Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Dr. Jerrold Coe
Feb 6, 2021

Is it me?

Desert Bus posted:

I recced it to ArmTheHomeless cause he linked your blog to me because I am a giant book nerd. Hard to remember who has posted where about what at this point lol. I didn't realize Gutter Phoenix was MIA, that thread moves so slow :(

I have far too many old UFO/paranormal paperbacks I still need to read. Many of them just cut and paste the same old stories over and over, which can be fun to track especially when some writers (Brad Steiger, Warren Smith) like to spice things up and change details to be spookier

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Desert Bus
May 9, 2004

Take 1 tablet by mouth daily.

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

I have far too many old UFO/paranormal paperbacks I still need to read. Many of them just cut and paste the same old stories over and over, which can be fun to track especially when some writers (Brad Steiger, Warren Smith) like to spice things up and change details to be spookier

I'm more into tracking dumb fantasy/sci fi tropes from like early biblical type poo poo to bros Grimm to Lord Dunsany/Verne/Poe etc to the 70's pulp explosion to modern high fantasy/space opera/cyberpunk. I may not share your particular enthusiasm, but I get it lol. No doubt if I read a bunch of your books i'd be all "OH LOOKIT THIS NEAT THEME CLEARLY THEY WERE READING...."

But this should be in the book thread probably whoops. Thought this was that. My bad but i'm not going to fix my mistake either.

Endman
May 18, 2010

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die


Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

in one of his later books von daniken wonders whether black people were a "failed experiment" by the aliens before they created white people. his aliens are blonde and blue eyed of course: https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-astonishing-racial-claims-of-erich-von-daniken

this is like posadism for ultra racists and I hate it

Dr. Jerrold Coe
Feb 6, 2021

Is it me?

Endman posted:

this is like posadism for ultra racists and I hate it

Check out the crew behind one of the most popular and long running UFO publications: https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-life-and-death-of-ufo-magazine.html

quote:

Bowen was not the first editor, for Flying Saucer Review was founded back in 1955. Unlike its early rival Flying Saucer News, the review was not founded out of organised ufology but by people in the publishing industry. The driving force was the rather sinister Ian Waveney Girvan (1908-1964), a man deeply involved in hard right pro-Nazi politics, before and after the war. Girvan was trained as a chartered accountant but by the end of the 1930s had become involved with Westaway books, the co-director of which was the Nazi sympathiser John Beckett. Beckett was interned as a potential traitor during the war, and the company's chief financer was the pro-Nazi Lord Tavistock, later Duke of Bedford. Bedford was in effect Girvan’s employer by the late 1940s. By this time Girvan was fed up with life under the thumb of the Duke and found employment with a firm that shared premises with Westaway Books, Carroll and Nicholson. The authors of this booklet suggest that this was at the instigation of Beckett who wanted to use the firm to produce far-right political material.

quote:

Dempster was succeeded as editor by Brinsley Le Poer Trench, the fifth son of an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Like many younger sons of the aristocracy he was sent out to 'Trade', and in the 1950s was employed selling advertising copy in a gardening magazine. Trench shared Leslie’s background, though at a less exalted level, and his interest in theosophy and occultism. He also shared Girvan’s involvement in pre-war far right politics, being a member of the pro-German Right Club. Trench would continue to show far right views in later life, during his time in the House of Lords as Lord Clancarty he was a noted supporter of the racist Smith regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Under Trench’s editorship FSR degenerated into a receptacle for just about any contactee tale going, perhaps the nadir being articles by T Lobsang Rampa an alleged Tibetan lama, who was actually a very British plumber called Cyril Hoskins, who came from the less exotic realm of Thames Ditton.

This, and perhaps Trench’s publication of a book called The Sky People, which had unorthodox and barely comprehensible occult views on the Bible and the origins of humanity, may not have gone down too well with the more conventional Scottish Presbyterianism of Girvan, and the result was that towards the end of 1959 Girvan, now working in some obscure back office job on Girl magazine, took over the editorship himself.

quote:

On the surface it might appear that the man who took over, regular contributor, diplomat, linguist, intelligence agent and long-time friend of Bowen, Gordon Creighton [left, in Diplomatic Corps livery] would be ideal for the job. There was however a terrible fly in the ointment, Gordon Creighton was paranoid to the point of clinical mental illness. John Harney recalls meeting Bowen at a BUFORA meeting some time in the 1970s, where the FSR editor described Creighton as “awfully nice chap, but nutty as a fruitcake”.

His paranoia was of two parts; the first, probably shared by a number of people of his age, class and background was that anyone whose values, beliefs, outlook on life or lifestyle would not meet the wholehearted approval of the more elderly and conservative members of the Rickmansworth Golf Club were agents of the monolithic global Communist conspiracy - this being particularly true of feminists.

Creighton’s additional spin on this trope was that the global Communist conspiracy was behind the scenes being run by the supernatural beings known to the Arabs and the wider Moslem world as djinns and to the rest of us as fairies, boggarts, elves, gnomes, fays, lutins, duendes, etc. etc., such supernatural beings also being responsible for most if not all manifestations that caused UFO reports. Furthermore this gigantic boggart-communist conspiracy already secretly controlled the world and would soon undertake overt world conquest. However this global conspiracy would from time to time divert their attention from world conquest to order the removal of books on UFOs from Britain’s public libraries.

Of course, those of us who argued that the latter was a load of tosh, were automatically assimilated into the conspiracy, As was virtually every other ufologist in Britain, Jenny Randles and Hilary Evans falling into particular disfavour.

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
We have to assume Von Daniken is just a disguise for Yakub.

Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021
Sky People eh?

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

John Harney recalls meeting Bowen at a BUFORA meeting some time in the 1970s

BUFORA deez lmao

Endman
May 18, 2010

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die


Its just Nazis all the way down :psyduck:

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


yes, hello, representative of the boggart-communist conspiracy here

Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021


Sky Person Detected

Barry Foster
Dec 24, 2007

What is going wrong with that one (face is longer than it should be)

Endman posted:

Its just Nazis all the way down :psyduck:

Always has been

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

Bro Dad posted:

Lol the new season of the Netflix Ottomans show is out and Radu is in it. of course since this is the Turkish Government version of the story he's just "Radu the Beautiful Handsome", Mehmet's totally heterosexual best bro/arrow shooting buddy

Also the re-enacted parts keep showing Vlad as an insane cartoon villain despite all the Romanian historians interviewed saying the exact opposite

oh yeah smart guy if the netflix ottomans show is so bad why dont you suggest a tv show about historical turkey

ive already seen midnight at pera palace btw

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Weka posted:

Here's the lime bit of the recipe, you be the judge if it's precise. I would suggest that area in which it lacks precision is in the time between slaking the lime and the mixing of the mortar. It's still pretty precise.



Ghostlight posted:

i think the ambiguity is not so much how precise it is or what it leaves out (paradoxically, the amount of information there could have caused people to overlook that it might not be the entire process, which is I think what the researchers are getting at when they say it's 'highly precise but vague') but that vitruvius never told anyone to slake lime. the word he uses is "extincta"; "extinguished", but of course since we know that you slake lime to make concrete, it makes more sense to translate that as slaked. so people have previously focused on the ash as being the source of the 'healing' as it was the one major difference to our process, while the new research has traced down material evidence that at least some of the lime was not slaked during the process, which might indicate that either the recipe is incomplete despite its exhaustive details (proportions are entirely fine when the purpose of the recipe is to define how to make an undefined amount of product) or imo that it's possible we simply projected our own knowledge of how to make concrete onto the recipe itself and made assumptions from there.

disclaimer i am not a concretician.

This is super cool thank you guys.

Are any other ancient construction materials nearly as well spelled out?

EmptyVessel
Oct 30, 2012

Weka posted:

Here's the lime bit of the recipe, you be the judge if it's precise. I would suggest that area in which it lacks precision is in the time between slaking the lime and the mixing of the mortar. It's still pretty precise.



This ->

Ghostlight posted:

i think the ambiguity is not so much how precise it is or what it leaves out (paradoxically, the amount of information there could have caused people to overlook that it might not be the entire process, which is I think what the researchers are getting at when they say it's 'highly precise but vague') but that vitruvius never told anyone to slake lime. the word he uses is "extincta"; "extinguished", but of course since we know that you slake lime to make concrete, it makes more sense to translate that as slaked. so people have previously focused on the ash as being the source of the 'healing' as it was the one major difference to our process, while the new research has traced down material evidence that at least some of the lime was not slaked during the process, which might indicate that either the recipe is incomplete despite its exhaustive details (proportions are entirely fine when the purpose of the recipe is to define how to make an undefined amount of product) or imo that it's possible we simply projected our own knowledge of how to make concrete onto the recipe itself and made assumptions from there.

disclaimer i am not a concretician.

Other quick points:
Translation: That's from Morgans 1914 translation of Vitruvius, other translations may and do read differently, e.g. Thayers transcription of Gwilts 1826 edition gives the first three sentences there as

Thayer posted:

Having treated of the different sorts of sand, we proceed to an explanation of the nature of lime, which is burnt either from white stone or flint. That which is of a close and hard texture is better for building walls; as that which is more porous is better for plastering. When slaked for making mortar, if pit sand be used, three parts of sand are mixed with one of lime.
Not too different but includes flint as a source of lime, and can be read to mean that slaking involves sand... Reliance on a single version when working from translation is not wise. I can't find any text online from Rowlands 2001 translation which seems to be considered an improvement on earlier translations.

Precision: yeah it gives proportions for the dry components, but how much water do you use? What consistency are we aiming for? How are the various components mixed? All at once together or adding a bit at a time. If the latter, in what order? "Mix" is vague too - does this mean stirring with a stick in a vessel, folding over and in on a board using a shovel, etc. How much could you make at one time so you can use it all before it sets?

Definitions: "Pitsand/Pit sand" wouldn't read to me as specifically volcanic sand, just sand that's excavated rather than taken from a beach or river. I've actually had to deal with this sort of confusion in my own research; was carrying out a geological classification of the materials used in constructing EBA monuments in NE Scotland, one major site had had the same thing done in the 1930s which was a nice discovery. Most of the classifications matched ours very well ("laminated stone" = sandstone, "pudding stone" = conglomerate, etc.) however the 1930s study used "whinstone" which baffled the geologist I was working with since even as a very loose geological classification (generally meaning dolerites, basalts and similar igneous rock) there were no examples at all. Close reading of the 1930s report showed that the archaeologist involved had got local stonemasons/quarrymen to do this and in Scots "whinstone" simply means "any hard stone suitable for road stone". The more you know...
And so on and so forth interminably.
Yeah. Romans innit?


Re. Von Daniken and racist ancient aliens, somewhere I have a piece by a German geologist looking at stone use in Minoan Crete (can't remember his name tho..) who was a friend-of-a-friend of VonD and reckons that the first book was written purely as a grift/joke (cos conman) that wasn't expected to have any real impact. As soon as he realised what he had tapped into he steered into it hard, for profit. See also Castaneda.

e: wtf? Bill Thayer was not active as long ago as 1912 - he is the webmaster of Laucus Curtius a Roman World website.

EmptyVessel has issued a correction as of 18:04 on Jan 8, 2023

Real hurthling!
Sep 11, 2001




Some Guy TT posted:

oh yeah smart guy if the netflix ottomans show is so bad why dont you suggest a tv show about historical turkey

ive already seen midnight at pera palace btw

turkish star wars

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



EmptyVessel posted:

e: wtf? Bill Thayer was not active as long ago as 1912 - he is the webmaster of Laucus Curtius a Roman World website.
that's the website i used - big thanks to anyone putting up original text alongside translations.


EmptyVessel posted:

Definitions: "Pitsand/Pit sand" wouldn't read to me as specifically volcanic sand, just sand that's excavated rather than taken from a beach or river. I've actually had to deal with this sort of confusion in my own research; was carrying out a geological classification of the materials used in constructing EBA monuments in NE Scotland, one major site had had the same thing done in the 1930s which was a nice discovery. Most of the classifications matched ours very well ("laminated stone" = sandstone, "pudding stone" = conglomerate, etc.) however the 1930s study used "whinstone" which baffled the geologist I was working with since even as a very loose geological classification (generally meaning dolerites, basalts and similar igneous rock) there were no examples at all. Close reading of the 1930s report showed that the archaeologist involved had got local stonemasons/quarrymen to do this and in Scots "whinstone" simply means "any hard stone suitable for road stone". The more you know...
And so on and so forth interminably.
the volcanic sand part is from the following chapter that is devoted to imparting the desirable qualities in quicklime materials (the water and fire has been burnt out of it)

quote:

1. There is a species of sand which, naturally, possesses extraordinary qualities. It is found about Baiæ and the territory in the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius; if mixed with lime and rubble, it hardens as well under water as in ordinary buildings. This seems to arise from the hotness of the earth under these mountains, and the abundance of springs under their bases, which are heated either with sulphur, bitumen, or alum, and indicate very intense fire. The inward fire and heat of the flame which escapes and burns through the chinks, makes this earth light; the sand-stone (tophus), therefore, which is gathered in the neighbourhood, is dry and free from moisture. Since, then, three circumstances of a similar nature, arising from the intensity of the fire, combine in one mixture, as soon as moisture supervenes, they cohere and quickly harden through dampness; so that neither the waves nor the force of the water can disunite them.

also thanks for the neat trivia about the name of local stone aggregate supplier winstones.

Sherbert Hoover
Dec 12, 2019

Working hard, thank you!
There's a great new Paradox mega-LP by the goon who did the Al-Andalus one if anyone here is into that.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020125

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

Science has long known that people living in what is now Siberia once walked (and later paddled boats) across the Being Strait into North America. But new evidence now shows that these early migrations weren’t one-way trips: in a study published on Thursday in Current Biology, researchers say they have uncovered traces of Native American ancestry in the DNA of Siberians who lived centuries ago.

This American heritage—still present in the genomes of some Siberians today—adds to a scattering of archeological evidence suggesting that North Americans were in contact with their northern Asian neighbors for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

The discovery is not wholly unexpected. “Human movement is rarely unidirectional,” says the new study’s co-author Cosimo Posth, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “There is usually some back and forth.”

Exactly when and how people first arrived in the Americas is one of the longstanding debates in archaeology. Hypothesized dates vary widely, but many researchers agree that the earliest migrants likely traveled across the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that periodically connected northern Asia to modern-day Alaska in prehistory. This transcontinental highway succumbed to rising sea levels sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, but that didn’t stop migrations between the landmasses. Genetic studies and archaeological digs indicate that people from Siberia made the move into North America several more times, including as recently as 1,000 years ago.

But even though a lot of research has focused on reconstructing the arrival of people into what is now Alaska, “very little is known about migration in the other direction,” Posth says.

That is slowly starting to change. A 2019 study found genetic evidence that ancient people living on opposite sides of the Bering Strait were in contact with each other. And a small number of archeological finds in Alaska—including the discovery of 15th-century glass beads that may be of Venetian origin—have pointed toward ongoing trade between North America and the rest of the world.

But how far from the strait these ties extended is unclear. Little is even known about how people moved around within Siberia in the past few thousand years. Hoping to reconstruct this part of the region’s history, Posth and his colleague’s sequenced DNA from 10 ancient people whose remains were unearthed at various sites around Siberia.

The oldest of these samples dates back 7,500 years. The study also included genomes from three people who lived on the Kamchatka Peninsula—which dangles down from the Russian Far East well to the southwest of the Bering strait—just 500 years ago. These sequences were the first ancient DNA samples to come out of the remote peninsula, Posth says.

Siberia was once a hotbed of migration that put ancient Siberians in contact with populations as distant as Japan and Greenland, the researchers found. Their analysis also revealed a previously unknown connection between Native Americans and people who were living in Kamchatka a few centuries ago. The team found that the ancestors of these Kamchatkans had met with North Americans at least twice before: once between 5,500 and 4,400 years ago and again around 1,500 years ago. These connections show the influence of Native Americans farther inland than previous studies.

Posth says he expected to find some evidence of Native American contact in Siberia, but he was surprised by how long ago these run-ins had occurred. Those ancient encounters weren’t the last time Kamchatkans interacted with North Americans either. The team found an even higher percentage of Native American DNA in the genomes of modern Kamchatkans, suggesting that the people of the peninsula were also in contact with North Americans during the past few centuries.

It remains unclear how DNA from North America made its way into Kamchatkans, Posth says. The Kamchatkans’ ancestors could have inherited the DNA from other Siberians carrying this heritage, or they may have come into contact with Native Americans themselves. Still, Posth and his colleagues’ study builds on previous genetic research by showing that DNA was moving from North America into Siberia, says Dennis O’Rourke, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, who was not involved with the new paper.

The fact that people from northern Asia and North Americans did come into contact isn’t that surprising if one considers how close the two landmasses are to each other, says Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University, who also was not involved with the new research. For one thing, the Aleutian Islands (where the Aleut people historically hunted and traded) form a chain that starts just off southwestern Alaska and runs westward to point directly at Kamchatka.

As for the Bering Strait, Stone says that although the region’s early inhabitants may have become isolated from one another after the disappearance of the Bering Land Bridge, later generations wouldn’t have been so limited. “They’ve got boats,” Stone says. “So they could visit and trade with each other.”

pidan
Nov 6, 2012


Any theories about ongoing contact between the Americas and anywhere else has to explain how no one ever brought any measles or smallpox over before 1492, which puts a pretty hard limit on how "ongoing" contact could have been.

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

(attempting to provoke other posters into making an effortpost voice) when was smallpox invented anyway

Cuttlefush
Jan 15, 2014

pidan posted:

Any theories about ongoing contact between the Americas and anywhere else has to explain how no one ever brought any measles or smallpox over before 1492, which puts a pretty hard limit on how "ongoing" contact could have been.

is that authoritative or are you speculating? measles and smallpox were not everpresent maladies. smallpox could infect via fomites, but it's a bit harder and a long voyage/travel is probably going to reduce the chance of infectious fomites hanging around as things are in constant use. also a long exploration-geared travel would make it pretty unlikely to impossible that an actively infectious person would be able to spread it.

for example, Hernán Cortés' expedition did not spread smallpox on initial landing in Mexico in 1519. Columbus' group also did not spread smallpox on initial discovery of Hispaniola in 1492. The first smallpox outbreak there was in 1518 after colonization ramped up. Hernán Cortés' group actually picked up smallpox in 1520 when they went back to kill some dudes and then they brought it back to Mexico.

i know you said ongoing contact, but ongoing contact in the sense of that quote sounds more like occasional meetings of small groups of people. the fact that it took 26 years worth of Europeans (and their slaves) coming over for Hispaniola's first outbreak from initial contact implies that sporadic contact like occasional trade wouldn't necessarily mean spreading communicable diseases

pidan
Nov 6, 2012


I don't have any specific source but I think my reasoning is sound.

The Alaska article made it sound like they'd regularly send boats back and forth (that would spend maybe a few days at sea if that). In such a situation I don't see how the disease wouldn't pass over eventually.

If you're thinking of longer distances, if you're sending large enough ships to take a weeks long voyage, there's probably also enough people on them to theoretically keep a transmission chain going.

It's not that every contact would be guaranteed to spread disease, and I can certainly believe that some individuals passed both ways occasionally, especially in Alaska and from Pacific Islands. But if there had been enough exchange to be historically interesting - regular trade, cultural exchange and so on - I have to think they'd have brought the diseases over at some point.

E: although that would be a nice setting for a horror story, cheerful fishing village trading with one on the other coast, one day Börte has a bit of a fever while rowing over, the next time they go the village has disappeared and locals run from them.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Some Guy TT posted:

(attempting to provoke other posters into making an effortpost voice) when was smallpox invented anyway
it was invented in yakub's weapon labs

Cuttlefush
Jan 15, 2014

pidan posted:

I don't have any specific source but I think my reasoning is sound.

The Alaska article made it sound like they'd regularly send boats back and forth (that would spend maybe a few days at sea if that). In such a situation I don't see how the disease wouldn't pass over eventually.

If you're thinking of longer distances, if you're sending large enough ships to take a weeks long voyage, there's probably also enough people on them to theoretically keep a transmission chain going.

It's not that every contact would be guaranteed to spread disease, and I can certainly believe that some individuals passed both ways occasionally, especially in Alaska and from Pacific Islands. But if there had been enough exchange to be historically interesting - regular trade, cultural exchange and so on - I have to think they'd have brought the diseases over at some point.

E: although that would be a nice setting for a horror story, cheerful fishing village trading with one on the other coast, one day Börte has a bit of a fever while rowing over, the next time they go the village has disappeared and locals run from them.

it sounded more like it'd happen very occasionally and maybe they'd gently caress and they'd have a kid. or maybe a group came over and stayed. i don't know how much you'd have to gently caress to account for the observed DNA (and i don't know if there's an alternate explanation and im not gonna bother digging the article out because smart guy tt just posts text without a loving link or attribution (some guy tt if you keep doing that i will have to report you for plagiarism)) but probably not a ton

also i don't know how traceable various disease exposure is through time/genes. does smallpox leave extremely long lasting genetic markers of any kind? or do we know that the north american population was unexposed just because we know they did not have significant contacts and were ravaged by initial outbreaks? this is actually something people in the covid thread probably know

Cuttlefush has issued a correction as of 13:07 on Jan 16, 2023

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe
i think you have to keep in mind that kamchatka ain't exactly the crossroads of the known world, and as such smallpox and other diseases of the sort would probably not be endemic in the way they were in more densely populated and well-traveled areas

Cuttlefush
Jan 15, 2014

Cerebral Bore posted:

i think you have to keep in mind that kamchatka ain't exactly the crossroads of the known world, and as such smallpox and other diseases of the sort would probably not be endemic in the way they were in more densely populated and well-traveled areas

yep. if smallpox does not leave anything to get passed on in genes then the only evidence people had it would be if documentation of it survived or if you could find an extremely well preserved corpse and see if their immune system had markers for it

Benagain
Oct 10, 2007

Can you see that I am serious?
Fun Shoe
Also iirc Kamchatka was cut off enough that they routinely had introduced disease outbreaks themselves so they weren't a festering pot of disease waiting to spread

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?
I think it's just cold enough in Siberia that the viruses didn’t want to go outside

Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019
saw this on the tiktok, some researchers think cave paintings are evidence of written language 20k years ago

quote:

At least 20,000 years ago, humans living in Europe created striking cave paintings of animals that they paired with curious signs: lines, dots and Y-shaped symbols. These marks, which are well known to researchers, might relate to the seasonal behavior of prey animals, making the signs the first known writing in the history of humankind, a new study claims.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...everyone-agrees

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



pidan posted:

I don't have any specific source but I think my reasoning is sound.

The Alaska article made it sound like they'd regularly send boats back and forth (that would spend maybe a few days at sea if that). In such a situation I don't see how the disease wouldn't pass over eventually.
well, my couch-research indicates that measles didn't develop into a fully human disease until sometime after the 11th century, meaning it was probably still somewhat limited to its original host - cattle - outside of epidemic outbreaks; and it's possible that neither america nor siberia had enough cattle to act as a reservoir for the disease or a dense enough population to sustain it anthropogenically should any visitors pop by; while smallpox was present in china around the 1st century but didn't make it to neighbouring japan until the 6th in a period where japan-china interactions were at a record high, so the likelihood that it made its way up to the top of the siberian peninsula even earlier than that through regular trade and chat channels seems low. not authoritative.

Spangly A
May 14, 2009

God help you if ever you're caught on these shores

A man's ambition must indeed be small
To write his name upon a shithouse wall
Smallpox did exist in Europe though? The Columbian origin is discredited. Skeletal evidence, artistic evidence, written evidence and even a few demonstrable samples of pre-15th-c bacterium exist that all show smallpox being a disease Europeans knew about under different names, and normally with much more mild symptoms.

There's even a great argument that smallpox as a dickrot disease is both exclusive to rich people and that knowledge of it was actively suppressed, that the bacterium was endemic to children in Europe, spread in tiny amounts via cups and water, which acted to innoculate them. As class stratification began to accelerate with the rise of mercantilism, and status objects like individual utensils became common for rich cunts living isolated from peasantry and urban poor, the existing herd immunity failed for those groups of people, who would develop symptoms much more like modern ideas of smallpox, and pass those to their prostitutes, which meant no immunity and massively increased bacterial load on initial infection.

Whether it is accurate is not something I have the ability to tell, but it accounts for the divides in class and rural/urban infection rates, and most importantly I want it to be true, so I'm going to assume it is

Real hurthling!
Sep 11, 2001




you talking about syphilis

Spangly A
May 14, 2009

God help you if ever you're caught on these shores

A man's ambition must indeed be small
To write his name upon a shithouse wall

Real hurthling! posted:

you talking about syphilis

Yeah idk how I did that, loving poxes

But now some new people might know the rich people dickrot curse thing so it's a happy accident

i say swears online
Mar 4, 2005

primitive rot wiener

Grevling
Dec 18, 2016

I read a book a while ago that claimed the Inuit used iron the whole time they were in north america and got it both imported from Asia and from meteors. In fact I think the book posits ancestors of the yupik and inuit used iron already when they made the crossing to Alaska. I think most people still think of the americas and eurasia as closed off until 1000 AD or 1492 but when you have contact across the bering strait and Polynesians mixing with South Americans it's a really different story.

Grevling has issued a correction as of 08:26 on Jan 17, 2023

Azathoth
Apr 3, 2001

I have no idea about a lot of this but it always seemed really weird to me that there could be no contact between Asia and North America from after the migration until Europeans bumbled across it when we have Polynesian people bridging far larger gaps all across the Pacific. I know they're not the same people, but it's the same ocean ffs.

WoodrowSkillson
Feb 24, 2005

*Gestures at 60 years of Lions history*

Azathoth posted:

I have no idea about a lot of this but it always seemed really weird to me that there could be no contact between Asia and North America from after the migration until Europeans bumbled across it when we have Polynesian people bridging far larger gaps all across the Pacific. I know they're not the same people, but it's the same ocean ffs.

Polynesian contact has been proven via genetic markers. I am not sure anyone has ever said arctic peoples did not have any contact between each other. AFAIK they were also not impacted in the same way as further south populations during the initial colonial period. The arctic is a long, long way from nearly anywhere else and between it and the south there is lots of inhospitable land that was sparsely populated even in 1491. Its pretty easy to see how major diseases did not easily move up there. Especially something like smallpox where its mostly transmitted in environments very different than the arctic

pidan
Nov 6, 2012


Yeah, all that makes sense, after all Polynesians and Arctic peoples already had relatively little contact with the heavily populated parts of the old world so it's not implausible they could have had some limited level of ongoing contact with both sides without passing a noticeable amount of disease back and forth.

pidan
Nov 6, 2012


The book 1491 does make the case that North America (where the US is now) was much more densely populated originally, than it was when the Europeans found it. Diseases that had spread from the Europeans in South / central America had already depopulated large parts of NA before the Europeans themselves arrived. But still, there's a lot of space in the central US and Canada that was probably always sparsely populated due to the inhospitable climate.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Grevling
Dec 18, 2016

Inuit were definitely living in larger settlements than the image we have of them today, there's still traces of pretty substantial villages of stone where they'd exploit seasonal whale migrations. Their population must have crashed too, maybe by a combination of the little ice age and later European diseases. Still few compared to people further south though I suppose.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply