WI humans never cross the Bering Strait into the Americas/America remains uninhabited.

What kind of flora and fauna might the first humans to arrive to the continent later on, wherever they might be from, might encounter? What would be the consequences of a mostly uninhabited Western hemisphere?
 
First thought: mammoths! Second thought: no crops such as tomatoes, pineapples etc but especially maize.
Assuming discovery happens as otl, I wonder if it means Vinland survives. The Norse had problems with the natives, and iirc attacks by the natives destroyed their settlement. Without those, maybe Vinland could have been permanent.
 
Even without humans other animals will cross Beringia. Horses and camelids crossed into Asia. Wolves crossed from Asia to North America. I’m not totally convinced megafuna extinction was all human, when humans weren’t the only predator that crossed.
 
Kind of nitpicky, but there were likely 3, and possibly 4 or more, different migrations to America, and only one of those three (albeit seemingly the most significant) was by Beringia.

Even if you somehow stop people from crossing over from Beringia, that would just mean that the continent would be settled by the (likely) earlier coastal migration. This would have enormous butterflies and result in the American civilizations being genetically, linguistically, and culturally unrecognizable to what we know, but there would still be people there and they would probably be of a similar population and probably basically similar status to Native Americans as we know them. If you eliminate this one too, then you're still left with the migration of Thule peoples circa 5,000 years ago. They would find a virgin field and settle the entire continent by the time the Europeans got a handle on things, though the butterflies would be in some sense even more extreme since the shorter timeframe will result in radically different societies in addition to the above.

Eliminating all of these, most of all the Inuit migration, seems improbable.
 

Gabingston

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First thought: mammoths! Second thought: no crops such as tomatoes, pineapples etc but especially maize.
Assuming discovery happens as otl, I wonder if it means Vinland survives. The Norse had problems with the natives, and iirc attacks by the natives destroyed their settlement. Without those, maybe Vinland could have been permanent.
No tomatoes means no pizza, which automatically makes the world several times worse.
 
Kind of nitpicky, but there were likely 3, and possibly 4 or more, different migrations to America, and only one of those three (albeit seemingly the most significant) was by Beringia.

Even if you somehow stop people from crossing over from Beringia, that would just mean that the continent would be settled by the (likely) earlier coastal migration. This would have enormous butterflies and result in the American civilizations being genetically, linguistically, and culturally unrecognizable to what we know, but there would still be people there and they would probably be of a similar population and probably basically similar status to Native Americans as we know them. If you eliminate this one too, then you're still left with the migration of Thule peoples circa 5,000 years ago. They would find a virgin field and settle the entire continent by the time the Europeans got a handle on things, though the butterflies would be in some sense even more extreme since the shorter timeframe will result in radically different societies in addition to the above.

Eliminating all of these, most of all the Inuit migration, seems improbable.
Not to mention the Dena migration.
 
The butterflies are massive here, because an 'empty America' scenario would have significant effects in the Earth's climate in the long term (as Native Americans deforested much of Northern America IOTL).

So we could not expect that IOTL History would run in the same way in the rest of the World.
 
The butterflies are massive here, because an 'empty America' scenario would have significant effects in the Earth's climate in the long term (as Native Americans deforested much of Northern America IOTL).

So we could not expect that IOTL History would run in the same way in the rest of the World.
I doubt that pre-agricultural native Americans had such a huge impact on forests.
 
What are you referring to?
I’m assuming he’s referring to the more recent discoveries that human settlement in the americas occurred in several stages, some of them involved coastal people sailing along the coast of Eastern Siberia into Alaska
 
I’m assuming he’s referring to the more recent discoveries that human settlement in the americas occurred in several stages, some of them involved coastal people sailing along the coast of Eastern Siberia into Alaska
But that's still "through" Beringia given it was coastal migrations, if he's talking about post-LGM migrations(given he said "earlier")
 
"Empty America " was one of the first big threads, going back to the old usenet soc.history what-if
A very old but finished timeline by Doug Hoff, already started in the glory days of the now non-existent soc.history.what-if discussion newsgroup (AH.com's precursor).


 
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I doubt that pre-agricultural native Americans had such a huge impact on forests.
They had it, same as aboriginal Australians.

People tend to underestimate the great impact of the human in the environment, even at a Neolithic level.
 
They had it, same as aboriginal Australians.

People tend to underestimate the great impact of the human in the environment, even at a Neolithic level.
Yep. One case of this is the Willamette Valley in Oregon where the natives (Kalapuyan-speakers) routinely set fires to maintain an oak savanna and smoke out deer and other game. Almost all of them died in epidemics or forced relocation to reservations in the mid-19th century, and by the end of the 19th century locals noted how much the local forests had expanded.

But this occurred nearly everywhere like California, the fringes of the Great Plains, Eastern North America--humans using fire to encourage preferred plants and drive out game is an extremely old tradition.
 
Yep. One case of this is the Willamette Valley in Oregon where the natives (Kalapuyan-speakers) routinely set fires to maintain an oak savanna and smoke out deer and other game. Almost all of them died in epidemics or forced relocation to reservations in the mid-19th century, and by the end of the 19th century locals noted how much the local forests had expanded.

But this occurred nearly everywhere like California, the fringes of the Great Plains, Eastern North America--humans using fire to encourage preferred plants and drive out game is an extremely old tradition.
Exactly, this happened in many places (not only in the Americas, but in other parts of the planet).

Today it is increasingly assumed that the human activities (specially, deforestation using fires) at the end of the last Ice Age accelerated the warming of the global climate (we are talking about five to eight millennia anyway, this was not a quick process). If a whole landmass like the Americas would have remained pristine, probably the climate would have warmed at a slower pace than IOTL, meaning that the rise of the first civilizations (which depended on a warmer climate for agriculture) would have probably delayed and the History as we know it would have changed from its very beginning.

So no, under this scenario it won't be a Columbus reaching an empty America. The history line of the known civilizations would change from the cradle.
 
Quetzalcouatl drives mass extinctions- Carthegenian lost fleet colonizes new world. Is dangerously inbred. Polynesians show up later.
 
But that's still "through" Beringia given it was coastal migrations, if he's talking about post-LGM migrations(given he said "earlier")
As I understand it, the coastal migration did not go "through" Beringia, as the southern coastline of Beringia was glaciated and impassable at the time. Rather they went "by" it, and didn't physically cross it. They likely originated in Siberia proper or the Kurils before commencing their coastal migration.
 
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