I built this amazing machine: time-travel plus travel to alternate timelines. With it, I go to our late 8th/ early 9th century Carolingian empire, and kidnap about 15,000 people from the roads when nobody’s looking.
I transport them to an alternate 9th century North America, in a timeline identical to ours, except nobody ever came across the land bridge way back when. (And the Vikings never did their Vinland vacation) Our Carolingians have the place to themselves! In late 15th and early 16 centuries, Columbus etc make contact. What do they find?
The Carolingians are a random mix. The only thing in common is that they were engaged in some travel - not necessarily very far (before the kidnap, anyway…). Some of them are farmers nabbed with carts of wheat, hops, rye - so European grains make it across. Some were nabbed inclusive of horses.
So, do they manage to replicate their home civilization? Do they surpass it, or stay stuck? I imagine feudalism is out to a large extent because of the vast available acreage, and small available labor pool.
They would be forced to eat the small amount of seed with them, then die. (Unless they were landed near a coast or productive river, and knew how/were equipped to catch fish and such.)
Yeah. An uninhabited North America has a) no maize (maize was created by artificial selection by generations of Native Americans) and likely an absence of other useful plants like tomatos and potatoes which were also at least improved, if not created by the Natives, and b) a lot of large mammal predators - the ones that were killed off by the Natives directly or indirectly. It’s darn difficult to move to a new land and survive. For comparison, in Massachusetts, the Mayflower bunch moved to a land where they could move into abandoned houses, and start using recently abandoned fields, and had guns and a helpful guide who explained how to survive - and still about half of them died in the first winter.
They would also have to know how to recognize ore deposits (and be near them) and know how to smelt out the usable metals. And have the tools to mine that ore. And also have nearby coal mines or know how to make charcoal (which is a full-time job requiring specal skills.) And have a source for the right kinds of clays to build kilns and forges and smelters. And the skills to build them. Better there are forests close to the iron and coal mines. And those productive rivers. Better get those industries up and running before the few iron tool you have with you run out. Maybe–if you are lucky–some random genius in your group will quickly reinvent the lost art of flint knapping. Then maybe you can do some of your mining and forest-cutting with sharp rocks.
No, it takes a lot of villages to maintain a technological civilization–even if that “technology” is iron hand tools.
They would be screwed.
So it’s established. You’re gonna drop them with some grain. Any draft animals (apart from a handful of horsies?), iron ingots, maybe a few kegs of gunpowder…or are we starting from scratch with some basic know-how in unexplored territory? You gonna give any hints about where the best sources of coal, iron, copper, and gold are? Maybe a map so they can get an idea of how to get there and how far away or are they going in blind? It would be interesting to see whether and how long it would take to domesticate bison into draft critters.
Are you grabbing random travelers? Or are you deliberately shooting for a planned ratio of men and women? Are you including sheep? Cows?
How much effort are you putting into choosing a location, climate, and season of arrival? That will determine how much effort has to be put into subsistence.
As to re-creating civilization, knowing that there is a way to make steel is not the same thing as being able to find iron ore, mine iron ore, smelt iron, and create steel. As a for instance. But they’ll definitely want to create towns in order to have other people nearby to rely on. And 15,000 people will need to be spread between many towns, just to keep the sewage problem manageable.
If there is no maize, etc., does that mean that horses and mastodons haven’t been hunted to extinction? I don’t think buffaloes are likely to be domesticated, not while they’re present in large numbers. They’re easier to hunt than to raise.
They’re going to want to replicate their home civilization, as much as they can, just because that’s the way people are. Are there any nobility, town elders, or clerics included, because they’d be expected to take a leadership role.
So whether they survive will depend mostly on initial conditions and on the competence and cooperation of the leaders. Also on the mix of skills in the snatched population.
Whether they re-create their technology will depend partly on whether they can keep the idea of their old technology alive for enough generations. And whether they have enough surplus to allow enough people to experiment with recreating the tech.
Will they be dropped off in one group, so that they’re all aware of each other? I can see having problems if smaller groups set up different systems of coping and then meet each other and argue or compete.
Personally, I’d recommend snatching at least one set of millstones, with a carpenter group that knows how to build a mill. Otherwise the women will spend a huge amount of time at the daily grind with hand grind stones. Also, snatch a good anvil. if nothing else, it makes a good example of the tech they should be shooting for.
ETA: Do 9th century Carolingians use chimneys?
Nope. Per wikipedia, home chimneys were later.
Stirrups were in use, though.
Well, the animals would have no fear of man.
So initially, there would be plenty to eat. But there would be a full suite of megafauna, also with no fear of man. I doubt they’d start farming, hunting and fishing would be too easy in the first century or two. Farming is too much work. They might see value in strong places to live though. So basically, hunter-gatherers with some stone nuraghes and churches or similar.
I agree. A farming economy doesn’t just happen. You have to spend a long time building one up until you get a self-sustaining system that can feed an ongoing population. Take a large group of people from an established farming economy and dump them into a wilderness and they’re going to die before they can rebuild a new farming economy.
And they’re not going to be able to survive by switching to hunting and gathering either. That’s also a large set of skills - and skills which medieval European farmers aren’t going to have. This is especially true if you move them to a new continent where they won’t know the local plants and animals.
Most people are adapted to living in their own environment; they grew up in that environment and they learned how to avoid dangers and obtain food and other necessities in that environment. And that environment has been adapted to their use.
Throw a group into a different environment - even one which is capable of sustaining life - and they’re not going to know how things work. If they’re lucky, there will be locals who can show them the local rules for survival. If not, they’re probably going to die.
If they are left off where the weather is decent, in the nut tree forests, somewhere not too far from water rich with fish or shellfish, and other game that mainly unskilled hunters can still bring down, they have some chance of developing stone age technology. Producing any kind of metal is out of the question for years and years, and only if they thrive. The metal they’ve brought with them won’t last forever either. If they can plant some of their seed and are smart enough not to eat all they produce then maybe they can duplicate farming as they once knew it, but I think that’s unlikely, they’ll have to develop agriculture with local plants if they can figure how to do that.
Just like the native Americans in our timeline there will be bison. If they aren’t too far from bison herds, if they can develop stone points and spheres, which is probably within their skill set, and they have some knowledge of hunting they could have a good supply of meat, hides, bones, etc. But first they would have had to survive up the point where they can develop all those skills, and that might be tough to do depending on where they are and how things are going.
Remember, when the native Americans first came here they were already experienced in the environment they migrated to initially. Our Carolingians will be scared to death, rapidly using up whatever food they had, and the few of them that keep their heads would have to organize people to build shelters, find fresh water, and start looking for something to eat.
No gunpowder for Carolingians. No deliberate gender balance, but not grossly unbalanced. There’s more than a couple poachers in the bunch. No millstones.
I would think a middle age civilization is not that incredibly hard to establish, but clearly I underestimated the challenge.
Well I don’t see how they could recreate the Carolingian civilization since they would be in an entirely new environment, but people lived in the Americas long before there were domesticated crops and animals and metal and such. Humans are quite resourceful, and 15,000 of them (a good start!) would almost certainly survive and build a new culture. It would be funny, in fact, if they did so well that their sailing ships eventually discovered Europe, and, along with their advanced technology, decimated the natives and established a new empire.
Middle Ages civilization features a lot of specializations - certainly not as many as we have, but still enough that even a few thousand people wouldn’t have all the skills necessary (trade in the Carolingian era was important - the empire traded with the Muslim civilization and the Byzantines for stuff that they couldn’t make themselves).
Yes, but the people who historically settled the Americas were nomads who were experienced at hunting and gathering. They had the skills for living off of virgin land.
Medieval farmers don’t have those skills. They’re no more used to living off the land than a group of twenty-first century office workers are.
Guilds kept their secrets within the guilds. You learned by apprenticing. The guilds networked with other guilds.
Barrel makers didn’t cut down trees and form lumber. They didn’t smith the metal, although they might have made hoops from metal stock.
Blacksmiths didn’t smelt iron, they only worked it. A blacksmith could form a plowshare, but then a carpenter would work the wood to make the plow. The horse collar spread through Europe between the 10th and 12th century, so someone better have brought field oxen - fertile ones - in order to pull those plows.
“Poachers” seems to assume legalities not in evidence. Hunters, I’d expect: poachers, not so much.
First, they’re going to regress to stone-using Hunter Gatherers in a couple generations. But if they culturally preserve the idea of agriculture, or manage to retain aspects of it, even as stone tool users, they should return to full-fledged agriculture a lot sooner, and possibly build up their numbers quite quickly. They should retain literacy, which would help. Especially if we’re kidnapping people from the roads, which are likely to skew to more non-peasants than some more completely random population sampling method.
Just in time to be killed en masse by diseases when the Europeans come, just like the real Native Americans. Since neither measles nor smallpox were endemic in the Carolignian Empire.
An awful lot depends upon where you drop them off. If you leave them in Alaska as if they’d just come over the land bridge then they freeze to death the very first Winter. If you drop them on the coast of SC or GA then I think they’d survive all right. There’s just a shipload of game right there, none of which has learned to be frightened of humans. And of course you could easily live on the fish and seaweed if you needed to. Here’s a list of the native wild edible plants. It looks like a fairly good diet was possible. If they could get enough wheat going to supplement that would be helpful. It would also be great if they had brought along some rice.
To the best of my knowledge there were never any bears in that area, so they’d just need to watch out for the rare alligator in the Summer time and an occasional cougar or bobcat. They might have had wolves, but I remember seeing that coyotes were new to the area.
NC is a little colder in Winter, so not the best choice to start out, but the mountains are closer to the ocean, so you’d speed up finding metals by a generation or two. No question they’d be making do with stones for the first little while though.
Overall though I don’t underestimate them. Humans of the past were not stupid, they invented all the bases upon which our technologies were built. Many of those leaps of understanding were harder than our later refinements. There will be geniuses among them, as well as the average folks.
Another reason SC/GA coast is good - there is lots of soft pine for them to build shelters with. It would be relatively easy to stack a bunch of coastal pines into a small cabin, and a source of clay for siding is never far off.