An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.
There are plenty of valid claims that many other civilizations contacted America:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...</a><p>But it is meaningless since they did not write about it nor they stablished commerce. The fact is that before 1492, most civilizations in Africa/Asia/Europe did not know that America existed and that other humans lived there. After 1492, that changed forever.
<i>The Icelandic sagas suggest that the Norse engaged in cultural exchanges with the Indigenous groups of North America34. If these encounters indeed occurred, they may have had inadvertent outcomes, such as pathogen transmission7, the introduction of foreign flora and fauna species, or even the exchange of human genetic information. Recent data from the Norse Greenlandic population, however, show no evidence of the last of these.</i><p>Is it possible the Vikings were not in that location long enough for populations to mix? Or they were so remote (physically, culturally, and linguistically) that limited opportunities arose? Or something else?
I thought this has been known for awhile. I visited the site in Newfoundland like 15 years ago. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Anse_aux_Meadows" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Anse_aux_Meadows</a>
What I find most amazing in the article is the technology of radiocarbon dating individual year rings in a piece of wood, correlate that to known cosmic radiation events, and get the precise year when the tree was felled.
A millennia from now, I think people may well be kind of shocked to learn that we got to the moon in 1969 if a collapse, global recession or some other calamity derails the latest efforts to get back there within the next few years.
Apparently there is some evidence about Vikings bringing Native Americans back to Iceland.
<a href="https://phys.org/news/2010-11-vikings-brought-amerindian-iceland-years.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2010-11-vikings-brought-amerindian-ice...</a>
It begs the question then of what happened to them? Did they integrate with existing Native Americans? Or did they just die out? Are there stories from Native Americans in the area that report Norsemen in the area?
"Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the Americas"<p>Is "cognisance" really the right term here? I didn't really follow the whole article and it seemed mostly unrelated to my question anyway, so sorry if I missed something. It just seems to me that for there to be any European awareness, there would have to be proof of a return voyage, no?<p>Is this not really just talking about "European presence"? I'm being highly pedantic, I'm well aware.
One remarkable person from this time period is Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who had the first European child in the Americas (outside Greenland) and then made a pilgrimage to Rome. She's probably the most well-travelled woman of the 11th century.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudrid_Thorbjarnard%C3%B3ttir" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudrid_Thorbjarnard%C3%B3ttir</a>
The debate on whether Vikings were in Pre-Columbus America is starting to sound a lot like the back and forth of "$food is (good|bad) for you".
There's a fun wikipedia article [1] on various theories of pre-columbian contact with the Americas. Some of these are very dubious, of course, but the Roman fruit bowl from 2000 years ago does look like it contains an actual pineapple, which is an American fruit [2]. There is also evidence of nicotine and other substances found in Egyptian mummies from even longer ago, which could indicate at least some sort of indirect trade/contact across the ocean.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories#/media/File:0_Mosaico_pavimentale_%E2%80%93_Grotte_Celloni_%E2%80%93_Pal._Massimo.JPG" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...</a>
A few of the other comments had me curious, but while it's widely known that diseases brought over from Europe were devastating to the native populations of the Americas, are there any notable examples of transfer in the other direction - i.e. new diseases the Europeans encountered in the Americas that got brought back to Europe?
I hope someone else noted that this is not new evidence. What they did is reanalyzed existing wood samples and determined an exact year that they were definitely in Newfoundland.<p>They did through dating of tree rings based on known cosmic radiation events from the year 993 (if I recall the year correctly). Very interesting paper to read.
This was the era of the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, formed in Britain and Scandinavia under the king of England, Canute, a Danish prince. It didn't outlast him by long (and Norway was independent until the 1020s) but the coincidence of political consolidation in northern europe with brief settlement in north America is interesting.
Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (c. 1340) <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...</a>
I was curious how the solar storm giving radiocarbon works. It seems approx:<p>In the storm the sun chucks out hydrogen and helium ions.<p>>It is not uncommon for [these] to collide with an atom in the atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide with nitrogen atoms. When the neutron collides, a nitrogen-14 (seven protons, seven neutrons) atom turns into a carbon-14 atom (six protons, eight neutrons) and a hydrogen atom (one proton, zero neutrons).
The evidence for collapsing agriculture in the Amazon basin a couple of centuries before Columbus hints at disease spreading from contact there, such as from a (historically attested, well equipped) African expedition in 1311 that might not have returned.<p>The Amazon has proof positive of tree domestication 10000 years ago. The coincidence of collapse right about then seems hard to account for without contact. But we may never know.
"These sudden increases were caused by cosmic radiation events, and appear synchronously in dendrochronological records all around the world"
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That is a pretty interesting method for dating historical sites. I wonder how much it will change the records as future research is done globally.
Tangentially related: Kim Stanley Robinson's early story Vinland The Dream, in which an archeologist discovers that those very remnants here were actually planted there as an elaborate hoax 100 years ago.
I was hoping they'd have found out more about other settlements in Newfoundland besides L'anse aux Meadows. Did they ever find out more about that possible settlement in SW Newfoundland?
I've never understood the significance of this.<p>The vikings were in North America for a few years and then went back to Europe. They brought back (almost?) nothing, left a few scattered settlements, and completely forgot about it.<p>So what.
So what? This news reads to the rest of the world as.. Europeans squabbling between each other as to who amongst them first visited a continent they'd previously not known about, already brimming with other populations of humans. End of story. It's 2021 folks, no one cares about eurocentric land grab claims.