DBWI Done Properly, Hopefully: What if the Americas had been inhabited by humans?

Well, if one agrees with the argument of Morganstern in his controversial Whither, Atlantis?: The True History of Pre-Columbian America, (I certainly do not) there were inhabitants in the Americas, refugees from mythical Atlantis, existing at a high level of technology and communing with transcendental extraterrestrials and advancing to such a state of immaterial existence. One might wonder what sort of silly sativa Herr Morganstern was smoking to come up with such a EVBic theory.

Personally, I agree with Hodgkin and Gill's ideas of parallel development, wherein the civilizations of the New World would have been similar to those in the Old. The areas around the New Nile and other great rivers would develop similar civilizations as one saw in ancient Egypt and China, nomadic herders in the Great Plains like those of Asia's steppes, feuding tribalist societies in the tropical south, and so forth. A rather antiquated theory with some inadequecies, but I believe it is a reasonable framework for any potential New World civilization.
 
... mammoth-riding pyramid-builders? Yeah, a native American civilization would be awesome. I can just imagine our bronze age Homeric hero being tossed into a Colosseum to face off against giant sloths. :D

Can we introduce some dark religious background? Maybe the natives have some kind of pantheon that favors live human sacrifices and ritual warfare between large masses of slave-warriors. Some kind of Carthaginian element there would be fun to work with.
 

Thande

Donor
Can we introduce some dark religious background? Maybe the natives have some kind of pantheon that favors live human sacrifices and ritual warfare between large masses of slave-warriors. Some kind of Carthaginian element there would be fun to work with.

Now now, we have our fun, but let's not get too convergent, we're not Henry Frenchhen.
 
Who discovers who?

Who's to say that they wouldn't be discovering Europe? Norfth America has abundant resources..could they have been ahead of us? Though they might have had to be a wee bit more advanced to get to Europe than we had to be to get tehre--no reason to explore out that way, and contrary winds.
Still, Ceasar might have been more than a bit unhappy to have ships armed with cannons arriving in Imperial Rome...

(OOC...I'm assuming a butterfly trap is in effect until the Viking voyages of discovery, at least--perhaps until 1492)
 
Who's to say that they wouldn't be discovering Europe? Norfth America has abundant resources..could they have been ahead of us? Though they might have had to be a wee bit more advanced to get to Europe than we had to be to get tehre--no reason to explore out that way, and contrary winds.
Still, Ceasar might have been more than a bit unhappy to have ships armed with cannons arriving in Imperial Rome...
I'm not so sure.....what about that sociologist's theory, can't remember his name, that east-west landmasses produce more technology than north-south ones? Admittedly North America at least is closer to even than Africa, but even so.. And also, don't the current prevailing theories of economics indicate the areas rich in resources are more likely to stagnate?
Even so, I think the conflict between Americans and Europeans would be less one-sided thand Africans and Europeans...North America has so much saltpetre it's hard to imagine them not having gunpowder, though they probably won't have iron, just bronze.
Personally, I agree with Hodgkin and Gill's ideas of parallel development, wherein the civilizations of the New World would have been similar to those in the Old. The areas around the New Nile and other great rivers would develop similar civilizations as one saw in ancient Egypt and China, nomadic herders in the Great Plains like those of Asia's steppes, feuding tribalist societies in the tropical south, and so forth. A rather antiquated theory with some inadequecies, but I believe it is a reasonable framework for any potential New World civilization.
Indeed. I don't think the nomads would survive as independent states, though there'd probably be independence movements by now. Otherwise, I see an unsatisfactory division between agricultural native states and European colonies. As for agriculture....I think yellowheat can be adapted for mass food by pure selective breeding, as old wheat was. And there maybe food crops we haven't identified as such. I'm considering doing a guesswork map of what modern America would look like.
OOC: Is the New Nile the Mississipi?
 

ninebucks

Banned
Hopefully this would mean that the maps would be more interesting than This World's. I'm tired of looking at counterfactual maps that just show the Americas as massive blocs of land, divided along straight lines by European powers. With native ethnicities knocking around, the map is going to look much more detailed.
 
Well it seems likely these natives would have domesticated the llamas- modern scientists did afterall so given enough time I'd guess the locals would too.
I wonder though given that they'd have millenia to mess with them in what directions the llamas might evolve. Could they be bred into different directions?- a fatty meat llama, a sturdy and quick riding llama, a big muscly draught llama?
Or would the llamas have been wiped out? I mean the Australians killed off all their decently sized large animals and the American creatures were pretty damn stupid when it came to humans what with having evolved in isolation. We wiped out a fair amount of them on our own...
Or am I just getting too crazy and being different for the sake of it. Would not the native Americans have just domesticated the American horses...probally....that does leave the cow niche open for llamas though...
Heh.
Very sorry, I love llamas.

What of the megafauna?
Could ANY of it have survived until modern times?
As I've said the Australians did a good job of it with their giant critters but the Americas are a bigger place and some of the animals there...they gave gunpowder armed Europeans a hard enough time let alone primitive natives.
Which reminds me- wasn't there a discovery of native Peruvians a while back? Or rather shipwrecked Polynesians who lived there for a while until they all died for some reason. There were signs of the bones having been devoured.
Or was this all rubbish and these were just post-discovery people? Last I heard it was all a big mystery

What else could be useful in the Americas? Any special plants?
We never really bothered with native plants too much- except of course caca, which does the trick in its standard wild state- but given isolated people with only those plants to chose from might not some of them have developed into something useful? I mean...the original corn was pretty useless apparently, little better than grass, but the Mesopotamians over the millenia bred it into the useful stuff we have today.
Plants are particularly special. Lots of stuff out there which is edible and somewhat useful but not in a mass scale. Its hard to say what would have worked out in the long term...I mean over here in Europe there's lots of edible plants which we never bothered to domesticate and fully exploit to their maximum potential.
 
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As for your question, some random thoughs: I think the exploration of Americas would accelerate considerably. At the very least we could trade for maps with the natives. Also, don't forget the added incentive of plunder. The natives would have gathered, mined or crafted some goods ready for taking. On the other hand, either no or less slavery, as there would be enough potential workers in place already.

I also think that having native Americans would accelerate the exploration of the Americas. Consider how many colonies and expeditions failed due to hunger. If there were natives to trade with for food, who knows how far Europeans could have gotten.

By the way, what about this "Big Foot" creature and the so-called hobbits? Can we really be sure they aren't real? Much of the Americas is still unsettled and sparsely explored. I know ancient remains have been found and they have been classified as being less advanced primates. Still, could a human cousin have made it to the Americas, then died off? Or have scattered survivers still?
 
We'd probably still have a world-girdling Spanish Empire, with perhaps a Portuguese in second place. They didn't fight to keep their New World colonies very hard, preferring to take over already-settled places in Africa and Southeast Asia (guess they had a labor shortage or something, because I'm too cynical to buy the religious arguments), so Britain and France won out in the end - but if there was a native agricultural civilization, the Spanish would have got to it first, and then they'd have fought to keep it.

And I'm not convinced that we would have covered the whole continents as quickly. Maps and native guides help immensely in the initial explosion through already well settled areas, of course. But a few hostile Bronze Age locals are all it takes to turn marginal, forbidding landscape into a complete waste of time. Would anyone ever have bothered to settle the Alqali Basin [Nevada and Utah]? The Sea of Grass [Florida Everglades]? The high Rocky Mountains? Heck, faced with all the irritating landscape in between, add natives who want to keep their land (and why wouldn't they?) and I'm not sure Europeans would have ever spread past the New Nile Basin. Too much work for too little return.
 
I would have to agree that much depends on just how advanced these natives are and what the disease environment is like.

If the natives are tribal, like Africa, with about the same disease deadliness, the Americas are essentially more of Africa.

If the natives are tribal, but the disease environment is weaker, our colonies expand faster through trade with the locals before conquering them and overrunning the whole New World.

If the natives are about Chinese or Indian level of advancement, regardless of the disease environment, we have much the same dynamics at work in dealing with them. As with the Eastern powers, we would be playing power games with various American nations (unlikely there would be a unified empire over all of either continent) with a period of European dominance, giving way to liberation in the 20th century and modernization today. We have it bad enough with all our jobs going to India and China now; how much worse if the Americans were in on it too?
 
You missed two!

What if, as someone has mentioned, the natives are European level?

And what if they are more advanced? No plague, no dark ages?
 
If the Americas had been colonized, do you think the American fauna would have been wiped out by these "Americans" as it was by European settlers? Or could they have domesticaded the buffalo or the mountain sheep*? Also, would agriculture ever be developed there? IOTL were the Europeans who brought wheat and other grains to America, and there almost no plant worth of cultivation.


Well it seems likely these natives would have domesticated the llamas- modern scientists did afterall so given enough time I'd guess the locals would too.

***

What of the megafauna?
Could ANY of it have survived until modern times?
As I've said the Australians did a good job of it with their giant critters but the Americas are a bigger place and some of the animals there...they gave gunpowder armed Europeans a hard enough time let alone primitive natives.

What else could be useful in the Americas? Any special plants?
We never really bothered with native plants too much- except of course caca, which does the trick in its standard wild state- but given isolated people with only those plants to chose from might not some of them have developed into something useful? I mean...the original corn was pretty useless apparently, little better than grass, but the Mesopotamians over the millenia bred it into the useful stuff we have today.
Plants are particularly special. Lots of stuff out there which is edible and somewhat useful but not in a mass scale. Its hard to say what would have worked out in the long term...I mean over here in Europe there's lots of edible plants which we never bothered to domesticate and fully exploit to their maximum potential.

The challenge would be finding a high-carbohydrate plant that can be grown in large enough quantities to feed a community. And north of Istmo* there is simply nothing that people could use. South America has some root plants that could potentially be cultivated, but remember that any potential crop has to be usable for hunter-gathering people... otherwise they have no reason to notice it.

I do like the idea of domesticating some of the mountain-sheep, though. Alongside some small-scale plant growing, you might see the rise of nomadic herding societies in the Altiplano and nearby regions of South America. Elsewhere, though, we're probably going to find simple hunter-gatherer societies, like in Australia. So no mammoth riding pyramid builders, unfortunately.

And concerning the megafauna: it's pretty much an iron law of history that where man goes, mammoths die. A tragedy for history, really - we wouldn't even have the chance to see them in zoos. They'd be fossils, just like all the Eurasian megafauna. It's hard to imagine the Americas without mammoths, but there you are.

Now, if you allow for a Polynesian colonization, as mentioned, you'll get pigs and breadfruit and the potential for centralized chiefly societies. But the Polynesians could not possibly have reached the Americas before c. AD 1000, so that doesn't give them too much time to fill the continents. That does present some pretty amazing counterfactual possibilities, however. Imagine Genoese merchants sailing their way up what they believe to be an uninhabited stretch of Pacific coast, only to see a giant stone Rapa Nui head looming at them from the next bluff!**

ooc
*Panama.
**On second thought, that's probably too convergent to OTL - Rapanui civilization depended on sweet potatoes imported from South America, so it would be quite different in TTL... not to mention that the name "Rapa Nui" comes from the colonial era... well, tough. Rule of Cool.
 
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So much depends on when the Americas are colonized. We accept as a given that the Bering land bridge was impassable to humans, but it would have take only a slight climate shift for a window of possibility to open. That would give newcomers from Siberia as much as 10,000 years to spread out and populate the continents. Even if they brought only dogs and reindeer with them, they would find horses and other a rich ecosystem waiting for them below the glaciers.

Once wild rice is discovered and domesticated in the upper New Nile region around the Five Inland Seas, it could form the basis of a thriving agricultural society supporting hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people. And let's not forget that the same region has abundant copper and iron ore resources. It's possible. After all, look where Europe was only 2,500 years ago.

More recent arrivals from Polynesia, Japan, or China wouldn't have the time, of course, to expand their populations. But look how much trouble it was to tame those Norse savages in the upper northeast portion of the continent, and they'd been there for less than 500 years.

I do worry that if the continent is populated that long ago, the current inhabitants might be mre susceptible to our diseases.
 
Once wild rice is discovered and domesticated in the upper New Nile region around the Five Inland Seas, it could form the basis of a thriving agricultural society supporting hundreds of thousands

That area has some long, cold winters. Its hard to imagine a civilization developing there-- more likely to develop further south and spread north later, at which point they've already domesticated some other wild grain -- maybe some form of annual meadow grass, or some other wild subtropical grass further south -- that could be bred to to survive the harsher winters.
 
~SNIP~ native Peruvians ~SNIP~

:D Peruvians?

I assume you mean Paravians. Unless they really smoked a lot of leaf :D:D

OOC:
Peruvian = hippy. Adopted from a famous 60s Uni/College Wine-Drinking Society motto of Per Uva! "By the Grape" ;)
Paravia - peasant workers in ATL S America?
 
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