Did nobody read my first post in this thread? I mentioned the colonization of the Pacific. Most of the pacific islands were populated by about 2500 years ago. The descendants of the Lapita Cultural Complex are the ones who essentially started the colonization of the Pacific, and they were able to do so without maps, clocks, magnets or any other “modern aid”. What they could do was read the stars and the currents and when a boat set out to find a new island, it appears that the success rate was pretty good. Also, the first Europeans to come into contact with Pacific Islanders were quite impressed with their navigational skills.
adam yax-
Yeah, I would be surprised to learn that Polynesians didn’t make it to the New World. Surely at least some of them must have drifted over at some point. I’m guessing those who did were either killed, or were bred out of existence, upon reaching the Americas.
Old Irish legends speak of a St. brendan (AKA “the Bold”) who made a voyage across the Atlantic in CA 900 AD. It is known that irish monks inhabited Iceland BEFORE the Vikings arrived.
Another question-why don’t we read of Chinese explorers going west to Europe?
Not that they count as “ancients”, but China has a long history of isolationism.
From Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:
picmr
I believe the Olmecs had a great many stone figurines that proved other peoples made contact.
Many had African or Arab features, and some were said to be Asian (although many SA Indians naturally have various Asian features from the first to cross the Alaskan land bridge.
Spoke -To expand on Akatsukami’s post, the Spanish landed (eventually) in the most densely populated part of North America, Mexico, while the Vikings landed in one of the less populated areas. To put it in contemporary terms, the Spanish landed in New York City, while the Vikings landed in North Dakota. It was much easier for the Spanish to spread diseases in a densely populated area.
The Spanish stayed a long time, and traveled widely over the continent. The Vikings only stayed a few years, and didn’t travel far on foot. They may have done some recon by boat down the coast, but this gave them little chance to meet the natives and spread disease.
egkelley - The Chinese did explore to the west, reaching the east coast of Africa in the mid 14th century (if I remember correctly.) They would have surely have made it around the Horn and eventually to Europe had the explorations not been forbidden by Imperial edict. See picmr’s post.
Science News had an article on who left Africa first. Conventional theory has H erectus made the first move some million years ago. Newly discovered fossils have led others to say that H ergaster started roaming out about 1.7 million years ago. [Skulls and stone artifacts were found in Georgia [not Atlanta, but the Republic of…]. Theorists conclude that the earlier migrants were searching for larger hunting territories and relief from Africa’s tropical diseases. H ergaster was taller and therefore required high quality protein sources - in other words meat. A Harvard anthoropologist says that their “stunningly” small brain for body size probably meant that they moved for reasons other than burgeoning intelligence or toolmaking skills… probably, I might add, to avoid tropical diseases as well.
An interesting note, no one mentioned curiosity as a motivator to roam…
I know this is an old thread, but this is a pretty interesting development.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/nat/newsnat-19jul2000-28.htm
What it says, for those of you who don’t follow links for whatever reason, is that some guy’s found structures on the Northern Australian coast that he thinks are Phoenician in origin, from about 3000 years ago.
I really think there’s going to be a major rethinking of how far ancient civilisations spread around the world, sometime soon.
Fascinating stuff. Of course it doesn’t state what this man’s credentials are. It might not be that old, it might be older, it might not be phonecian. But, no matter what they find, it should be quite enlightening.
Why didn’t the Vikings stay in North America?
The sagas are clear. The skraelings kicked them out. Let’s put it this way. What would the Vikings have done if a boatload of Aztecs tryed to set up a village on Iceland? They’d have whacked them. The indians did the same thing.
The later European colonies fared no better. They kept starving to death, being attacked by fed-up indians, dying of disease. The difference is that the Europeans kept coming. And they had guns, ships, joint-stock companies, and smallpox.
Why didn’t the Vikings/other earlier explorers infect the Indians? Well, you have to have a viable disease pool. If you only have one guy on a boat, and he’s got smallpox, he’s either going to get better and not be infectious (smallpox only happens once, like chicken pox), or he’s going to die. Either way, he’s probably going to get over it before he infects someone else. Same with a small group…almost all the diseases will burn out over the ocean voyages, meaning that the group is clean before they have extensive contact with indians.
But the later contacts were different. People knew where North America was, they kept coming, new ships kept ariving, and they traveled faster with better ships. So the chances of each disease making the jump across the ocean may have only been one in a thousand per immigrant, but when you have thousands of immigrants it adds up.
Also, pre-columbian north america had a much denser population than it did at the time of the 13 colonies, because of the diseases. The pilgrims settled in an abandoned indian farming village. Why was it abandoned? All of them had died of some disease a few years ago, all except Squanto who was living with a neighboring tribe. He adopted the pilgrims because they were living in his home village!
And remember that most pre-columbian north american indians were farmers, not hunter-gatherers. Disease shattered the farming societies, many of them gave up farming because the population had collapsed and there were so many abandoned farms it made no sense to farm when you could hunt and gather instead. Horses allowed the previously almost uninhabited great plains to be colonized…whole tribes gave up being farmers to become horse-riding buffalo hunters.
Now, yes, it is possible to walk across north america in a few years. It is possible to sail across the atlantic in an open boat. But the trouble with walking across pre-columbian america was that lots of people already lived there. I bet most of them would be friendly and just want to say hello to a strange visitor. Maybe one in a hundred would figure that strangers needed killing. How far could you get with that attitude? And remember that most of the Mississippi valley is farms, not wilderness like it was when the pioneers were brushing aside the drastically reduced indian population. How far will you get before a local equivalent of a sherrif arrests you for vagrancy?
And yes, you can cross the ocean in an open boat…if you know where you’re going. I don’t think many fishermen decided to just sail in a straight line and hope they hit land somewhere…think about the early sailors, how many of them starved to death in the middle of the ocean. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you’re going to do it often.
Also…the Chinese built a huge fleet of dozens of ships that sailed to africa several times in the 1400s, just when Henry the Navigator was establishing the primitive European age of exploration. Tapestries show the Admiral presenting the Emperor with giraffes! Chinese ship-building was much more advanced, the centralized government had access to dozens or hundreds of times the resources of any European kingdom. They could easily have sailed to Europe, or North America (same way the Russians did…up Siberia, across to Alaska, and down the pacific coast).
But the Beauracracy shut the whole project down, since China was doing great on its own, it was the center of the universe, what could trade do but shake things up? Trade would have brought change, and the ministers would have lost their position. So ship-building was forbidden, trade was restricted, and the Chinese age of Exploration was shut down in its prime.