In all this talk about possible pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the new, I’ve gotten to wondering: how far did the ancients travel? For example-a 5th century BC Greek travellor (Pythias of Massila) is thought to have visited Scotland, and possibly Iceland. The Romans of the 1st centurt AD knew of India and China. There is evidence that the Romans visited Sweden.
How far did people travel in the ancient world?
This is a subject I’ve got an interest in. It’s more of a hobby-like interest though, so most of this is just my own personal opinion.
I don’t really think there’s anything too surprising about the examples egkelly’s given - Scotland’s not that hard to get to from the European mainland if you’re adventurous and have boats, as as for China and India, you would’ve just needed a few Romans who were willing to walk in that direction until they found new stuff. However, such locations were probably remote enough not to be seen as viable places to be conquered.
Then there are the grander claims of exploration - the old Heyderhal one about islanders zigging back and forth across the Pacific, and I remember reading about finds in Central and South America which indicated, respectively, Greek and Australian Aboriginal contact. I can buy that. All you’d need is a little boat and a whole lot of luck - sure, very very few people who set off to cross a major ocean several thousand years ago would’ve made it, but a few would’ve. Didn’t the Maya (or the Inca or the Aztec…damned if I can ever get those groups straight) portray one of their gods as being fair-skinned, with caucasian features? That would also seem to support the theory that a few intrepid explorers managed to make it halfway around the world.
Slightly off topic, but do people here think “contact” equals “discovery”? Similar to the Viking villages (12th century?) on the East coast of North America, there’s quite a bit of evidence that the Dutch had a number of shipwrecks, and even a settlement or two, on the West Australian coast in the 1600s. But the popular views are still “Columbus discovered America in 1492” and “Cook discovered Australia in 1788.” I’m sure there are other examples.
To me, the most dramatic account of prehistoric human travel comes from the Pacific.
I’ll be honest, since I’m talking about island chains and archipelagos some of the islands were within site of each other. However, there were some islands that colonizing would have required crossing more than 600 KM of open water. That is pretty impressive.
Of course, there was also trade.
The Site Bukit Tengkorak on Borneo had enough obsidian recovered that
Bukit Tengkorak is roughly the same distance from the source, Talasea, as Fiji is.
I used to think that travelers from the Old World to America in ancient times might have been fairly common, and that we didn’t know about it only because they didn’t return to record their travels.
The flaw in the theory is disease. When the Spaniards began exploring the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Indians were exposed for the first time to Old World diseases, and died in droves. (IIRC, estimates run as high as a 95% reduction in native populations from the resulting plagues.)
Now, if travelers from the Old World had appeared on American shores before, why would Native Americans have been so vulnerable to Old World diseases? Seems like they would have already had a cycle of plagues and would have developed some immunities.
I can’t remember who said it, but I think that “discovered means last discovered” is not a bad way of looking at it.
In the case of Australia, there are lots of theories about the first Europeans. People are still looking for a particular Portugese ship off Warnambool (Victoria), obviously there was trade across the Timor Strait etc., but Cook’s voyage made Australia permanently known to the rest of the world.
picmr
Some historians maintain that the Basques (possibly the best seamen of medieval europe) were fishing on the Grand banks off Nova Scotia, as long as 75 years before Columbus. As they wanted to maintain their fishing monopoly, I’m sure they were quite reluctant to talk about their discoveries.
One thing about the Vikings always puzzled me-N. America is a much nicer, warmer place to live than either Iceland or Greenland-why didn’t more people from Norway try top colonize the new World? I thought that the population pressure (not enough good land) was driving people out of Norway-why didn’t they move to Seacaucus NJ?
With their steel swords, steel-tipped arrows, axes, the stone-age amerindians didn’t stand a chance in battle with these tough Vikings!
I don’t know why the Norse settlers didn’t stay longer, or explore farther south. Homesickness, maybe?
I’ve also wondered why the contact between the Norse settlers and the native population (called “skraelings” by the Norse, I believe) didn’t result in the same sort of plagues among the natives as those caused later by contact with the Spaniards. Sort of undercuts the logic in my earlier post.
Spoke- Disease would depend on time/ when which diseases were at their peak. The diseases available to the Spanish when they travelled to the new country might not have been known to the Norse when they were zipping around. Also the population density was much greater in the areas where Spainish brought diseases than the population density in Vinland (?) where the Norse travelled.
IMO the urge to travel was greater than the need to bring back what was found or the need to move to the new land. What was there for the Norse to covet in NE America? to bring home?
Didn’t Alexander the Great conquer part of India? I don’t believe it stayed conquered for long though, probably because of the distance problem you mention above.
I recall seeing a special (NOVA or similar) on the ancient tribes of the Americas and contact with Africa. They’ve found coffee beans in sealed Egyptian sarcophagi, and strong evidence of migration from Africa to the Canary Islands, and onward to S. America. A bit of support came from an African fishing boat that was caught in a storm and ended up in South America weeks later. Only two of the crew survived, but it showed that one could cross with or without intention.
Thousands of years ago a tribe had set up a couple cities in the mountains, or were possibly spread out further in Peru/Brazil area. They were at any rate forced into their mountain strongholds by the migrating Asiatic tribes (those who had settled N. America). Those that weren’t killed or intermarried fled to the Tierra del Fuego, and the last of their descendants were possibly discovered this century, but will likely die soon. Except for the existence of the cities, a lot of that is speculative, but a likely outcome.
panama jack
spoke- asks:
Nope, it’s because “Lucky” Leif and his successors were at the end of a very long chain of rather marginal colonies that just didn’t have enough resources to support a North American colonization effort.
The medieval population of Iceland was probably a few tens of thousands (those DWEMs, despite being pre-industrial, didn’t practice proper ecological consciousness for what, after all, was essentially an Arctic island, and significantly and negatively impacted the carrying capacity of the land). I haven’t seen population figures for the Greenland colonies, but I don’t imagine that they were larger than a couple of thousand people. L’Anse aux Meadows (the only authenticated Norse site in NA, SFAIK) would have held only about 70 people, and that was probably more than Greenland could spare out of the pittance that Iceland sent (it should be noted that the weather in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap is pretty fierce, and that a goodly number of would-be colonists of Iceland, etc., likely ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic).
The Greenlanders (Greenlendings?) didn’t give up on North America, even after deciding that the effort to colonize it couldn’t be made or wasn’t worth it. They definitely went there for ship’s timber as late as 1189, and there are allusions to what might be references to their going to Labrador as late as the mid-14th century. Overstrained resources, worsening climate, and (possibly) a fundamentalist religious reaction to the former in Greenland put paid to the Greenland colonies in the 15th century. Norway did, however, try to put forth a claim (shortly after it achieved indepedence from Sweden) to Greenland on the theory that Norse-speaking people had been there before anyone else.
One of the most obvious pre-columbian events is the demarcation of the New World by the pope that gave Brazil to Portugal. There seems to be reason to believe that Portugal was in the Amazon delta islands, when they were in the Azores, but hushed it up. The distance is the smallest between land masses, and the currents are favorable for Africa to S.A. contact from Phoenecian times. Without gold, or the magic fraud of “India” that Columbus was pushing, the islands were of no practical use.
Why didn’t the Vikings’ diseases spread to the rest of the native population? North America wasn’t densely populated enough to permit disease to spread beyond the neighborhood where the Vikings landed. The Vikings didn’t stay long enough or travel widely enough in North America to have a permanent effect on the disease pool.
Why didn’t the Vikings colononize the warmer bits of North America? Because it was too damn hard. It’s not like you could come ashore, toss some seeds into virgin untouched wilderness, and then sit back and wait for the crops to grow. You needed to have reliable material support from the home country to make it through the first hard years, and that’s something the Vikings didn’t have. The distances involved were just too great for the time.
Weren’t the Vikings hardy pioneers, used to living on next to nothing in the wilderness? No. The Vikings were pretty clueless about making farms out of virgin wilderness (as were the first English, Spanish, French, etc. settlers who followed centuries later.) In particular, the Vikings were accustomed to the natural pastureland of Iceland. They would have dismissed the warmer bits of North America as an uninhabitable wilderness of trees and brambles.
So you see, the question isn’t “Why didn’t the Vikings’ North American colony succeed?” It’s “Why would you expect the Vikings to attempt a colony in North America in the first place?”
I don’t know about you, but I can walk 25 miles in a day along a semi-treeless coastline, or wooded areas without human trails, just animal runs.
To me that means anyone stubborn enough, and without too specific dietary tastes, could cross a continent in a couple of years. Some people are doing just that right now.
In terms of boats, the simple skin boats of St. Brendan took him to the Americas from Ireland. That “technology” was easily matched a couple of millenia earlier.
So the world has always been a small place.
I’m not sure I buy that explanation. My understanding is that North America was pretty densely populated until the diseases brought by the Spanish wiped them out. (Obviously, they were densely populated enough for those Spanish-borne diseases to spread.)
Maybe the Vikings just didn’t happen to bring any nasty germs with them. (Is that a possibility?) I do know that one of Cortez’s men came down with smallpox while in Mexico (which promptly caused an epidemic among the Aztecs), so obviously, the the Spaniards did bring disease with them onto their ships.
According to my university-level American History textbook, which I think we can cunt on to give the most widely accepted figures, the population of the Western Hemisphere in 1492 was 50 million; only 4 million of those were living in what is now the United States. Population density in North Amertica was signifigantly lower than in Mesoamerica.
There are lots of tantalizing hints about pre-Columbian contact, but there is no firm evidence. (No cities that are in any way obviously African!) Certainly, individuals could and did travel long distances. However, it is unlikely that those travelers had any real effect; it is diffucult to see how history would have been much different if Lief’s ship had sunk. The only possuble exception to this is a few hints of Shanh (chinese) contacts with the Olmec culture in Veracruz. There are enough similarities between the two gruops to suggest that if contact did occur there was a signifigant exchange of culture, and thus some sort of prolonged contact. However, there are not so many similarities that pure coincidence can be ruled out; everyone is waiting for a smoking gun.
Maybe, but the population was at least dense enough for Spanish-borne diseases to spread through the New World. Why not Viking-borne diseases? Just trying to puzzle this one out.
Fortunately, the Vikings recorded some of their American exploits in the sagas. THat and archeologiical evidence show that the the reason the Vikings did not colonize North America was because it was already taken. The indians outnumbered them vastly and were armed.
The Vikings wanted to spend more time on Vinland because of the Wine and Nuts that they found there. These were highly valuable to them. But as was pointed out, they were stretched pretty thin.
However, they did very well in Russia where they were known as the *Rus[/] and became the ruling class. The name “Russia” is based on the Vikings.
spoke- asks:
Basically, because the Vikings weren’t very sick, weren’t very numerous, and didn’t stay very long.
If a few dozen Spaniards had stayed on Hispaniola for a few years, and then said, “Aww, the heck with this place” and gone home, odds are no diseases would have been transmitted to the various American peoples. Viruses are (generally; not universally) relative fragile constructs that need to be transmitted from host to host more-or-less directly (sneezing on somebody can work). Bacteria are hardier, but still need to infect somebody every once in a while in order to reproduce and repair damage to themselves.
We hear stories of bacteria sporulating for centuries, or viruses being crystallized and stuck on a shelf for years, whilst still retaining their effectiveness, but we should recall that these stories are like hearing of a 30-year-old cat, or a 120-year-old human – sure, such things happen, but they’re by no means the norm.
As for the general healh angle: remember that the Vikings who came to NA were from the far end of a progressively narrowing chain of populations, growing sparser and more isolated – not the environment conducive to picking up the new plagues from the heartland (contrawise, the Icelanders were in a bit of immunologically virgin population mode themselves). There probably just weren’t any smallpox viruses in Greenland.
Erroneous wrote:
IIRC, Thor Heyerdahl set off on a balsa raft (“Kon-Tiki”) from Peru and made it across quite a bit of the Pacific (Polynesia). Of course, the sample size leaves something to be desired, but still - it might not call for such extreme luck. The book (called “Kon-Tiki”, hardly a surprise) is highly recommended, BTW. As for Thor Heyerdahl himself - his anthopology may be unconventional, but he’s not afraid of backing his words up with action. On a later expedition, he crossed the Atlantic in a reed boat (although he needed two attempts to get this right).
I know - it helps if you know where the streams are, but still…