Excellent point of another plant from the Americas. There are quite a few varieties of potato – an enormous number, if memory serves. I don’t know much about potato breeding, but I feel pretty certain that such a large number of native varieties could only exist because of human breeding of them. For all I know the large edible potato we know might only exist, like corn, because of human intervention. I suspect it wasn’t just that The Spaniards saw the locals eating them – I think that the locals were probably responsible for the plant as we know it being there in the first place.
Certainly its impact was enormous. The potato grew easily in sandy European soil and quickly became part of the diet of the peasants. It was nutritious and vitamin-packed. And when the Potato Blight struck Ireland, the peasants had become so dependent upon them (for a variety of complex reasons) that it was a major catastrophe.
You’ve got it backwards – hemp is an Old World plant. It was used as a drug there, too, but I seriously doubt that it was smoked before the example of tobacco from the New World gave the idea.
I’ve smoked a pipe with an Iroquois chief. They do make up their own mixes – it’s not pure tobacco. But I don’t think drugs (apart from those in tobacco) play a part in this.
Writing that response made me check out the Wikipedia article on smoking. The article claims that smoking and the use of the hookah* predate the European discovery of America. I report this with some suspicion, because I’ve never encountered any such claims or items in books, museums, or reading before this. And it doesn’t help that one of the sources of these claims was published by “Reaktion Books” . I’ll have to look into this further.
Whatever the case turns out to be, it was Europeans who introduced marijuana to the Americans, not vice versa.
*and I note that the Wikipedia sarticle on the Hookah places its invention well after the discovery of America:
Subjugation of Native Americans was the gateway drug for the importation of African slaves, so it’s possible that without that stepping stone, it would have been harder and taken longer for Europeans to start enslaving blacks.
Jared Diamond’s Collapse has an interesting chapter on the Norse in Greenland as well as their limited activity in what they called Markland and Vinland (parts of North America). Their naval technology wasn’t sufficient to keep a steady stream of supplies coming their Greenland colony, so they didn’t have enough iron weapons to give them an advantage in fighting the natives in Greenland. They were just plain outnumbered by the natives in North America proper.
Initial Norse colonies in North America proper would probably have had to be more or less autonomous, with limited access to supplies from traders from Norway. I think that colonies would eventually take hold and prosper. Chances are good that a Vinland colony would be independent of Norway, because it would be too far away to govern effectively. Regardless, increased desire for trade between Vinland and Europe would be a driving force in the development of new sailing technologies.
I won’t hazard a guess as to whether any other European nations would be in any position to try to claim part of the New World for themselves. Would they have had to sail along the northern route the Norse took, or could they cut across the Atlantic with the ships they had in the 1100s or 1200s? Would the Norse block other nations from sending colonists through their northern waters to keep the riches of Vinland for themselves?
The Americas might be more culturally connected to Europe. The native Americans might have been subsumed by European settlers but they did exist and provided an example of a non-European culture. Without them, Europe would have been pretty much the only cultural influence in the Americas. As a result, the Americas would essentially be an offshoot of Europe rather than having a distinct character of its own.
Most of the early colonies starved because they weren’t colonies, they were trying to collect gold. With the example of the flood of gold from Mesoamerica, everyone wanted in.
With no native humans, gold wouldn’t have been a major impetus for colonization, because all the gold the spanish stole had been produced by the indigenous people. The spanish eventually took over the gold mines, but these were gold mines that already existed. All the prospecting had already been done. Look at the California gold rush–it happened hundreds of years after colonization, simply because the indigenous Californians didn’t have an existing gold extraction infrastructure.
So without gold, there’s no rush to colonize. Without native crops, farming colonies would have lots of trouble. The Pilgrims set up their colony on top of an existing Indian village that had been wiped out by disease, and famously appropriated buried maize stores.
But without native resistance, colonists wouldn’t have to search for empty places for their first footholds. And the Norse colonies would have been much more successful. So a trickle of Northern European colonists would have been going on since the early 1000s. Or even earlier. There could have been any number of unrecorded landings in North America since the Classical Era, they just never made it back home and were either wiped out or absorbed into the existing population. Without an existing population there might have been colonies that survived, although ships blown off course wouldn’t have had many women.
But the early success of the Northern European route shows why none of this could have happened in the first place, because North America was in continuous contact with the Old World via the Northern Asian route. Northern Asian populations migrated across the Bering Straits, and there’s very strong evidence that there were several waves of migration. Eskimos for instance are recent migrants to the Americas, and are found on both sides of the Bering Straits. The Russians colonized Alaska by colonizing the Russian Far East and just crossing the Straits.
Of course, Northern Asia was very lightly populated, even though China, Manchuria, Mongolia and Japan were right next door. But it seems pretty much impossible for there to be no migration across Beringia into North America. So for your What If scenario you’d have to have some plausible explanation for why nobody ever did.
To what extent did Australian aborigonies affect European colonization of that land? I’m sorry to say I’m fairly ignernt of Australian history apart from it’s being entirely peopled with criminals (according to someone I used to work with). My impression is that they generally kept themselves to themselves, but that’s probably not true. Did they facilitate Whitey’s conquest in ways similar to the Native American?
That’s an excellent question. I’m pretty ignorant of Australian aborigines and their culture as well (apart from mythology). I have gotten the impression that they were much more nomadic, and didn’t do farming – although I might be completely wrong.
American indians, despite the image of “Nomadic Hunters”, were, especially in the east, builders of villages with large fixed structures, and did quite a bit of farming. That’s why the Europeans were able to move into their cleared land (after the Plagues) and to use their stored grain. My mental image of Australian natives doesn’t include any of these things. How correct is that? Did they even make pottery?
Around 162,000 convicts were transported in the period 1788 - 1868, by then Australia’s population stood at around one million. So “entirely peopled with criminals” was a long war off being correct then. Convicts were probably not even in a majority after 1820. More people immigrated to Australia in 2009 than were ever transported.
Aboriginal assistance was important during the inland exploration phase. Those expeditions who travelled without contact/support of the locals tended often had adverse outcomes. During the settlement phase White/Aboriginal relationship would have been closer to the conflict and displacement seen elsewhere.
There is some evidence of free standing aboriginal dwellings around rich fishing or birdlife areas where trapping was practiced. These are more likely to be seasonal than permanent. There is little evidence of food storage in aboriginal culture. I am not aware of any fired pottery being produced, I guess clay lined bags would be possible.
The aboriginals did not domesticate animals (except the dingo), though, to be fair, there weren’t any obvious candidates for domestication.
There were species of grasses that have similar potential to the wheat/barley/rye/corn precursors e.g. the various Mitchell Grassesbut there is no evidence for aboriginals sowing crops, let alone selective breeding.
OK, name a few large successful land mammal species that have gone extinct by the hand of man since 1500. I can think of the Aurochs, and quite a few subspecies. There’s the Bluebuck, but it was already fairly rare when Europeans first encountered it. Schomburgk’s Deer is a maybe (we’re not entirely sure it’s extinct, or what caused it’s extinction, or how successful it was). There are a few other mammals where there’s considerable argument over whether it’s a species or subspecies, and a number of those were always known to be rare- the Saudi Gazelle being a example. Of course you said “near-extinction” and humans have certainly done that- NA Bison is a perfect example.
Max the Immortal may be right about the Vinlanders going the way of the Greenlanders. OTOH, Vinland was much more temperate. So, it’s a maybe.
I think that maize, tobacco, and maybe potatoes would never have been cultivated. Cotton was also an old world crop, grown in the Indus area some 5K years ago. Spread to China and Egypt. I think no cocoa. We’d have yams, but maybe no sweet potatoes. Thus Polynesia might have not occured as such.
wiki “Historians estimate that between 11 and 18 million Black Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert between 650 and 1900,[8][9][10] compared to 9.4 to 14 million Africans brought to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade[11] from 15th century to the early 19th century.” Slave raids into Africa started before Columbus. And the Romans were pretty hot on slave trading too.
I’m talking about the trans-Atlantic importation of millions of African people to the New World. It’s nice and all the Arabs had slaves too and all, but I’m not talking about small-scale slavetrading between warring neighbors. I’m talking something quite different.
Jared Diamond clearly documents in “Guns Germs and Steel” how virtually every fruit and vegetable we know today started out as something much different and less edible before humans cultivated it for consumption over many centuries. I use the word “cultivated” loosely since the natural selection process typically predated agriculture.
Therefore, with no humans in the New World, there would be no potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, tomatoes, chilies, strawberries, peanuts, cashews, chocolate, vanilla or pineapples.
Early in this thread another was also briefly mentioned that I would like to clarify. Not long after the first human migrations to North and South America, many animal species went extinct, including the dire wolf, cave lion, giant beaver, ground sloth, smilodon, mammoth, and American versions of the mastadon, camel, horse and lion. These species had survived ice ages and other natural catastrophes so it’s reasonable to assume they were hunted to extinction by humans. Without Amerinds, these and other species would have abounded when Europeans landed. They might have been sufficient to scare off the Norse as well.