Is a major 'terra nuliis' after 1450 asb

Is there anyway the Americas could have been without humans?

If not what about Austraiia or New Zealand?

What would happen to European settlements if that happened?
 
The Maori arrived in New Zealand fairly late (c. 1250 AD); I expect it wouldn't be impossible to push that back by a few centuries. The Austronesians were excellent sailors and had been zipping around all over the Pacific for a few millennia, but NZ is sufficiently far out of the way that one could imagine them taking even longer to find it.

The others had been settled long beforehand (to give you a sense, people have been in Australia longer than there have been people in Britain).

As for effects? New Zealand without the Maori likely still has Moa when Europeans arrive (although the Europeans will be just as deadly for them as they were for the dodo), which would be interesting for its effects on literature (imagine stories of giant birds as stock features of Robinson Crusoe/Swiss Family Robinson-style castaway stories). It still gets colonized (probably starting with whalers, and moving on to Christchurch-esque planned colonization efforts), and still has a tiny population.
 
No, no, yes.

America is ASB. At least two major migrations seem to have occurred over the Bering in the past few thousand years and there were almost definitely many more. On top of that you have the Norse in the northeast and the Polynesians in the southwest, plus whatever small-scale or undocumented migrations.

Australia is also ASB. There's the first landing of the Australians a few tens of thousands of years ago, which was likely planned and not an accident. Some Indians migrated a few thousand years ago. The Macassan connection is extremely well-documented, and although the Macassans postdate European "discovery" there we have the baijini, who, if they existed, predated the Europeans in the Yolngu country. Again add to that whatever small-scale or undocumented migrations.

New Zealand, by contrast, is possible if things go terribly for a lot of Polynesians.
 

It's

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The Maori arrived in New Zealand fairly late (c. 1250 AD); I expect it wouldn't be impossible to push that back by a few centuries. The Austronesians were excellent sailors and had been zipping around all over the Pacific for a few millennia, but NZ is sufficiently far out of the way that one could imagine them taking even longer to find it.

The others had been settled long beforehand (to give you a sense, people have been in Australia longer than there have been people in Britain).

As for effects? New Zealand without the Maori likely still has Moa when Europeans arrive (although the Europeans will be just as deadly for them as they were for the dodo), which would be interesting for its effects on literature (imagine stories of giant birds as stock features of Robinson Crusoe/Swiss Family Robinson-style castaway stories). It still gets colonized (probably starting with whalers, and moving on to Christchurch-esque planned colonization efforts), and still has a tiny population.
Were the Maoris the first Polynesian tribe to reach New Zealand? I thought there was another tribe there before them, whom the Maoris exterminated.
 
You'd have to have some pretty major geological/geographic/evolutionary divergences to keep the Americas human-free until the modern era, cool as that could be with Mammoths and Glyptodonts still mucking about.

Australia would be just about as hard.

As noted, there could be some more recent butterflies affecting the development and spread of Polynesian that might delay the Maori settlement of New Zealand. Moas would still be toast, unless by chance the Europeans (or Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, etc) thought of a way to domesticate them.
 
What if there were some predator (velociraptors?) lurking in the Americas, able to wipe out neolithic humans, but unable to cross the Bering land bridge and eat up Eurasia ?

Though they'd eat up all the other megafauna too.

Might still be Inuit, but they dare not go south of the tree line...
 
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The Moriori were Maori who left NZ to settle another group of Islands.

I believe there was some British propaganda about the Moriori being the true indigenous population of New Zealand as opposed to the Maori.

It was mainly used to support European colonialism.

Moriori were darkskin Melanesians who were wiped out by the lighter skin more civilized Maori so the propaganda goes.
 
Although to be fair, 19th century NZ was full of many mad theories about the origin of Maori. I'm reading about that now actually. For reasons of British India, the Maori as Aryans was quite popular too for a time.
 
What if there were some predator (velociraptors?) lurking in the Americas, able to wipe out neolithic humans, but unable to cross the Bering land bridge and eat up Eurasia ?

Though they'd eat up all the other megafauna too.

Might still be Inuit, but they dare not go south of the tree line...

It would have to be an ASB level awesome predator like armoured bears. People have the power of an apex predator and the numbers of a large herbivore....plus we have a force multiplier in dogs. We're just too good for nature.
 
Austronesians reached as far as New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa around 1000 BC.
And then were stuck right there for 2000 years.
Society Islands were settled in 11th century AD - after Iceland and Greenland.
The whole rest of Polynesia, from Marquesas to Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand, was settled in 13th century.

So, how about something butterflies away the 13th century Polynesian expansion, with result that New Zealans is unreached by any humans in 1450?
 
Hawaii was rather out of the way, so it's a long shot as one.
By the Christian era, Tasmania had become a completely isolated island supporting a small population of the most primitive people on the planet. If some freak event happened, it's population could have gone the way of their compatriots on the Bass Strait islands.
Also, was Madagascar completely uninhabited before the Austronesians colonized it? If so, Madagascar could be one.
 
Austronesians reached as far as New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa around 1000 BC.
And then were stuck right there for 2000 years.
Society Islands were settled in 11th century AD - after Iceland and Greenland.
The whole rest of Polynesia, from Marquesas to Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand, was settled in 13th century.

So, how about something butterflies away the 13th century Polynesian expansion, with result that New Zealans is unreached by any humans in 1450?

Hawaii was reached in the first millennium A.D.
 
The Norse and the inuit both reached Greenland at around the same time. Some pod (or two) could probably keep them both out....
 
Hawaii was rather out of the way, so it's a long shot as one.
By the Christian era, Tasmania had become a completely isolated island supporting a small population of the most primitive people on the planet. If some freak event happened, it's population could have gone the way of their compatriots on the Bass Strait islands.
Also, was Madagascar completely uninhabited before the Austronesians colonized it? If so, Madagascar could be one.
While it's not entirely clear who if anyone lived in Madagascar before the Austronesians, the OP specifically wanted it to be terra nullius by the time Europeans arrived. Either the Arabs or the Bantu would certainly have arrived by then, and likely established more significant settlements in the absence of a native population.
 
The Norse and the inuit both reached Greenland at around the same time. Some pod (or two) could probably keep them both out....

There were people living there before the Norse and Inuit. The Inuit may have actually drove out the Norse people, but n any case they arrived circa 1300 (the Norse arrived around 1000)
 
There were people living there before the Norse and Inuit. The Inuit may have actually drove out the Norse people, but n any case they arrived circa 1300 (the Norse arrived around 1000)

I guess my memory was wrong. I had the idea that the people there before the inuit (I think archaeologists call them the dorset) were in baffin island, but didn't have the naval tech the inuit had and so were unable to make it across to Greenland, but my memory is probably out of date.
 

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Hawaii was rather out of the way, so it's a long shot as one.
By the Christian era, Tasmania had become a completely isolated island supporting a small population of the most primitive people on the planet. If some freak event happened, it's population could have gone the way of their compatriots on the Bass Strait islands.
Also, was Madagascar completely uninhabited before the Austronesians colonized it? If so, Madagascar could be one.
Most primitive people on the planet? By what rubric are you defining that by?

They had a toolkit just like the Mainland population and its believed a redtide event occurred that killed off a significant proportion of society that then reduced said toolkit. That's what's believed to be the origin of Tasmanian Aboriginal fear of fish came from.

Also there is growing evidence of hunter gather populations inhabiting Madagascar and the Malagasy themselves state when they came on the island it was already inhabited. The Merina Royal origin myth even states the lineage of their kings descend from Vazimba.
 
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