Could Antarctica have ever supported an indigenous population?

I'd probably say no, not unless there was drastic climate change earlier in history. I believe the Arctic Circle is more habitable overall and still can barely support any population (and many areas like Greenland and northernmost Canada were completely uninhabited until relatively recently, or are still uninhabited to this day).

Another problem would be that many of the cold northern hemisphere regions are connected to warmer areas by land, making it possible to travel there by foot or migrate regularly, neither of which would be possible for Antarctica.

I agree. Don't forget that the only part of Antarctica that isn't covered by ice and snow year round is the northernmost tip of the Peninsula, and the it's about 1000 km across the Drake Passage to Cape Horn in South America. BTW said passage is known for having very rough seas.

Antarctica is simply too far and too cold for any kind of permanent settlement to be sustainable. Scientific research stations don't qualify as settlements in my book.
 
There's a saying that they had about the circumpolar currents.

Beyond the 50's there is no law. Beyond the 60's, there is no God. The circumpolar currents and winds were savage and very difficult. I don't think that Iron Age sailing tech is going to handle it, particularly the distances.

Even with the advantage of an Iron Age tech base, that's not necessarily going to help.

If you look at the Canadian Arctic, you had quite sophisticated and technologically well prepared Europeans going there in the age of exploration, and a lot of them died, simply because the environment was so ferocious.

The Inuit thrived there, but even for the Inuit, they had to give up massive ground in Ellesmere and the Archipelago during the little Ice Age.

The thing to remember about the Inuit is that they were the culmination of a long evolving northern survival package. They lived in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth, but they were the heirs to the Dorsets and at least four prior cultures which incrementally developed tools and and techniques for surviving further and further north and maximizing the resources available. Thousands of years.

Here we're expecting someone to literally make that vast transition, into an even more barren and impoverished environment, in how long... a generation? A couple of years.

At best, your Yisreali's are going to visit and leave, and some will die. The ones that decide to try and stay, they'll all die. Unless someone leaves them a vast amount of every kind of supply. Then they might survive long enough to know they have to get the hell out.

I'm speaking as the guy who wrote both the Thule and Tsalal Timelines.

Which is why I value your opinion. Not that they won't try, but they'll either leave or die (probably some combination thereof). Which is probably for the best, as their own name for Antarctica is Tsalal.
 
The only half-plausible way I could see this happening is if some European empire decides to forcefully transplant some Inuit to the Northern tip of of Antartica's main peninsula, or one of the islands near it. But they'd need a reason to bother... maybe a half-cocked theory that the Inuit settlement would be able to provide support to a whaling station? Or maybe as an effort to produce "facts on the ground" justifying an imperial claim.

Whether they would actually qualify as "indigenous", or have any chance at survival, is another question.
 
Anyone who has the means to plant hundreds of people in Antarctica as a colonial power surely would also be aware that this is a death sentence.
 
Anyone who has the means to plant hundreds of people in Antarctica as a colonial power surely would also be aware that this is a death sentence.

For the Inuit? Not really.

The Antarctic waters have plenty of penguins, orca, seals, etc.

A few thousand Inuit would certainly be able to thrive on the Antarctic Peninsula; its climate is similar to that of Nunavut or Greenland.
 
For the Inuit? Not really.

The Antarctic waters have plenty of penguins, orca, seals, etc.

A few thousand Inuit would certainly be able to thrive on the Antarctic Peninsula; its climate is similar to that of Nunavut or Greenland.

All over Greenland, there are barrows which were essentially collapsed dwellings. Bad hunting seasons, bad weather, people slowly starved to death in their homes. During the little Ice Age, they largely abandoned Ellesmere and the Arctic Archipelago, and were confined to the Southern half of Greenland.

The Inuit survived on a seasonal life cycle - seals during the winter, spawning fish during spring and fall, and caribou, fox, ptarmigan and whatever else they could kill during summer. They made some limited use of plants during summer. Even there, as I said, sometimes they starved to death.

No caribou in Antarctica. The land resources are limited and very thin. No voles, foxes, ptarmigan, no land based ecology at all to speak of. The only land animals are the penguins, which are entirely dependent on the sea.

Without large or significant land animals, you're going to have handicaps - nothing for leather, for fur, no large bones or teeth for tools.

Basically, a large chunk of the very essential subsistence package is going to be missing. Maybe the Inuit can adapt, can focus entirely on sea, or can adjust... but I'm betting a lot of will starve. Remember, it took centuries to evolve the package they now have. It's hard to change it overnight.

My impression is that if you transplanted Inuit to the Antarctic, even the most habitable portions.... unless you provide a lot of support... tough.

You won't get thousands. But after a lot of dying and maybe a few decades or centuries of desperate adaptation... maybe a stable adapted population.
 
For the Inuit? Not really.

The Antarctic waters have plenty of penguins, orca, seals, etc.

A few thousand Inuit would certainly be able to thrive on the Antarctic Peninsula; its climate is similar to that of Nunavut or Greenland.

It is still a very hard task to adapt. You can't just move a population from a similar area to another similar area and expect them to hit the ground running. There is so much more to it than that. If the land, as in this case, is incredibly marginal and filled with awful weather and cold, then one is going to need massive ongoing support for the foreseeable future. This will be expensive.

By comparison, it is thought that the early Polynesian explorers had to leave the Auckland islands quite soon after they arrived, as there was little in the way of useful plant life to supplement their diet of seals, penguins or other bird life. Sure, the Polynesians are not the Inuit, but at least they had slowly worked their way down towards the Auckland Islands and were at least familiar with neighboring biomes.
 
so, it seems that any kind of permanent settlement is a no-go from the start. What about seasonal visitations to the peninsula? Did any of the peoples at the southern tip of SA have boating skills, enough to sail so far? And does the peninsula have any kind of visitation seasonally by fish/birds/seals, something that would inspire the natives to make the effort to go there once a year, maybe to collect a food bonus that they can't get locally? That's about the only way I can see to get anyone there at all...
 
I would say no. If Antarctica could support settlements it would already been settled. We humans are like that.
 
so, it seems that any kind of permanent settlement is a no-go from the start. What about seasonal visitations to the peninsula? Did any of the peoples at the southern tip of SA have boating skills, enough to sail so far? And does the peninsula have any kind of visitation seasonally by fish/birds/seals, something that would inspire the natives to make the effort to go there once a year, maybe to collect a food bonus that they can't get locally? That's about the only way I can see to get anyone there at all...

The Falklands are a hell of a lot closer to the Patagonian mainland and coastal islands, and orders of magnitude more hospitable, than anything in or around the Antarctic peninsula. There is some circumstantial evidence that the natives from Patagonia visited.
They do not appear to have settled. If they ever did, it did not last enough to leave significant traces.
The Yaghan and related groups probably had neither the capability, will or interest to sustain contact with the relatively close and habitable Falklands. Antarctica is immensely thougher, even allowing for incremental adaptation through island-hopping.
Each hop in the island chain is harder in terms of navigational skills, and leads to more barren land, that offers less resources to attempt another move from the new base. And even getting to the South Sandwich Islands, you won't be that much closer to Antarctica proper, although they'd provide a better training ground than Tierra del Fuego would be.

I argued in a similar thread time ago that you'd need:
a) a vastly increased ability to get in place (alive), which the Patagonians IOTL seem not have developed; and there are, as noted, some of the roughest seas in the world in the way. That could be the relatively easy part; give the Yaghan, or a similar group in the area, any reason to consider settlement and continued contact in the Falklands, and things just might evolve from there into creating a package of skill and technology that ends up working for the passage. I suggested an earlier Polynesian contact that transfers top-level navigational ability in the general area in the thread back then, but nothing prevents the alt-Yaghan to figure it out by themselves given time and motivation to keep investing in maritime endeavors forbidding conditions notwithstanding.
b) the ability to survive there in long term. In my opinion, this means the ability to transform the local ecology and/or transport your own and install it in Palmer's Land. This means something akin to agriculture.
The utter lack anything edible from the land itself is a big limiting factor for a hunter-gatherer subsistence society. Perhaps a small group just might to eke out a living... but would they bother?
No, you want to make that landscape more welcoming. This means, more or less, agriculture. You'd need to come out with a Yaghan parallel of the Thule package in DValdron's Thule timeline, or to transfer that very package or a very similar one to the Yaghan & friends.
Of course, a native South Patagonia with an extreme agricultural package (which would be hard to adapt to the far more forbidding Antactica anyway, but offers a remote chance, maybe) would in itself a more plausible environment for the development of the transport capabilities.

So, the question is, is it possible to pull a "Land of Ice and Mice" in the farthest southern tips of island Patagonia (more northerly parts won't work much, you need to have crops that can survive tundra conditions, which exist only in a relatively small area around Cape Horn itself, not even covering most of Tierra del Fuego)?
Sounds problematic.
 
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Unlikely. Too big a jump.

Theoretically, you might be able to support a bare subsistence population based on seals, penguins, fish and seaweeds, but it would be pretty marginal.

The big problem is that there's no way for that subsistence population to evolve. In the Arctic, people have refuge south and an immense borderland to exist in, while developing the cultural toolkit to survive. Here? There's no intermediate steps.

Feugian boat people. Have them become more reliant on sealing and fishing. At some point, a permanent population is established on the Falklands. Sealers and Penguin rookers island hop from there to South Georgia, than to Coronation Island, to Elephant Island, and finally to the northern Antarctic Peninsula.
 
Not feasible.

First, the Falklands do you no good, they're actually due North, and East of Tierra Del Fuego. Distances range from 350 to 500 kilometers. They also don't get you anywhere. It's 1210 from the Falklands to the South Orkney Islands, and 1370 from the Falklands to South Georgia/Sandwhich. If you want to take the long route, its 2200 from the Falklands to the South Orkney's, with a stopover in South Sandwhich. Add in another 500 from South Orkney to South Shetlands, 1710 to 2710, and another hundred from there to the coast, 1810 to 2810. So really, the Falkland aren't stepping stones to anywhere. The gaps are too immense.

You might as well jump straight from Tierra Del Fuego to the South Shetlands directly, that's 850 kilometers, from there to another 100 to the peninsula, 950 kilometers.

Of course, that's as the crow flies. Conservatively, you would want to double or triple those distances, because almost certainly, they wouldn't be travelling directly. You couldn't travel directly south the 950 kilometers from Tierra to Antarctica because the winds wouldn't let you. No southerly winds at all - just the 'West Wind Drift'

You could use the West Wind Drift to travel from South America to the Falklands, and people inadvertently did. And you could use that same West Wind Drift to travel to South Sandwhich. But then you're screwed. The Winds are going in the wrong direction now, you've got to move opposite the winds to get from South Sandwhich to South Orkney. So you can't actually get there that way.

So your better attempt would be to Island hop from Fuego or Falklands directly to South Orkney. That gets you closer. But the winds are still going in the wrong direction now, to jump to South Shetland. So you can't get there that way, either.

Keep in mind that these winds are not gentle breezes. No, they're known as the Furious Fifties ("there is no law") and the Screaming Sixties ("there is no god).

I did some calculations of distances:


*Tierra Del Fuego to Falklands - 350 to 500 kilometers
*1370 from the Falklands to the South Georgia and South Sandwhich Islands
*850 from South Sandwich to South Orkney
*1210 from Falklands to South Orkney
*1660 from Tierra Del Fuego to South Sandwhich
*1260 from Tierra Del Fuego to South Orkney
* 850 from Tierra Del Fuego to the South Shetlands
* 1050 from Falklands to the South Shetlands
* 500 kilometers, South Orkney to South Shetlands
100 Kilometers from South Shetlands to the Antarctic Peninsula

Here's a map: of the Islands

Antarctica_Map.png
 

Here's a Map of the Currents:
Antarctic_Divergence.gif


It would almost be easier for Tierra Del Fuego to colonize Africa.

I can't see how the local boats or quality of navigation could stand up to that.

When I ran the numbers and currents for Land of Ice and Mice, there were a lot more Islands, they were a lot bigger, the extreme maximum distances were 350 to 500 km, and there were a lot of local crossings of up to 5 to 100 km to cut teeth on, and an intense cultural tradition of accessing sea protein on a regular basis. A lot of the big crossings had intermediary island specs to land on.

And remember, the winds don't change direction. So anywhere they take you... it's a one way trip. You can't get home.

This is simply beyond infeasible.
 
A drastic ASB climate change , so that the coasts are inhabitable ? Would be interesting, if different indigenous people settle there from different directions. Austronesians, Paleoindians, Polynesians .

Another ASB scenario not involving climate change is give Neanderthals Inuit level tech and let them have a refuge where they are better adapted than Sapiens.
 
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