplifies the naivete of cultures like the Inca, which somehow spent centuries conquering an entire continent only to be left ignorant of the very concept of invaders (I liked this one because it referred to Diamond as "not even an anthropologist").
* That Diamond's understanding of the Inca empire as being absolutely controlled by Atahualpa and thus his overthrow --- which is also apparently rendered inaccurately in the book --- doomed the Incas... where was I with this sentence? At any rate, it's apparently not true.
* That the most important conquests of Central America occurred between native powers, and that colonizers had repeated false starts during them and took root mostly after wars between indigenous people had ravaged the continent.
I thought I might take a stab at summarizing everything r/AA and r/AH have to say about the book, but it'd be like summarizing Wikipedia. I own Diamond's book and have read chunks of it and remember enjoying it, but here am just reporting that among experts in these fields, it doesn't have a good reputation, even as pop science. The criticisms seem mostly procedural (and, to an extent, about turf --- Diamond's training is in hard science, not social science), not political.
Tenochtitlan was larger than almost every other contemporary city in Europe. The market alone was noted by the Spaniards who saw it to be as large as the cities they knew. And, in addition to having universal primary education (for both males and females, imagine that!), as well as more opportunities for lower classes to rise into the ranks of the elites, the city was also more cosmopolitan than most, having what we would see today as ethnic neighborhoods. At a time when the Spanish were busy trying to erase any legacy of Moors or Jews in their country.
Or maybe you'd want to consider instead the Mayans. Their astronomy was on par with--or better than--contemporary Eurasian astronomers. Their calendar is sufficiently precise, and their written legacy vast enough, that we know the chronology of successorship in polities and rulers for the Classical Maya where we struggle to even identify the existence of those same entities in contemporary Europe (although, to be fair, the Age of Migrations is responsible for a lot of that). And, personally, I think the Mayan writing system is more wonderful than anything derived from the Phoenicians or the Chinese.
But why stop with the well-known urban civilizations? Several cultures challenge conventional notions about the development of civilization. The Mogollon culture developed impressive aqueduct systems to enable farming in a desert without any evidence for a centralized authority. The quipus of the Wari and the Inca challenge the notion of writing system. Norte Chico challenges the idea that agriculture is a necessary precondition for urban civilization.
Pre-Columbian America developed very differently from the Eurasia. If you try to fit its development to a Eurasian development sequence, you will find that it doesn't match very well. But that doesn't mean it didn't develop civilization, and pretending that it does misses a wealth of fascinating advancements that they did.
Point of correction, it's the Hohokam and not the Mogollons that are known for their massive canal systems. The people inhabiting the broader Mogollon region had fairly small irrigation networks that don't really justify the term "canal".
Most archaeologists would also have some quibbles with describing Hohokam irrigation as truly decentralized, particularly in e.g. the civano phase, but it's accurate enough I guess.
Lets make it clear.... they build impressive things, and had a civilization, but they were way behind those both of europe and asia.
the Aztecs were sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli (their war god), when europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford an Cambridge.
Same with the mayans. We can discuss all day long, but their civilizations were not any more advanced than old egypt ones, and the ones in the Levantine era (Prior to the Roman period). Which were about 2080-3500 years prior.
The Spanish Inquisition was executing people up until 1826. The last 2itch was executed in England in 1716. Both hundreds of years after the fall of the Aztec Empire.
Oxford is a strange callout. It was founded in 1096. About 700 years before the enlightenment. I doubt they were teaching heliocentrism and the scientific method.
According to official records, the Spanish Inquisition tried 150 000 people, and only 2% resulted in death sentences, so that's 3 000 executions over 350 years of history.
According to Aztec records, for the consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, 84 000 people were sacrificed IN FOUR DAYS.
You can't even begin to compare the numbers. Many historians agree that the reason a small number of Spanish soldiers could conquer the big Aztec empire is because they could forge alliances with the neighbouring tribes that were completely fed up with them. The Aztec were the Nazis of their time.
My point wasn't to compare specific atrocities. You can find plenty of high death count (thousands, tens of thousands) religious massacres in Europe during this period.
My point was to show that the claim, "they had a civilization but they were way behind those both of europe and asia", because "europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford and Cambridge." is a nonsense argument.
With regard to belief in mysticism and exercising religious violence they don't seem dissimilar.
Maybe they seem more different because sacrificing 84k people at a pyramid is less familiar to us than Catholics and Protestants butchering each other in the streets and defenestrating each other.
Rome was at its most 1 Million inhabitants, but since its fall due the Asian and African invasions all cities were constrained in size and development as they needed walls and larger amounts of defensive architecture/design
When European history writes about discovery it naturally means discovery by a European. If somebody in China or India did it how would it matter to Europeans?
History is always written from a perspective. If native Americans discovered Europe then whomever did so would have been recorded in their history. They would not go “ah but the Europeans where already there so let’s forget about this feat”
Oh, they are seriously important to me. Just so you cannot say Columbus was the first is very important. And to give you your dose of pride: yes, Columbus was very important in wiping out almost all indigenous people. Change of course of history my a__e.
I totally agree with you, "discovered" meanings are two:
- as the first people to ever see it (their aboriginal folks)
- Discover to the world by the Spaniard crew captained by Columbus/financed by the spanish monarchs.
Everything else is just trying to mess with history, and if even any contact was there stablished they even didn't know for sure what american land was, even Spain wasn't totally sure if it was an extension of Asia or something of its own until one of its cartographers, the italian Américo Vespucio, determined it must be a continent of its own.
is this where tolkien got his inspiration for silmarillion? There too, earendil took a quest to find the lost paradise West over the ocean succeeding after many tribulations
There's a Donald Duck cartoon by Carl Barks called The Golden Helmet that deals with the discovery of America by the Vikings, and then Don Rosa made a follow up that brings up the Celtic theory, among others.
54 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/irish-colony-sout...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc#Welsh_Indians
* http://www.simonwinchester.com/atlantic
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Winchester
https://archive.org/details/theyalldiscovere00bola
https://www.amazon.com/discovered-America-Charles-Michael-Bo...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0QnAqQUmw 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ket_people
Fine. Far Northeastern Asian Upper Paleolithic Hunter Gatherers then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia
https://vimeo.com/288240659
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088116.The_Brendan_Voya...
If you absolutely insist on silly "comparative metrics" though, many areas of the pre-columbian Americas were home to incredibly advanced agricultural civilizations whose productivity far exceeded that of their European contemporaries. This isn't a useful perspective for academic work, but maybe it'll help you come to grips.
It's hard to create an industrialized society without them.
Even assuming "industrialized society" is the ideal, which, given our multiple ongoing ecological catastrophes, isn't necessarily a safe assumption.
In terms of agricultural resources, you don't need the plow to effectively farm the land in most of urbanized Pre-Columbian America (the Great Plains are a different matter). Aquaculture is a wonderful supplement--it's suggested that the founding agricultural crop in the Norte Chico region may be a flax instead of a staple food crop, and the early date of its monumental architecture may predate agriculture for food (although this is very much in debate right now). In terms of population, Tenochtitlan achieved a size greater than all but the very largest cities in Europe, and had no issues feeding its population out of the resources in the Central Mexican Valley.
It's also not necessary for trade: the vast trade networks of North America are pretty well-documented, and they continue down into the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Indeed, it's been suggested that pottery was introduced to the Mississippians via trade with Amazon tribes across the Caribbean. Waterborne transport makes a lot more sense in the Americas: the Mississippi and its tributaries provides a strong link for much of North America, and of course the Amazon region even today relies almost entirely on water transport. If you look at Andean civilizations instead, the topography makes any form of cart completely impractical, and llamas and alpacas were already domesticated for use as pack animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel is one controversial book on the topic.
I was thinking more in terms of raw power than agriculture: before we could develop coal-fired industry it was useful to have draught animals to carry heavy loads and drive equipment.
Not an expert, but it's clearly a lack, and the correlation between variety of domesticated animals and industrialization is interesting.
https://scihubtw.tw/https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...
However, in that entire thread, no one is saying that having large, domesticated animals wasn’t useful.
I’m not saying Diamond was right about everything, I’m saying it seems self-evident that you can get farther down the technology path, faster, if you have more power available.
Animals were a very important part of the power story in pre-industrial times.
Where am I wrong?
"Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel."
This kind of psychologizing looks pretty silly to me and I'm not sure what any of it has to do with the arguments made in the actual book.
I found the book an interesting meditation on the connections between land, plants and animals, the kind of society that can form as a result, and knock-on effects from that process (like the dependence of diseases on city living). The level of hostility to this work in the linked reviews seems out of proportion to its alleged deficits.
You can do better on this, though; for instance, it turns out there's a whole subsection of the AskHistorians wiki covering GGS, with entries observing:
* Diamond's understanding of genetic data for the human disease load during colonization is faulty
* The inability of Spanish conquistadors to hold conquered territory once captured
* That Diamond risibly oversimplifies the naivete of cultures like the Inca, which somehow spent centuries conquering an entire continent only to be left ignorant of the very concept of invaders (I liked this one because it referred to Diamond as "not even an anthropologist").
* That Diamond's understanding of the Inca empire as being absolutely controlled by Atahualpa and thus his overthrow --- which is also apparently rendered inaccurately in the book --- doomed the Incas... where was I with this sentence? At any rate, it's apparently not true.
* That the most important conquests of Central America occurred between native powers, and that colonizers had repeated false starts during them and took root mostly after wars between indigenous people had ravaged the continent.
I thought I might take a stab at summarizing everything r/AA and r/AH have to say about the book, but it'd be like summarizing Wikipedia. I own Diamond's book and have read chunks of it and remember enjoying it, but here am just reporting that among experts in these fields, it doesn't have a good reputation, even as pop science. The criticisms seem mostly procedural (and, to an extent, about turf --- Diamond's training is in hard science, not social science), not political.
Or maybe you'd want to consider instead the Mayans. Their astronomy was on par with--or better than--contemporary Eurasian astronomers. Their calendar is sufficiently precise, and their written legacy vast enough, that we know the chronology of successorship in polities and rulers for the Classical Maya where we struggle to even identify the existence of those same entities in contemporary Europe (although, to be fair, the Age of Migrations is responsible for a lot of that). And, personally, I think the Mayan writing system is more wonderful than anything derived from the Phoenicians or the Chinese.
But why stop with the well-known urban civilizations? Several cultures challenge conventional notions about the development of civilization. The Mogollon culture developed impressive aqueduct systems to enable farming in a desert without any evidence for a centralized authority. The quipus of the Wari and the Inca challenge the notion of writing system. Norte Chico challenges the idea that agriculture is a necessary precondition for urban civilization.
Pre-Columbian America developed very differently from the Eurasia. If you try to fit its development to a Eurasian development sequence, you will find that it doesn't match very well. But that doesn't mean it didn't develop civilization, and pretending that it does misses a wealth of fascinating advancements that they did.
Most archaeologists would also have some quibbles with describing Hohokam irrigation as truly decentralized, particularly in e.g. the civano phase, but it's accurate enough I guess.
the Aztecs were sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli (their war god), when europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford an Cambridge.
Same with the mayans. We can discuss all day long, but their civilizations were not any more advanced than old egypt ones, and the ones in the Levantine era (Prior to the Roman period). Which were about 2080-3500 years prior.
Oxford is a strange callout. It was founded in 1096. About 700 years before the enlightenment. I doubt they were teaching heliocentrism and the scientific method.
According to Aztec records, for the consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, 84 000 people were sacrificed IN FOUR DAYS.
You can't even begin to compare the numbers. Many historians agree that the reason a small number of Spanish soldiers could conquer the big Aztec empire is because they could forge alliances with the neighbouring tribes that were completely fed up with them. The Aztec were the Nazis of their time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
You can find plenty of sources there.
My point was to show that the claim, "they had a civilization but they were way behind those both of europe and asia", because "europeans were teaching and learning in Oxford and Cambridge." is a nonsense argument.
With regard to belief in mysticism and exercising religious violence they don't seem dissimilar.
Maybe they seem more different because sacrificing 84k people at a pyramid is less familiar to us than Catholics and Protestants butchering each other in the streets and defenestrating each other.
History is always written from a perspective. If native Americans discovered Europe then whomever did so would have been recorded in their history. They would not go “ah but the Europeans where already there so let’s forget about this feat”
- as the first people to ever see it (their aboriginal folks)
- Discover to the world by the Spaniard crew captained by Columbus/financed by the spanish monarchs.
Everything else is just trying to mess with history, and if even any contact was there stablished they even didn't know for sure what american land was, even Spain wasn't totally sure if it was an extension of Asia or something of its own until one of its cartographers, the italian Américo Vespucio, determined it must be a continent of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Helmet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Charts_of_Columbus