I was going to make this “areas lacking human habitation”, but then I thought actually, that could be deemed a good thing.
What places on Earth are not, nor have ever (as far as is known) been inhabited by humans?
Caveat: Humans have to have been able to live there, in large groups, in that time. So the North Pole could count now, as we’re just about capable of having a very small “town” of people living up there, with buildings and airlifted supplies and so on, but this would be out of the question not so long ago.
BTW, it’s not feasible to live at the North Pole for any length of time in a structured environment as you describe. All ice floes. And submarines have a history of surfacing at the Pole just so the crews can take some Happy Snaps for the relatives back home.
How “large” is large? I’ve heard a figure of 1000 quoted for the winter population of Antarctica.
Other possibilities: Heard and McDonald Islands (Australia) and Auckland Islands (New Zealand). They’re all fairly inhospitable spots which have seen short-lived attempts at permanent habitation.
Probably parts of highland New Guinea and Irian Jaya too.
Not really. It is an area that hasn’t been inhabited in the last 50 years.
There are plenty of rainforest areas on the Earth that are uninhabited simply because rainforest isn’t a a viable place to make a living. If the areas won’t support swidden agriculture or the locals simply never invented agriculture then it’s a safe bet that only the ranges of any area of rainforest is inhabited.
But that is a far cry from saying it was never inhabited. This is best demonstrated by the Tasmanian rainforests that have been totally uninhabited for the last 200 years. Not so long ago it was assumed that those regions have never been inhabited. Then someone stumbled onto a rock shelf right in the middle of the wilderness with rock paintings. People had lived there, and further archaeological finds confirmed that the areas had been inhabited but were abandoned in a neat pattern as the climate became warmer and wetter allowing the rainforest to spread.
Which highlights just how impossible this quetsion is to answer. How long does the time frame need to be? Are we allowed to include large chunks of Tasmania in the answer because they haven’t been inhabited for the last 500 years? What about those sections that haven’t been inhabited for 10, 000 years?
And of course once we get beyond 10, 000 years it’s pretty much impossible to say with any confidence whether an area was inhabited by humans. I’d bet good money that the Foja mountains were inhabited 10, 00 years ago and abandoned at the end of the ice age, but it’s impossible to prove at this stage. So do we include them or not?
Well they’re your rules, but you do realise that by using this criterion you are pretty much embracing all the world outside of cropping regions and mining towns?
Let’s assume that you allow us to extend our cell to as much as 100 miles from the nearest population centre. You are still saying that something like 95% of Australia is and always has been uninhabited.
Like I say, it’s your rules, but are you sure that you really want to be told that most of Australia, 60% of North Africa and probably 30% of the US are areas without human habitation?
Like I say, they’re your rules. Just be aware that you will be drastically oversampling remote and third world areas simply because remote and third world areas aren’t as intensively studied.
In the pre-industrial age the two terms were essentially synonymous. If it could support a population it did so. So if that is your criterion then the answer is that there were basically no uninhabited areas on Earth 300 years ago. Some areas became uninhabited by your criteria after the invention of modern transport or after colonisation by European powers, but no areas were viable places for people to establish large towns that didn’t have large towns.
I’m having real difficulty here understanding what you are actually looking for. People are like any other species. We expand our population to match the energetic limit of the environment. We may alter the environment by technology, but then we simply expand to match that new limit. It’s only been in the last 100 years that this hasn’t held true. Prior to that there essentially were no areas where the technology of the time could viably support large towns that didn’t have large towns. Arguably we might be able include those few regions that European settlers were still in the process of occupying, and we could include a few game reserves and parks like the New Forest, but that;s it. Certainly less than 1/100th of a percent of the world land cover
So if we take a literal reading that you want areas that have could have supported large towns with the technology of the time but never did then the answer is that there are none.
Yep, that was it, really. I was assuming there were none, mainly for the expanding reasons you put - we as a species have always inhabited pretty much right up to the limit of where we could inhabit. My question was just to make sure, really, though i’ve often seen questions I felt sure of the answer and was proved wrong.
The slopes and peaks of the tallest mountains - Everest, K2, Dinali, etc. - are uninhabitable, by the OP’s parameters. “Nice place(s) to visit, but I wouldn’t want to - and couldn’t - live there.”
There were some isolated islands that were only inhabited in the last few centuries when European sailors reached them, like the Galapagos, Madeira, Mauritius, the Falklands, the Cape Verdes, the Azores, Pitcairn Island, and St. Helena. New Zealand was probably uninhabited until around 1200 AD, and there are lots of other islands in the Pacific that were uninhabited until the Polynesians got there. Lots of places on the northern Canadian archipelago were never inhabited, but those places are comparable to Antarctica, not even Inuit people could live there. There are still quite a few tiny little uninhabited islands today, but they are invariably uninhabitable because they have no source of water. You can’t live on one of those cartoon islands with one rock and one palm tree because you’d die of thirst.
So if you’d asked this question 1000 years ago there would have been quite a few habitable but uninhabited islands, New Zealand being the prize, but none as of 200 years ago.
By the criteria of the OP there wouldn’t have been.
Firstly If you couldn’t reach an island with the technolgy of the day (ie you would die of thirst sailing around looking for it) then the island was habitable.
Secondly New Zealand wasn’t inhabited even 200 years ago ago by the standards laid out inthe OP. No town even approached 5000 people. Only European technology permitted the presence of large town in New Zealand. Since we are specifically excluding areas that couldn’t support large towns with the technology available we can’t include the South Pacific Islands.
I don’t think that Pitcairn even qualifies as inhabited today.
