Consequences of no Native Americans

I thought the racist attitude predated the French and Indian Wars.

The colonists did indeed have the usual sense of racial superiority, and there were some earlier conflicts with the natives, but it was the F&IW that really cemented the hate and fear into the English colonists...
 
The Natives and the Europeans always had a love/hate thing going. In some times and places, there was peaceful trade and cooperation. In others, brutal wars and rivers of spilled blood. Sometimes some Natives and some Europeans fought together against other Natives (it's how the Spanish were able to steamroll over the Aztec Empire) or other Europeans (like the French and Indian War). Sometimes the Natives were victims of brutal and racist European policies. And sometimes the Natives were guilty of what today we would have to call terrorism and slaughtered innocent European civilians.

Both sides were equally capable of atrocity and equally capable of cooperation. So let's not pretend that the Natives were either the vicious rampaging "Injuns" of earlier myth or the peaceful, nature-loving hippies of modern myth. Mmkay?

Moving on, if there had never been any Natives, this landmass would be a very different place. It would have been a complete wilderness, and it's hard to imagine what would have drawn large numbers of settlers. Food sources would be much less varied and much less nutritious without Native cultivation. Forests would cover a lot more of the land. (Many Native groups practiced slash-and-burn agriculture.) Lean times would be leaner, and there would be no one to help the colonists, so a lot more early colonies would vanish from cold and starvation. The gold would be there, but there wouldn't be any outward signs of it or rumors of it, so the Spanish incentive to fill up the land searching for wealth wouldn't be there.

In places where the Europeans could get a foothold and turn the land to their own purposes, they wouldn't be hindered by wars with Natives or with considerations of leaving some areas (however temporarily) to the Natives. So the only barriers to their expansion would be how much land they could practically use and whether any other European powers were trying to use the same land. But it would be harder to get that foothold, and not much incentive to come over at first. So I think the era of colonization would take much longer to get going than in OTL, but would get faster and faster once things did get going. Like a freight train that needs time to build up steam before it can get to speed.
 
Well, without Native Americans colonization will be significantly harder since there will be no Native Peoples to help settlers establish themselves, guide Europeans
No American Aborigines as Slaves.
Forests would cover a lot more of the land. (Many Native groups practiced slash-and-burn agriculture.)
They would also be a lot denser/impenetrable. Most American Aboriginal Tribes practiced extensive Forest Management & Maintenance.

I believe that Colonization would be Glacial compared to OTL.
 
Both sides were equally capable of atrocity and equally capable of cooperation. So let's not pretend that the Natives were either the vicious rampaging "Injuns" of earlier myth or the peaceful, nature-loving hippies of modern myth. Mmkay?

Hmm... I'm starting to like you Cicero, never a good thing :) You state what I believe in such a much more elegant way than I.

So I think the era of colonization would take much longer to get going than in OTL, but would get faster and faster once things did get going. Like a freight train that needs time to build up steam before it can get to speed.

Again, totally agreed - however, I did want to point such colonies as the Nordic one was purely for expansionism - not religion, not trade goods, just 'living room'. Plymouth colony comes to mind as well, a colony built simply because of religious persecution back home. Hmm, does that mean the Zionists or Jews might have sailed West earlier if no Natives?

That said, there was a 2nd reason for coming here, with or without Natives. Trade goods such as Pot Ash, trapper's furs and others would still have drawn trappers, traders, scouts, and eventually farmers and townsfolk would have appeared or migrated. In addition, you always have that small percentage of the population, the undesirables, that are, throughout history, moving to the 'new lands' whether under formalized arrangements like Austrailia, or the western drive of colonization before Manifest Destiny in the form of scouts. Sometimes even just the desire to know what is out there 'Lewis & Clark' like.

Slow start yes, possibly even slower than I'd care to speculate.
Faster expansion after start? Perhaps, depending on how hard the colonists cling to the 'European methods' in the New World. They weren't very applicable, yet still clung to quite stubbornly - both Nordic & European colonizations had that problem - which was one reason why Greenland colonies foundered, along with climate change, lack of adaptability, and disease.

If there were no natives, I do wonder if they would founded l'aix Meadows or not. If they did so with no natives, and got a couple critical resupplies from home as well as a somewhat larger number of people in, then they would very likely have colonized most of the eastern seaboard.

Wow - that would lead to a Nordic N. American, wouldn't it? I'd speculate the Europeans would still have a technological edge, especially if contact was cut ~1100, that would lead to wars, etc. but it would sure be a different timeline from OTL - almost unrecognizably different :)
 
The last of the Native groups, the ancestors of the people who would in OTL become the Eskimo/Inuit, arrive two thousand years after the cataclysm, but fail to thrive on the devastated continent.

I think this is the weakpoint in your scenario.
 
Not just Jews. But Muslims perhaps maybe fleeing from the Reconquista? I doubt Christopher Columbus' discoveries of lands in the west would garner much interest if the islands are practically unpopulated so the Spaniards continue their war against the Muslims into North Africa and beyond with maybe minor expeditions to the New World. I can see small trickles of Muslims and Jews head west.
 
Actually, the OP forbids that explicitly:

The impact, probably equivalent to thousands of megatons, wipes out not only the American megafauna, but the human population as well. Man never manages to reach South America. The last of the Native groups, the ancestors of the people who would in OTL become the Eskimo/Inuit, arrive two thousand years after the cataclysm, but fail to thrive on the devastated continent.

Obviously the point of the thread was to discuss how colonization would go if there were no people in the Americas when the Europeans arrived. To say that some other group arrived in ancient enough times to replicate the effects the Natives had on the continent smacks of missing the point.
 
One major possibility you should consider is that ice-age megafauna will survive without the Native Americans.
Obviously this is controversial-was it the ice age, hunters, or your timeline's Tunguska-like event that killed off the megafauna? Tough to say, and your choice decides whether or not mammoths, mastadons, terror birds, and all those other goodies exist in the Americas.
But I for one would love to see the look on Hernan Cortez's face when he lands on Mexico and is charged by a herd of hairy elephants.
 
One major possibility you should consider is that ice-age megafauna will survive without the Native Americans.
Obviously this is controversial-was it the ice age, hunters, or your timeline's Tunguska-like event that killed off the megafauna? Tough to say, and your choice decides whether or not mammoths, mastadons, terror birds, and all those other goodies exist in the Americas.
But I for one would love to see the look on Hernan Cortez's face when he lands on Mexico and is charged by a herd of hairy elephants.

Hmm...as an ecologist by trade, I'm gonna say "yes." Even assuming the worst-case scenario, the megafauna in Mexico, Central America, and probably the American southwest and California are going to survive the comet and associated firestorms.

Virtually all of the megafauna found in the U.S. were also found throughout Mexico, meaning that the Mexican megafaunal remnant will have the entire north to repopulate with no population pressure from human hunters.

So yeah, Hernan Cortez would find a very different Mexico than our own. There would be terror birds in Texas, giant cabybaras (and llamas) in Florida, and the Midwestern plains would look like a bizarro-world version of the African savanna, with multiple species of pronghorns and convergently-evolved "cheetahs" to run them down. Not to mention American lions, and worse, Smilodons.
 
One major possibility you should consider is that ice-age megafauna will survive without the Native Americans.
Obviously this is controversial-was it the ice age, hunters, or your timeline's Tunguska-like event that killed off the megafauna? Tough to say, and your choice decides whether or not mammoths, mastadons, terror birds, and all those other goodies exist in the Americas.
But I for one would love to see the look on Hernan Cortez's face when he lands on Mexico and is charged by a herd of hairy elephants.

Or be hunted down by packs of Smildon. :D
 
I'm sorry, but this a very old-fashioned and racist idea of Native Americans. They weren't running around randomly killing every White person they saw, for the most part, they coexisted with them, and traded with them local resources for European imports.

Saying that they were nothing but an impediment for colonisation, while, in fact, they were more often on the brunt of wars of extermination, seems very disingenuous.

For the majority of New World settlement, this is true. Historians have remarked as to who the "savages" really were when it came to colonization.

Centuries before Columbus, the Norsemen made it to the New World. Whether they met with hostility or were simply assimilated is not clear since their accounts did not make it back to Europe. The Norse would have landed in very harsh territory. Had there been no natives, there would not have been competition for sparse resources. The visitors would have been on their own and some expeditions might have made it back to spread the word.

The net result would have been far fewer resources in the New World to utilize, but knowledge of its existence might have spread to Europe centuries sooner.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
For the majority of New World settlement, this is true. Historians have remarked as to who the "savages" really were when it came to colonization.

Centuries before Columbus, the Norsemen made it to the New World. Whether they met with hostility or were simply assimilated is not clear since their accounts did not make it back to Europe. The Norse would have landed in very harsh territory. Had there been no natives, there would not have been competition for sparse resources. The visitors would have been on their own and some expeditions might have made it back to spread the word.

While it would be harsh for the Norse settlers to survive in the new land, let remember that these people had colonised Iceland and Greenland which was worse, and inner Scandinavia was howling wilderness.

They would likely have treated the new area as a new Greenland, food aren't going to be a big problem in the start, with animals whom aren't used to Humans. Likely we would see Norse bygds spread down the American east coast and along the rivers, but even with a explosive population growth it's still going to rather empty in 1500, through a few Norse settlements may exist in the Caribbian (it's going to lack tropical diseases, because of the lack of Humans). Cultural I expect it will be much like medieval Iceland rather anarchistic semi-democracy, where the patricians of the different houshold votes. We will likely see a split between rural and urban household, where a urban bygd can be dominated by a single household, while the towns look more the North German and Baltic free cities.
It will likely keep contact with Europe and in the first few centuries the main import from Europe will be thralls until the last Pagan statelets has gone the way of the Dodo. The main export to Europe will be furs and precious metals.
Religeous they will likely be Christians and the priest will likely have a important position in society, if Vinland stay in communion with Rome, the priest will be celibate, and clerical property may be large enough to beginning to look like proto states. If they have cut off from Rome, the priesthood may have evolved into a local strongman position.



The net result would have been far fewer resources in the New World to utilize, but knowledge of its existence might have spread to Europe centuries sooner.
 
Wouldn't there be tropical diseases even without Humans?

Yes, but some of the worst, like yellow fever, would not exist in the Americas. Yellow fever was an import from Africa.

I don't know if malaria was present in the New World or not...I'll need to look that up...

I wonder if the presence of mammoths could start some sort of trans-Atlantic ivory trade in the middle ages?
 
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