Deleted member 166308
If they knew about the sea they would have just told them.
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What Would the World Look Like Without the Concept of Continents?
dcharles
Banned
I'm probably being a poor communicator here, but my point is this:
The history of Western (generally meaning white) contact with tribal and indigenous peoples is so fraught with racism, elitism, and ethnocentrism that any and all claims that boil down to "these savages don't know the first thing about the world around them" should be regarded with boulders of salt.
The tribes of northern California could have been manufacturing surfboards, and whatever Dr. Livingston found them would have still said "the savages only seem to have the vaguest knowledge of the ocean."
Deleted member 166308
I mean, possibly, but there's no reason to assume that they should know about the ocean.
dcharles
Banned
Yes, there are.
All of the other people (probably thousands of them) who lived in the approx. 150 mile zone between them and the ocean.
The burden of proof should always be on the parties who are claiming that people who have lived in an area for thousands of years don't know basic facts about the world around them.
In this case, the basic fact would be that the ocean is about a week and a half's walk away.
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Deleted member 166308
He does make good points. After all, it's perfectly possible traders would spread information of the sea to inland peoples. It's not a very great distance and we have archaeological evidence of goods traded in prehistory thousands of miles away from their original location, so why couldn't the Native Californians have done something similar?
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dcharles
Banned
Always.
And I am making an a priori argument. That in essence, the natural inclination of people to explore their surroundings, acquire knowledge, and talk to others is so strong (my a priori assumptions), that societies living within a couple weeks' journey to the ocean all probably knew of it's existence.
That being said, it doesn't therefore follow that every single individual did. There's always people who are dumb as fenceposts. Just because our society knows of the existence of the Solar System, it doesn't therefore follow that every person in society is going to be able to tell you the order of the planets. And there will be some that get the most basic facts wrong--I'm sure there's people out there who forgot that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around.
Furthermore, I can see how a society might lose basic geographical knowledge in extreme circumstances--like a genocide. Say the US Cavalry comes and massacres all the adults in a tribe. The surviving adolescents and children might retreat to the hills, abandoning historical trade networks and contacts in other tribes, and over the course of a generation or two, become quite ignorant and reclusive. But that survivor's contingent isn't really a society anymore; they're just a group of traumatized refugees who are trying to eke out a living and not get massacred like their parents did.
Unfortunately I've already spent an hour trying to track down this source in my very unorganised folders, but it would have been 1930s-era (and thus interviewing elders who were children in the 1850s) rather than a random report from earlier times (which I generally take with a grain of salt because misinterpretations are everywhere and they are indeed written in a elitist, dismissive tone). I will try and track down this source when I have more time.
Yes, the same people whom they met only a few times a year and were just as likely to be fighting with as they were trading.
It's not much different than how before the mid-20th century we barely knew about all sorts of features barely 150 miles out to sea or 150 miles over our heads. Sure, a fisherman probably knows there's something interesting down there based on the depth and the catches of fish, and the guy at the observatory probably knows something about those features in the sky, but otherwise nobody gives it much thought especially if they don't talk to fishermen, astronomers, or their relatives. If it doesn't matter to your daily life and you have minimal contact with anyone who it does matter, why should you waste time thinking anything other than "yeah, this place exists." It doesn't necessarily make you ignorant to think that, and obviously I'm not calling any indigenous group anywhere stupid because they don't know facts that are of little relevence to them anymore than I'd call medieval Europeans stupid because they didn't know the Earth revolved around the Sun.
My argument referring to California was not that people never knew of the sea so much as "they knew it existed, but gave it little further thought because it was as relevant to them as space is to us." With New Guinea, I'd be inclined to believe there are a few similar people, including those who would believe the ocean is only in one direction from them (and thus a belief they don't live on an island, at least anymore than flat earth theories in various cultures that believes the world is surrounded by water). because the island is even more rugged and there are even more ethnic groups thanks to the many valleys.
Crazy Boris
Banned
Let’s play a game called get back on track instead of debate club
I think that without continents as a concept, the conception of geography would probably more regionally-based
Instead of seas, large rivers and mountain ranges become dividers for land areas. If there’s no concept of “Asia”, you can have places like India bound by the Indus, Himalayas, and Bhramaputra acting as the base divisions of the world. Larger islands like Greenland could get “alt-continent” distinction just from being disconnected from other land masses by far enough.
Either that, or people divide up the world more along cultural lines, ie; Sinosphere, Arab World, Orthodox Christendom, etc.
I think that without continents as a concept, the conception of geography would probably more regionally-based
Instead of seas, large rivers and mountain ranges become dividers for land areas. If there’s no concept of “Asia”, you can have places like India bound by the Indus, Himalayas, and Bhramaputra acting as the base divisions of the world. Larger islands like Greenland could get “alt-continent” distinction just from being disconnected from other land masses by far enough.
Either that, or people divide up the world more along cultural lines, ie; Sinosphere, Arab World, Orthodox Christendom, etc.
Exactly... (on both points
) A good OTL example of this would be the commonly-accepted (and entirely arbitrary) division of the Eurasian landmass into "Europe" and "Asia"... an alt-historical process could've carried this Balkanization of large land masses to other continents as well. Mountain ranges, deserts, etc made more near-impenetrable barriers in the remote past than seas did...
I still think that eventually, as the world "shrank" and cartographic knowledge increased, the concept of "continent" would be near-unavoidable...
I think most of the boundaries of todays continents developed not as much as strictly geographical divisions but more along geopolitical and ethnographic lines. The fact that most often they use coastlines as division lines is just a geopolitical feature.
So if for a thought experiment, an alien geographer who had no notion about our concept of continents, would be tasked with writing a geography of Earth, he would quickly establish there is a Chino-Asian, Indo-Asian 'European-western', South-American, middle-Eastern, and Southern-African block of regions, a distinct island-culture in the Pacific And a large uninhabited, frozen landmass at the South Pole. (If he doesn't consider land-masses that important, he might also add the islands and ice-masses of the arctic as an additional entity)
Refining his 'region groupig', he will quickly lump Japan with the Chino-Asian regions, and probably merge India and a few other countries with them for geographical reasons, calling them 'Continent X, eastern part and Continent-X western part. Likewise he will originally lump Europe, Australia and North America together for having the same culture and ethnography, but split off Australia for being too far away from the others and having a likewise but still distinctively different zoology. If this were the 1400's, he would move North-America with South-America into one group, by 1800, he would split the two, but keep North-America a separate region. Today, he would probably merge North-America and Europe together.
No idea what he would do with the 'near East' and 'Middle East': move it with Sub-Saharan Africa, move it with Europe and make the Sahara the boundary between the continents or keep it as a separate entity, possibly including Pakistan and several majority-muslim islands in Asia.... My guess is as good as yours
Still, his division will be between 55 and 75% compatible with our 'western' division of 'continents'.
To recap, our current notion of continents is a pretty arbitrary division stemming from notions of the Greco-Roman world, adapted to fit over the ages to fit our understanding of the world. Could it be done differently? Surr, done better? Probably. Would it matter in the end? Not really. So what gives? Why ask. It's still a nice topic to debate on sites like AH.com
So if for a thought experiment, an alien geographer who had no notion about our concept of continents, would be tasked with writing a geography of Earth, he would quickly establish there is a Chino-Asian, Indo-Asian 'European-western', South-American, middle-Eastern, and Southern-African block of regions, a distinct island-culture in the Pacific And a large uninhabited, frozen landmass at the South Pole. (If he doesn't consider land-masses that important, he might also add the islands and ice-masses of the arctic as an additional entity)
Refining his 'region groupig', he will quickly lump Japan with the Chino-Asian regions, and probably merge India and a few other countries with them for geographical reasons, calling them 'Continent X, eastern part and Continent-X western part. Likewise he will originally lump Europe, Australia and North America together for having the same culture and ethnography, but split off Australia for being too far away from the others and having a likewise but still distinctively different zoology. If this were the 1400's, he would move North-America with South-America into one group, by 1800, he would split the two, but keep North-America a separate region. Today, he would probably merge North-America and Europe together.
No idea what he would do with the 'near East' and 'Middle East': move it with Sub-Saharan Africa, move it with Europe and make the Sahara the boundary between the continents or keep it as a separate entity, possibly including Pakistan and several majority-muslim islands in Asia.... My guess is as good as yours
Still, his division will be between 55 and 75% compatible with our 'western' division of 'continents'.
To recap, our current notion of continents is a pretty arbitrary division stemming from notions of the Greco-Roman world, adapted to fit over the ages to fit our understanding of the world. Could it be done differently? Surr, done better? Probably. Would it matter in the end? Not really. So what gives? Why ask. It's still a nice topic to debate on sites like AH.com
Either that, or he'd go with the Old World as the "greater continental mass" and the New World as the "lesser continental mass" and everything else as islands like the Race did in the Worldwar series.
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
And even so there's no consensus that North and South America are two continents, while no one much bothers about Greenland.
One I've considered is a concept akin to civilizations taking the place of continents. So China, India, probably Persia and the Middle East are straightforward. The West is a little tricky - is it the Med, or Europe? Southern Europe and Anatolia? where does Egypt go? - but it could obviously have happened.
Then if that normalized, it would be natural to identify similarly sized chunks, even if they weren't cradles of civilization: Central Asia, Indonesia/Malaya/Philippines, European Russia, the Sahara, etc. Taken to a form of modernity, this would be extended to most things: Greenland, Patagonia, Australia....
They'd still have to more or less handwave Oceania, though.
Or a division's between Iraq and Iran, so from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west is "Arabia", while the Perso-Turkic region from Iran to Pakistan and north into Central Asia/western China is something different, despite the shared religion. Either separate or together works.
Deleted member 166308
Oceania could be divided into "Australia" (Australia and Tasmania), and "Oceania" (Melanesia and Polynesia).
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
That's sometimes the case in our timeline, that's my point. Australia is clear enough, sure. But just as with continents IOTL, roping a swathe of very distant, very small islands together with an arbitrary line creates a qualitatively different entity to all the other landmasses it's equated with. It's not even very comparable to the East Indies.
There's a rather good TL (currently either dead or on hiatus, I think) about the aftermath of a Persian conquest of Greeks. In the various glimpses given to the future, it is suggested that without the Greek concept of "Asia" (all the people to the east of us we don't like) people don't think of geography in the same sense we do: people thinking of that part of the world don't usually think of what we think of Asia, but of the "Persian east" (Persia becoming in this world a China-like "eternal empire"), what we consider the Indian subcontinent and what we'd call the far east are the largest _meaningful_ geographic divisions of the region. Sure, there's a technical geographic term comparable to our "continent" meaning "the very largest bodies of land surrounded by water" which applies to Africa and what we call Eurasia, but it's not something most people think of when discussing international politics.
The thing is, in our world we tend to infuse what should be a strictly _geographic_ term with cultural and social meaning: "Asia" and "Africa" are often talked about as if they were all one thing, set in opposition to Europe or North America. Meanwhile, North America includes the US, Canada and culturally very different Mexico+Central America+the Caribbean, but those often tend to discussed not so much as North American nations as "Caribbean" and "Latin American" nations. That cultural baggage comes along, in part due to "Christian Europe" conquering most of the globe and being able to contrast itself as the "white continent" in contrast to the decadent brown and yellow Asians and the barbaric "Africans" (never mind the Arabs in the north of the Continent, that's the "Middle East" or the "Near East" or whatever.)
We tend to muddle cultural/civilizational concepts with ones of physical geography: historically, where Europe ended and the Other began was often pretty cloudy due to invasion or counterinvasion, or suspicion of the "European -ness" of nations like Russia and later the USSR. One writer talked about, in the days of the Ottoman presence in Europe, Asia starting just east of Vienna, and who can forget the dismissive "Africa begins at the Pyrenees?" Another culture might avoid this muddle to some extent by not confusing a somewhat technical geographic division with meaningful cultural ones, although they'd probably still end up lumping together peoples which would rather not be.
And, in those timelines where Europe is divided between strongly distinct civilizations or is a relatively backwards place, it's the same thing as India: a peninsula of Asia.
Edit: in timelines where something like Russia in geographic extent exists, it well could be another, "north Eurasian/steppe and tundra" zone. I wonder if we could get a "great Eurasian plain" - low countries to lake Baikal - civilization in contrast to a "Mediterranean" civilization?
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Back during the days of Rome, wasn’t North Africa seen as basically an extension of Europe?
That seems partially related to this topic.
That seems partially related to this topic.