Lands of Ice and Mice: An Alternate History of the Thule

[Danbensen]

THE THULE SO FAR....

Lovely history. I love the painstaking tracing of the development of agriculture.

Two things that occurred to me:
1) Communication between the Siberian and Alaskan Thule will have to be by sea. How good is Thule seafaring? And what does that mean for the Aleutian Isles, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido? I can't imagine the Thule ignoring these rich islands and their not-particularly-militarily-powerful native inhabitants.

2) You might just not have gotten to this point yet, but what happens when the Norse interchange introduces smallpox? Based on a tiny bit of research (http://books.google.bg/books?id=OBE...esc=y#v=onepage&q=smallpox in Siberia&f=false) it looks like Siberian populations were also susceptible to the disease.

 

[Danbensen]

So you'd want an animal suited to colder forest marsh territory, immensely large and strong....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaiqfAGkC6E

 

[DG Valdron]

A Survey of Key Thule Domesticates

Animals

Dogs - original domesticate brought from Asia approximately 3000 years ago, or acquired subsequently. Dogs weigh up to 35 kg, can carry 40% of body weight as a pack, or drag multiples of body weight. Used in teams of up to a dozen animals, dogs can drag immense loads faster than any other animal. In terms of work output, pound for pound, dogs beat eveything, and only Caribou and Camels come close. Dogs were the key to rapid Thule expansion beginning 950 CE, allowing Thule to move much faster than their rivals and to transport large amounts of material culture. The downside of Dogs is small size for a draft animal, wrangling requirements and an expensive carnivorous diet. Partially supplanted by Caribou and then by Musk Ox, Dogs remain a key labour domesticate, in heavy use on Islands and Coasts and used for rapid communication and transport.

Caribou - genetically identical to Asian Reindeer which were domesticated in some areas of Asia as long ago as 3000 years and as recently as 500 years ago. In North America, Caribou domestication dates to approximately 1300 CE, as agriculture begins to disrupt migrating herds. Initially herded as sources of meat and hides in marginal areas, Cariibou were rapidly applied as pack animals and sled animals along the lines and technologies (harnesses and sleds) initially used for dogs. From there, they were applied as draft animals, pulling plows, and came into widespread use. Weight ranges from 100 to 250 kg. Pound for pound, they are extremely powerful domesticates, delivering more than cattle or horses, and with more horsepower than anything except dogs.

Musk Ox -there are theories that the Musk Ox was semi-domesticated in ice age Europe. Now extinct in Europe and Asia. Musk Ox are large animals, 350 to 450 kg. Non-migratory, preferring colder and dryer climates than Caribou, they were domesticated by embattled hunter gatherers shifting to pastoralism around 1350. Although larger and more powerful than Caribou, they were more delicate in some ways. Often considered an inferior domestic compared to Caribou. Musk Ox become much more valuable after about 1500, for their wool.

Ptarmigan - A one kilogram sedentary bird with an astounding reproductive rate. Ptarmigan were domesticated as a microlivestock around 1350 and spread extremely rapidly through the Thule range. Easy to raise and maintain, reproducing rapidly, they provided a useful and accessible meat animal.

Arctic Hare - Traditionally a form of vermin, Arctic Hare's domestication was inspired by Ptarmigan. It became a secondary accessible microlivestock.

Snow Owl - Semi-domesticated verminator. Secondary uses as a hunting animal. Domestication or Semi-domestication followed shortly upon agriculture. Sometime between 1250 and 1350 widespread custom lead to constructing habitats for the birds, avoiding killing them except on special occasions, and feeding them in times of scarcity to ensure the continued presence.

Arctic Fox - Semi-domesticated verminator. Secondary uses for fur and as a pet. Same trajectory as the Owl.

Ermine - Semi-domesticated verminator. Secondary uses for fur and as pets.

 

[DG Valdron]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaiqfAGkC6E

That will fit the bill nicely.

On the other hand, the Thule already have dogs, caribou and musk ox, which basically gives them, on a pound for pound basis, more horsepower than literally any pre-industrial civilization on Earth.

Moose would kind of be a Wanking under the circumstances.

If Moose domestication emerges, I think it will come late and overlap with the European era.

As discussed in the threads, I have a theory that once a culture selects a domesticae, it will stick with them even at considerable inconvenience, rather than going through the time and effort of developing a new one. Its a little easier when they're acquiring a pre-made domesticate from another culture.

I'd say 50/50 chances. European contact will make the fur trade incredibly valuable, and move an assortment of goods back and forth. You're also going to see population collapses as a result of diseases.

So this may stop the spread of cattail/arrowhead agriculture in its tracks and butterfly potential moose domestication.

On the other hand, if cattail/arrowhead agriculture hangs on long enough, its a distinctive enough environment that I could see Moose/Caribou hybrids and eventually systematic efforts at Moose domestication.

The potential window is roughly 1550 to 1650, give or take 50 years either way.

 

[DG Valdron]

Lovely history. I love the painstaking tracing of the development of agriculture.

Two things that occurred to me:
1) Communication between the Siberian and Alaskan Thule will have to be by sea. How good is Thule seafaring?

They went out and killled whales. And not just puny little Beluga either. They'd go and take down fifty foot, sixty ton monsters. My impression is that they were coastal sailors and Island hoppers, but the Bering strait was well within their capacity. Also, using dogsleds, they crossed expanses of ice regularly.

And what does that mean for the Aleutian Isles, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido? I can't imagine the Thule ignoring these rich islands and their not-particularly-militarily-powerful native inhabitants.

Well.... They're facing the Chukchi, and the Chukchi are tough. The Chukchi are actually one of the few aboriginal peoples to make the Russians cry uncle. They kept the head of one particularly unpleasant Russian general as a trophy for years. South of the Chukchi are a related group called the Koryuks, equally tough customers and just as hard on the Russians. The Koryuk divided into two groups, the reindeer herders inland, and the fishers and sealers along the coast. South of the Koryuk were the Italmen. The Itelmen inhabited the southern part of the Kamchatka peninsula, lived in villages of hundreds, and were quite warlike. The Russians took down the Itelmen by exploiting their penchant for war upon each other.

In short, the Siberian Thule have to push through a succession of Buzz saws to get to Sakhalin and Hokaido. Moving south will get tougher and tougher and tougher.

What will happen is that the Thule will push the Chukchi back. The Chukchi will push the Koryuk back. The Koryuk will push into the Italmen, possibly establishing themselves as a ruling caste, or possibly pushing the Italmen even further south, or both.

2) You might just not have gotten to this point yet, but what happens when the Norse interchange introduces smallpox? Based on a tiny bit of research (http://books.google.bg/books?id=OBE...esc=y#v=onepage&q=smallpox in Siberia&f=false) it looks like Siberian populations were also susceptible to the disease.

The Norse interchange will not introduce smallpox. Remember that Norse expansion was like a series of Matrushka dolls. Norway was on the fringe of Europe. Iceland was colonized by a small subset of Norway. Greenland was colonized by a tiny subset of Iceland. European diseases had to pass through two sets of distance filters to get to Greenland, and largely, they didn't. By the time of contact, the Greenland Norse are isolated, forgotten and on their last legs, there's not enough sustained contact to create a disease bridge.

If anything, its the Greenland Norse who are going to be receiving Thule diseases.

Smallpox will come, and it will be devastating. But not just yet.

 

[The Sandman]

On the subject of moose: from an admittedly cursory Internet search, it looks to me as if their natural range includes the Pacific coastlines of BC, Washington and the Alaskan Panhandle, while musk oxen and caribou aren't natives of that particular region. So it might make sense for the hybrid Thule-Tlingit culture to turn to moose as an animal roughly similar to their existing domesticates that's better adapted for the local environment, especially if/when they start needing more draft animals to maintain their constructed/modified wetlands.

 

[DG Valdron]

On the subject of moose: from an admittedly cursory Internet search, it looks to me as if their natural range includes the Pacific coastlines of BC, Washington and the Alaskan Panhandle, while musk oxen and caribou aren't natives of that particular region. So it might make sense for the hybrid Thule-Tlingit culture to turn to moose as an animal roughly similar to their existing domesticates that's better adapted for the local environment, especially if/when they start needing more draft animals to maintain their constructed/modified wetlands.

Possibly but the simpler and more economic thing would be to import Caribou.

Any new domestication takes a certain amount of additional effort. There's a time and opportunity cost - you have to break the beasts, selectively breed for docility, learn to do harnesses, bridles, etc. Learn care and feeding, temperament. Importing a ready made domestic is cheaper. All that stuff is already done.

Seriously, it really is gilding the lilly to add another labour domesticate.

 

[Diez Mil Cantos]

just out of curiosity, you said that there were three diseases that the Thule would develop. I know u did a whole post on 'bruce', but what about 'joan' and 'mona'??? Are they still coming or has it been abandoned?

 

[DG Valdron]

Hey, you read the whole thing!

Yes, Bruce, a Thule STD derived from Brucellosis has emerged, approximately a century or so after Caribou domestication has gone widespread. It's had some impact on the southern peoples, may visit the Greenland Norse, and is going to be a charming surprise for Europeans.

Mona and Joan are coming down the pipe, I should write about them soon.

 

[Pesterfield]

So you can't find or plant a cattail marsh and depend on its continuous existence. Even in optimal water conditions, the very fact that cattails are growing there means that the environment will soon become impossible for cattails.

How long does that take though, and why do some places stay cattail marshes?

Some people do raise cattails, there's interest in them for biofuels, but I can't find anything on how modern cultivation is done.

 

[Danbensen]

They're facing the Chukchi, and the Chukchi are tough...Moving south will get tougher and tougher and tougher.

What about exploring down the coasts? Europeans colonized the Americas from the coasts inland. Even if it isn't colonization, there's always trade.

>>Smallpox will come, and it will be devastating. But not just yet.<<
I wait with baited breath.

Also, I am DEVASTATED that you're giving these guys domestic musk oxen rather than domestic moose. Just...devastated.

 

[DG Valdron]

This is an arctic agricultural civilization after all.

If it makes you feel better, I have domesticated surviving dinosaurs in my 'empire of Mu' timeline. Check it out.

 

[The Sandman]

Possibly but the simpler and more economic thing would be to import Caribou.

Any new domestication takes a certain amount of additional effort. There's a time and opportunity cost - you have to break the beasts, selectively breed for docility, learn to do harnesses, bridles, etc. Learn care and feeding, temperament. Importing a ready made domestic is cheaper. All that stuff is already done.

Seriously, it really is gilding the lilly to add another labour domesticate.

This is true, but does it apply to marshy environments?

Essentially, as mentioned before, the moose fills the water buffalo niche; outside of the specialized environment it's used in, it's unknown as a domesticate. But within that specialized niche, its resemblance to an existing domesticate that doesn't do so well there would seem to make it more likely that someone would try it under the assumption that they already know a decent bit about how to handle the animal.

So the moose wouldn't really be a Thule domesticate; it would be a Thule-Tlingit domesticate, used in the wetlands that culture lives amidst and engineers for their own purposes.

 

[DG Valdron]

Jesus H. Murgatroyd, you guys are persistent, aren't you.

We'll wait and see. We're getting very near the European era here. That throws a big wild card into things. Efforts at Moose domestication probably come about circa 1500-1600. Throw in another 50 to 100 years for domestication to spread and become fully established, with a clear domesticated working population. We may be looking as late ast 1700.

One thing about the farm research seemed to be that Moose diverged relatively fast. ie, that very early on, there were human tolerant moose that preferred to stick around the farm voluntarily, and moose that preferred to vanish off into the woods. So that's evidence of the population diverging into domestics and wilds within a couple of generations. So it could go earlier. But no earlyer, I think than 1550-1650.

The big troublesome variable will be Euro contact. Consider the massive depopulations from waves of diseases. Domestication may be achieved and then lost.

Of course, if someone wants to go and do their own Thule-Tinglit divergent 'moose domestication' timeline, welcome to it. Go have fun.

 

[The Sandman]

Jesus H. Murgatroyd, you guys are persistent, aren't you.

We'll wait and see. We're getting very near the European era here. That throws a big wild card into things. Efforts at Moose domestication probably come about circa 1500-1600. Throw in another 50 to 100 years for domestication to spread and become fully established, with a clear domesticated working population. We may be looking as late ast 1700.

One thing about the farm research seemed to be that Moose diverged relatively fast. ie, that very early on, there were human tolerant moose that preferred to stick around the farm voluntarily, and moose that preferred to vanish off into the woods. So that's evidence of the population diverging into domestics and wilds within a couple of generations. So it could go earlier. But no earlyer, I think than 1550-1650.

The big troublesome variable will be Euro contact. Consider the massive depopulations from waves of diseases. Domestication may be achieved and then lost.

Of course, if someone wants to go and do their own Thule-Tinglit divergent 'moose domestication' timeline, welcome to it. Go have fun.

Tlingit probably aren't getting hit by that until the mid to late 1700s. Barring the Thule getting hit early and the resulting epidemic crossing the continent overland before it burns out, I don't see how the diseases reach them until the Europeans are basically knocking at their front door; their contact with anything east of the Rockies is likely spotty at best, the Spanish didn't really do much north of California, and the Russians are probably going to be at least a few decades behind schedule on sending their own expeditions to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. So enough time to reach a point where the epidemics would actually make moose more useful, as there are now far fewer humans to do the necessary field labor.

 

[DG Valdron]

Bumping for the heck of it

 

[Falecius]

Bumping for the heck of it

Alway good to see signs of life in your TLs.

 

[eschaton]

This!

I hereby declare this to be Canon.

Yay! I'm glad I checked back in to see you came around to my conjecture.

We should note though, that iOTL it took 2-300 hundred years for the Anglo-Normans to move to speaking English as a first language (depending on what study you believe), and that the Thule Shamanic tradition will serve to bind the "Tinglo-Thule" upper class closer to the broader Thule culture and language than we might expect, as there are significant religio-cultural reasons why it's seen as important to be part of the Thule speaking world, as it links you into the trade and information exchange networks.

I'd actually use Arabic in North Africa as a model here, rather than French in England, because of this. If you want to be a shaman/partake of the sacred knowledge, you need to speak Thule, so there's a very strong incentive to learn.

Fair enough, although I'd see Persia as a possible analogue as well. Language replacement (at least partial) isn't unquestionable. It's more that I don't see the Northwest Coast cultures losing their distinctiveness just because they are taken over by the Thule culture, simply because by the time they get there, there could be tens of thousands, if not a few hundred thousand, people involved in the Northwest Coast agricultural complex.

 

[Admiral Matt]

Just found this. It has a strong beginning.

 

[Hnau]

Did maps get made for this yet? I've looked through quite a few pages and haven't found any, wondering if I missed some somewhere.