When Orcs Were Real
treeofwoe.substack.com
treeofwoe.substack.com
https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2010/10/killer-neandertal...
Realistically, probably both posts are wrong but we'll never know about which aspects. 10,000 years is a long time, there should have been multiple occurrences of the impossible. History is huge, and we only have tattered records for 1 in ~3,000 years events.
There is no need to beat around the bush. The linked article fully refutes the original one.
The first "evidence that they may have had the technology to make sewn garments" link [0] looks like some dude ran a model. Now it is certainly possible to claim that as conclusive evidence. But probably only in a debate between historians, I wouldn't bank on it.
50,000 years ago is a long time. There is not a lot of confidence about how things happened, and reality defies mixing generalisation and truth.
[0] https://anthropology.net/2009/06/26/neanderthals-dried-fresh...
That's a pretty weak defense, is why I'm asking. Almost anything else would be more convincing. So maybe it's worth asking whether you've got anything else to offer.
What do you think is going on here? There isn't enough evidence to create an accurate truth, we've got no way of deciding if an accurate truth has been uncovered and it doesn't matter at all anyway. The process by which "truth" is found has a heavy bias towards good storytelling and typically strong political overtones.
Do you feel HN is upvoting the story because anyone feels that accurately depicting the neanderthal lifestyle will have profound bearing on the course of the modern world? I doubt even the historians think that. Maybe something will come of it, but realistically everyone is in this for the fun of imagining what might have happened, and the joy of arguing about it confidently from flimsy evidence.
Well, to go by your prior comments, you're confusing "pick whatever just-so story you like" with how history is done. Feel free to continue, of course; I've more or less given up arguing with post-truthers in general, and certainly see no point in doing so here.
Anyway, I'm not trying to compel you, I'm just trying to include some important points in the discussion.
"Now he that by the arguments here adduced shall frame a judgment of the things past and not believe rather that they were such as the poets have sung or prose-writers have composed, more delightfully to the ear than conformably to the truth, as being things not to be disproved and by length of time turned for the most part into the nature of fables without credit, but shall think them here searched out by the most evident signs that can be, and sufficiently too, considering their antiquity: he, I say, shall not err....
"To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. "
Wow, that describes Internet posts (and HN comments), but it's utterly unlike the serious histories I've read, which are filled with primary evidence and incredible amounts of research, with the historians traveling around the world digging up new evidence in archives and museums.
If you want far better histories than what you've encountered, I suggest looking up the topic you are interested in on a college syllabus. The Open Syllabus Project[0], which collects millions of college syllabi and offers statistics too (most assigned, etc.) is a great resource. Or better, ask a reference librarian in the topic at a research library (e.g., a university) - I find they will often help people with recommendations if you are polite and show that you've made an effort to learn what you can without them.
When someone gets introduced as a "heterodox thinker", there's always something badly thought-out coming.
The minute I saw "horizontal slit eyes" I was pretty much done. There's literally no way to know if that was true, for that to be a claim in a proposed theory rightly discredits that theory. I can see them being hairy. But deducing from having larger eyes that they'd be nocturnal and therefore have horizontal slit eyes...
And then there's the issue of the flat face. I'm no anthropologist but I understand the structure of the face and I have seen a few pictures of Neanderthal skulls, they absolutely had a protruding hooded nose just like us, no doubt about it.
Looking at a skeleton, they obviously are very similar to us in form. All this stuff about them being vastly different looking monstrous human relatives is just fantasy.
What’s weird is that the advocate of the orc theory just throws in details without even considering whether they’re plausible. A full hair coat? Easy, we already have hair, and most of our “relatives” have full coats. Larger teeth? Sure. A gain of function that’s been lost to an entire phylum, including the apes he references? Unlikely.
Heck, it would not get attempted due to ethical issues, but technically it might be even plausible to clone a neanderthal using a human surrogate mother, there has been some work in cross-species cloning.
Another weird thing, So we have found evidence of the feathers of dinosaurs, but not the fur of something from 40k years ago? that seems rather unlikely. In this case, the absence of evidence for fur is evidence of its absence, much like the absence of worked neanderthal clothing is. A better simpler explanation would be, they had decent subdermal isolation and brown fat. While most people today think humans cant work outside on a typical winter day in northern europe without clothes, they are just wrong. Go to any country with a snowy winter and ask the first person you meet if they have that one friend or acquaintance who goes about in shorts and tshirt during winter, who seems just absurdly resistant to cold in general. They will give you a name. Luck, ample food and cold growing up, and you too could be walking barefoot through the snow with me, feel the refreshing -5 C wind on your chest when snowboarding in a tshirt, and alway be told you everytime you leave somewhere that you arent wearing enough jackets, pants, scarfs, gloves, and hats.
Besides its unnecessary for the story being told. Humans lived next to chimps and gorillas for millenia and they are furry, cannibalistic, violent tribal monsters. Fitting the story of orcs and goblins even better. But even that is unnecessary, people just like making shit up, but people are also terrible at actually doing that. So almost everything looks like a human or animal or combination.
Does it? Dinosaurs existed for hundreds of millions years, that's a lot of time for things to be preserved. Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years, that's not nearly as much.
Sure, fur/feathers is less likely to be preserved for 65 million years (+ however far into the mesozioic you go) than 40 thousand years (+ however far back into the history of neanderthals you go), but by how many orders of magnitude? Is it enough to make up for the many orders of magnitude difference in the number of times it could be preserved?
For what it's worth, my dad was an anthropologist and he liked to point out that their women probably had beards.
Who's been looking for neanderthal fur at any scale? It could be hiding in plain sight. AFAIK, geologists and archeologists don't try to run DNA tests on every bit of biological matter they come across. Humans are known tool users and clothing (and fur) wearers. If someone found fur near a hominid and it wasn't on their head, would anyone be jumping to this conclusion?
That we have a little bit of dinosaur skin impressions is down to said animals being around for a long, long time, and over much more territory.
The absence of evidence is certainly not evidence of absence here; there's simply no evidence one way or the other. Excavators are getting much better at recognizing non-skeletal remains, though, so perhaps we'll see something come up in the future.
Gorillas are largely vegetarian, and generally peaceful. Humans are much better example of “violent tribal monsters” than gorillas.
Cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1977/12/25/t...
Give chimps/gorillas/humans enough territory and they're peaceful, make them compete with others of the same species for limited resources and they'll turn violent.
I don't need much more than basic evolutionary theory to support that.
I had friends who were shorts all the time, but almost everybody will wear thick clothing in winter, and walking barefoot in the snow will cause frostbite and/or is extremely painful (yes I did that, just to see what happens. I was young once. It may have been one of the most painful things I ever did). Humans can survive in the cold because we are smart enough to cover up, not because some of us are so hardcore that we break the laws of physics.
Or maybe there was some cult/religion/tradition that demanded that specific enemies (or relatives) shall be eaten to harvest their "power". Again, some of our contemporary, modern humans still did that until quite recent (IIRC there was something with brains on HN recently, and how those who ate them [primarily that societies women] contracted brain diseases from their dead).
That means that only female Neanderthals transmitted their genes down the Sapiens gene tree. This could mean all sort of things.
Maybe Neanderthal Males with Female Humans didn't generate viable off-spring. Maybe Our selection process favored non-Neanderthal genes and it was phased out of the Y chromosome gene pool? Maybe as you said Sapiens have a much darker past?
That would be right if the only genes a man passes to his children are on the Y chromosome, but a man passes 23 chromosomes to every one of his children. (One of those 23 will be either an X or a Y.)
Just out of curiosity do you know if the Neanderthal mitochondrial line survives in humans today?
Another point seemed to me a bit far fetched: that due to anatomy Neanderthals could not speak. But there are birds that imitate pretty well human speech.
That bloodshed, for that Cain slew Abel, the Eternal Lord avenged: no joy had he of that violent deed, but God drove him for that crime far from mankind. Of him all evil broods were born, ogres and goblins and haunting shapes of hell, and the giants too, that long time warred with God - for that he gave them their reward.
The original Old English text refers to the monsters as eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, swylce gigantas, and other translations seem to disagree on their meaning; however, orcneas meant evil spirits, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and to Tolkien (who was a leading scholar of Old English in his day job).[0]
(I assume you are not saying that "people from other communities" are actually monsters, but referring to historical ignorance.)
[0] If you can access the OED, see the entry for orc.
Nothing has changed here except our ability to find meaningless differences among groups of people with enough of a qualifier to split the world into "us" and "them". It's a natural reflex that transcends genetics, race, and other ways to qualify people as us and them. There have been plenty of experiments to suggest that this us and them reasoning does not really have to involve anything meaningful or substantial. E.g. the Stanford Prison Experiment is a great example where giving some people a uniform is enough to trigger the effect.
IMHO Neanderthals did not actually disappear and the different subspecies of humanity simply merged to create a more fit offspring. Apparently humans carry enough neanderthal DNA to suggest that inter (sub)species breeding was a thing. Is that "us" or "them" or does that even mean anything? What do we call the humans without this DNA? Pure breads or ancestors? Is that better, worse, or just different? Is that even a thing? I.e. didn't those humans just die out?
We like to dramatize things into epic battles, fights, etc. But life a few thousand years ago was brutal and very much survival of the fittest biased. Apparently, humans with some neanderthal DNA were somewhat fitter and survived into modernity. No need to get judgemental about that.
Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still done and pretending that providing some context justifies it is just as flawed an analysis as saying it doesn't. The world is nuanced AF.
What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were for dividing people into 'we' and 'them' over minuscule differences, when they were mostly just faced with a simple choice - 'we' dead, or 'them' dead.
Human beings have consistent morality, in many ways, across space and time. As the GP pointed out, look at all the religions and cultural rules against the same things and encouraging the same things, such as not harming others and respecting your parents. There are differences also, but the extreme relativism is plainly false.
Here, check out how the audience reacts just a bit more than 50 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo
I think the only moral that may have been something close to universal throughout times would've been something like: "Don't kill a member of in-group without a good reason if you're not the head honcho."
Everything else? We have literally no idea.
EDIT: Really, watch the video, it actually applies to the discussion really well. It's basically an argument about morals.
That written history covers an enormous amount of ground, with records going back 6,000 years and in diverse cultures, from Sanskrit in what is now India to cuneiform to China for thousands of years, etc., and those records including older materials. Anthropologists have been studying different cultures for a long time and have plenty of evidence of what is consistent across them. Much is known about how morality develops in children. Etc.
Every human being understands it. You don't walk into a room in a strange culture and wonder, 'maybe these people think it's funny to poison each other' or 'maybe they are pure anarchists' or 'maybe they eat all their children'.
We can't have perfect knowledge of this question or anything, but to confuse that with no knowledge is absurd. For example,
> We have literally no idea.
Why is it important to you (and others) to try to push a transparent falsehood that empowers evil behavior?
1. Tens of thousands of people are part of societies where initiation into the society entails killing someone. (Various gangs).
2. Hundreds of millions of people are living in societies where honor killings is a thing.
3. Depending on how you count, there have been more than twenty genocides in the last century. That's during 0.05% of the time Homo Sapiens have been around.
4. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people are living in societies where a blogger can get lynched for a blasphemous post.
5. There have actually been societies in recent times ending up literally poisoning each other.
6. Just some 5 years ago around 10 million people lived in a society where people were thrown off roofs for being gay.
The list is obviously non-exhaustive. And all of the above is basically going on now, I'm not even getting into what we know went on a few centuries from now. Burning innocent women on pyres for imagined slights, anyone?
Like... Do all these people know/knew they are evil according to our 'common' and 'universal' core morals? I bet they feel pretty good about themselves when lynching the blasphemer. It's just that I refuse to accept that our core morals are similar.
Because people do something, it's moral? Gangs are considered moral? The existence of evil means there is no morality?
> I refuse to accept
Then the truth doesn't matter.
You got me quite interested in your worldview, can we please continue this discussion a bit? I hope it doesn't take too much of your time!
So, you're saying that you have the same set of core morals as a guy returning family honor by beheading his daughter[1] at night over her plans to run off with her boyfriend?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/world/middleeast/honor-ki...
We need more evidence and research; the Bible is long and we can find a statement here or there that supports almost anything. But as I said, while there are variations, much is the same.
I'll even speculate that it's predictable - I doubt I could walk into 99% of human communities in the history of the world and not have a reasonable sense of the morals (social customs might be tricky though!).
While the literal meaning of the 10 commandments has changed relatively little (mainly due to mistranslation or the shifting definitions of words) almost all of them mean would mean very different things to modern christian pacifist, a with burning 16th century calvinist, a 2nd century christian or a 6th century bc. jew.
I mean even regarding killing, while it’s easy for us, living in the modern world, to interpret it as a general ban on killing, a society which did not kill people under any circumstances would likely have been inconceivable in ancient times, it simply could not have existed since it would had been conquered and it’s members enslaved or exterminated by neighboring tribes.
> the population of humans dropped to as few as 50 individuals. Something terrible happened to the human race.
> When did this population bottleneck occur? A number of teams have analyzed mutation rates to find out. The mutation rate in our Y chromosomes suggests the bottleneck occurred 37,000 to 49,000 years ago.
Is the author really suggesting that the human population was down to 50 individuals 50,000 years ago?
How on earth does this square with human migration? Humans were already spreading near Australia 50,000 years ago, let alone Europe and Asia.
Is he suggesting that all the fossils throughout Eurasia and near Oceania were deposited by earlier humans, then nearly every human on the planet died at the same time, and then the survivors all re-spread to those areas, without leaving any archeological evidence of this?
The theory [1] has been around for a while.
> Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous? Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.
Is the author really suggesting that these stories are the product of an unbroken chain of 50,000 years of oral tradition? If not, what do events from 50,000 years ago have to do with myths from 2000-6000 years ago?
It's a game of broken telephone no doubt, but I don't see how that chain could not exist.
I don't know if Neandertals were rapist, but given the behavior of Sapiens, it wouldn't be completely surprising if it was in fact the opposite: Sapiens abducting Neandertal females and raping them…
How is strength measured here? Because that sounds strange for two species that close genetically speaking to have such a big difference on how muscles work. I would expect 1kg of chimp muscle to have roughly the same strength as one 1kg of human muscle, and having a muscle/whole body mass ratio in the same ballpark. But our muscles are localized fairly differently, with much more muscles in our lower body so depending how you measure, you could get really different results.
Also, the typical industrial-world-human is pretty weak compared to what the average humans can be under the right conditions so it may bias the measure too.
The probable explanation is that they were extremely human in nearly all respects.
Given that we know that thoughout recorded history people have made stories like that up about the community of the same human species over the next hill, it may be not-too-farfetched, but it is also a wildly unnecessary conjecture.
Some guy with a sword kills a big croc, which is a good feat! Yet each telling the croc is bigger, more fierce, especially as the alcohol flows.
His grandkids hear the story too.
Some ancient armies used long cloth bags as flags or banners, to impress the enemies or maybe to signal the position of themselves for the allies to see. They filled the bags with hot air and the bags rose to the sky as contemporary balloons.
Imagine how it looked from the enemy side: an army is approaching and long snake-like things are flying about the mass of people. And you can glimpse some fire at the end that is close to the ground. Could it be a creature that breaths fire? And occasionally these things detached and flew up to the sky. Perfect dragons.
I'm not sure about genetic memory, but human oral tradition is very old, and while I haven't heard about any evidence suggesting it predates modern humans, I wouldn't be surprised if there are stories that turns out to be as old as human language is.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pachycephalosaurus_w...
If you're in a pre-civilized, just-barely-scraping-by survival mode, you'd probably conclude: (1) this thing was a monster, and if it lived here I'm not safe. (2) This thing must have been killed by something worse, and if it's around I'm really not safe.
Imagine finding a 12 foot long skeleton in a cave, or just a skull of an impossibly large animal, of course it’s a dragon!
Using occult chronology, Tolkien's world corresponds to the Atlantis period (the same Atlantis described by Plato). Tolkien took most of the interesting bits from different epochs and compressed them into one short story. The tall people (2x taller than us) in his story are the atlanteans, Saruman and Gendalf must be Narad and Asuramaya and orcs are creatures made by the evil faction during the late Atlantis when the civilization was on decline. The records say, though, that the bad guys won at the end and the atmosphere during that final chapter was shown in the Prometheus movie. All movies and books, though, present a rosy version of orcs and other evil stuff from the records - an accurate picture would be unthinkable even in the book format.
He needed no popular book of the occult; he had read all the original myths in their original ancient languages. There is plenty of scholarly work describing his sources, and he wrote his own essay on it, though it's more conceptual than about primary sources: On Fairy-stories.
The word "Orc" itself used to refer to Norse invaders, who did much of the same stuff "real" orcs do and unfortunately more (which is also directly related to what is now called xenophobia, or intolerance to foreigners and their culture).
So a strange-looking humanoid with traits of a predatory animal is a natural monster.
After clicking some of the links in this article I went to what looked very much like wikipedia, so much so i went on a typical half hour wikipedia-dive, but wasn't actually wikipeida (I have a big monitor and the links I clicked all directed to subsections of articles so I didn't see the info-galactic logo at the top).
Really puts this article in a whole new (bad) light.
>>Theodore Robert Beale (born August 21, 1968), also known as Vox Day, is an American far-right activist,[2] writer, musician, publisher, and video game designer. He has been described as a white supremacist,[3] a misogynist,[4] and part of the alt-right.[5][6][7]
Now I would say InfoGalactic is politically neutral, I have not seen them applying bias against left-wing individuals. But even if they were right-wing that would be fine, even good. Mainstream morals/culture have been captured and manufactured in the image of a modern international leftism. And as someone on the right, it would be nice to see right-wing intellectualism go on the offensive for once and reclaim a sphere of influence.
Cheers, I hope you enjoyed your InfoGalactic-dive, seems you liked it fine until Wiki told you not to.
Examples: hates Jews, black people, basically any nonwhite. Wants America to deport everyone immigrated post-1960 and to reinstate a Christian theocracy, even though he lives in Italy. Wanted Trump to overturn election and become dictator to bring in this theocracy.
>> If early Greek, Roman, Norse, and Chinese mythologies are anything to go by, the legends spun by early humans centre around an heroic human (almost always a man) who is pitted against an ugly, evil cruel monster with superhuman strength…
As a PoGO (Person of Greek Origin) my impression of our ancients' myths and legends is somewhat different. Yes, there was the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy, but neither Titans nor Giants could be mistaken for "orcs" or "ogres"; the former were nightmare beasts with tentacles and the latter simply had a hundred hands. But most of our mythology is about the sexual lives of the gods, particularly Zeus' transformations to various animals that allowed him to sneak into maidens' beds (no accounting for taste) or the deeds of great heroes like Hercules, who however typically fight chimeric monsters (like the chimera itself, or the sphinx, or the harpies etc) or actual beasts (like the Erymanthian Boar or the Stymphalian Birds) rather than big burly monster men.
Where ancient Greek heroes fight beast-men, those are literally beast-men. The Minotaur is the child of a woman and a bull. The centaurs, who are not evil monsters, are a cross between man and horse. The sirens are depicted as birds with human heads. The Sphinx has a lion's body and a woman's head (there was clearly something going on with bestiality in ancient times). The cyclops Polyphemus and the giant Antaeus, slain by Heracles, are porbably the only examples of "orcs" that could be plausibly identified in Greek mythology. And even those are not very orc-like. Why would memories of Neanderthals be recorded in myths and legends as one-eyed giants?
Now the tale of Antaeus is an interesting one: Heracles wrestles him and keeps winning but everytime Antaeus bounces back. At length Heracles realises that Antaeus is drawing power from the Earth. He grabs him by the waist and crushes him preventing him from touching the ground, and so he wins. There is a clear symbolism there, of victory over an enemy that draws his strength from the land. But what does it mean? Who was this enemy? It doesn't have to be another species: a more ancient tribe that pre-dated the tale will do fine. It's an interesting question but we will never know the answer. As with the Neanderthals, that should not be license to imagine whatver we fancy, though.
Oh boi, not this horrible and flawed argument again. People have learned nothing from recent research into the impact of diseases in that history? Popular books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and "1491" give you a view into these matters and provide one with references for their sources for research.
This idea of "Europe won because it is good at tech" really needs to die. The best weapon Europe had when fighting indigenous people in the Americas was actually various kinds of pox.
Having better weapons is not an argument to ethnic superiority. It comes down to geography and history. The myth that needs to die is that the Mesoamerican civilisations were inferior because they didn't use wheeled transport; that's a Eurocentric idea based on the idea of the wheel as "fundamental" technology, even though they help on Europe's mostly-flat land and not Mesoamerica's mountainous and heavily forested territory.
These are not very well supported by first-hand accounts, for example in my favourite history book of all times, The Conquest of Mexico, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo (one of Hernan Cortes' men), there are many descriptions of battles between the Conquistadores and the Aztecs and the Aztecs don't run away - the gunpowder and the horses make a great impression on them but they stay their ground and fight. Except, in Bernal Diaz's telling anyway, they are used to fighting ritualistic battles, where the point was to capture some of the enemy's men, to later offer up as sacrifices to their gods. So the Aztecs are playing for points, in a sense, whereas the Spaniards are fighting dirty and going for the throat. Obviously, the Spaniards have the tactical advatage and it's not because of their weapons and armour, or their steeds.
Another detail almost always overlooked is that the Spaniards were allied to local Mexicans that were enemy to the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, particularly the people of Tlascalla. So in many of the battles with the Aztecs, the few hundred Conquistadores Cortes has with him are joined by thousands of Tlascallan warriors. This information is almost always left out of the narrative of the overwhelming technological superiority of the Conquistadores that allowed them to win despite being fewer in number. In truth, the forces of the Conquistadores joined by the Tlascallans and other enemies of the Aztecs were comparable in size with those of the Aztecs.
Finally, when the Aztecs decide enough is enough and start fighting for real, the Conquistadores run for their lives. This is the tale of La Noche Triste, The Sad Night, when the Conquistadores try to escape Tenochtitlan under cover of darkness with all the gold they've looted from Moctezuma's vaults, after he was killed (by his own subjects, according to Bernal Diaz, but, well... he would say so, wouldn't he?). They are chased through the streets of the city by the Aztecs who are in open revolt and catch and kill them one-by-one. Most drown in the waters around the city, many weighed down by the loot they cling to, stubbornly. Just a few barely escape with their skins and some of the gold. It's a sad night indeed- and it really puts the kibosh on the Conquistadores' crushing superiority, technological or other.
I do agree that the alliance with Tlaxcala is underplayed in the pop culture understanding of the conquest.
When these strange foreigners showed up and offered an alliance, their mysterious/inscrutable prowess (technology, foreign backing of unknown power, clear ability to ship in men and arms) helped give the rebels the confidence to give it a go.
Not to mention that guerilla warfare is effective like few other things
I would assume they did loot guns and horses from their defeated adversaries, yes. The only scenario in which that makes you more and more competitive is when you acquire comparable numbers of said resources, and can use them as effectively as an army that has been trained in their use. I don't think either is the case, but this is just me hypothesising because I only know the high level details of the conquest.
Apparently I remembered incorrectly, and the parent comment is correct. Here's a quote from the book:
> The importance of lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans' conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the batlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors' morale. For instance, in 1519 Cortes landed on the coast of Mexico with 600 Spaniards, to conquer the fiercely militaristic Aztec Empire with a population of many millions. That Cortes reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, escaped with the loss of "only" two-thirds of his force, and managed to fight his way back to the coast demonstrates both Spanish military advantages and the initial naivete of the Aztecs. But when Cortes's next onslaught came, the Aztecs were no longer naive and fought street by street with the utmost tenacity. What gave the Spaniards a decisive advantage was smallpox, which reached Mexico in 1520 with one infected slave arriving from Spanish Cuba. The resulting epidemic proceeded to kill nearly half of the Aztecs, including Emperor Cuitlahuac. Aztec survivors were demoralized by the mysterious illness that killed Indians and spared Spaniards, as if advertising the Spaniards' invincibility. By 1618, Mexico's initial population of about 20 million had plummeted to about 1.6 million.
Now on the other hand, if Europe had suffered something like 50%+ death from American diseases while indigenous Americans suffered much lower death tolls from European disease - in other words, the reverse of what actually happened - then I figure that all bets would have been off. In that timeline maybe the indigenous Americans would have had enough room to maneuver that they would have been able to adopt European technologies in time to defend their lands.
The Black Plague killed off 50% of the population in quite a few countries and it didn't result in any invasion. I'm not sure the rationale stands without a technological imbalance as a basis.
Poland ! I was alluding to the fact that the Plague wasn't uniform and that if demographic depression were an incentive to invade by itself, places that were unaffected (like Poland) would have expanded.
Instead Poland repeated the exact same pattern that had been pioneered in Gaul, then picked up by the Germans : expend East, where the Plague didn't have much effect, into non-Christian land and implement literate administration, centralized religion and feudalism.
The fact is the Black Plague didn't pose an existential threat in Western Europe, and it seems even else in other urban regions. I remember a historian, perhaps Le Goff or Leroy-Ladurie, remarking that the most astonishing thing about the Plague is that it changed nothing. The archives looked the same before and after. Just business as usual. In that sense the Thirty Years War was far more destructive.
All that to say that disease, as large as it gets, in itself isn't enough to sink well established institutions. And it's not a good enough argument to strip the Spanish of any credit in the conquest of the Americas.
It is important to realise that there are recent estimates that mention 9 out of 10 people all over the Americas dying of diseases. Remember that diseases travel faster than European invaders, so by the time they arrive at those locations the population is already in kind of chaos and traumatised.
There were a lot of people living in the Americas. A lot. The first chronicles mention large cities and populations, other chroniclers passing the same regions some years later see nothing. In certain areas, such as the Amazon, where people built things out of wood, almost nothing remains.
It is also important to remember than in many cultures, part of the healing process for a disease involved family and loved ones doing wakes and staying close to the afflicted. This causes a havoc as contagious diseases such as pox spread and claimed whole families, and then the next family, and so on. Pox was not common, nor was flu.
Many variations of pox are associated with use beasts of burden, most of the indigenous cultures didn't use them. So no resistance to cowpox, smallpox, etc
> I doubt that the indigenous Americans would have been able to adopt European technology fast enough to succeed in beating the Europeans back.
Please, read that book. You'll see the indigenous population of North America adapting quite fast to European technology to the point of managing sailboats. Also, sidenote the Spanish first met the Inca not on land but on the sea, they bumped into one of their large sailboats. Europeans adopting indigenous technologies in South America because theirs didn't work. This happened everywhere. Everyone was adapting.
Many of us learned different stuff in school and uni, mostly because it takes a very long time for research to trickle into school curriculum, and also because of the bias of those telling the stories who century after century create a narrative that favours them.
There a lot of recent research that throws away a lot of what was taught to me in school. Unfortunately, the usual reaction from people is that "this is not what I was taught, so it must be wrong!" and then proceed to repeat fairy tales about technology superiority which is a positivist way of seeing things that is very flawed.
"Beating Europeans back" is not the only possible outcome. It is not about beating people back to the other side of the Atlantic. If so many native people had not died of diseases, the Americas would look much different today.
What I got from that book was even more surprising. It's that by the time the Europeans got there the devastation had gone. The chaos and trauma one night expect from a horrific war had gone, like Europe 50 years on from WW2, this was over 150 (I think) later, so now instead was jungle, small villages, tiny populations. The scars back then were not visible to the Europeans, as disease hit these people a couple or more generations ago.
Now, had Europeans had a germ theory of disease by then, maybe that dynamic could have turned out different...
There were lots of artisans, but mercantilism the early stages already had state-run factories for cannons and other "central" managed technology.
Unfortunately I can't give any criticisms beyond that because it has been a long time since I had those discussions and the details just don't come to mind, so I guess really what I'm saying is though it's a popular and enjoyable read, perhaps take the narrative it gives with a pinch of salt, perhaps dig into the current historical perspective and see where it differs?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/how_d...
https://acoup.blog/2021/05/28/collections-teaching-paradox-e...
Americapox: The Missing Plague - YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
But Eurasia had a far larger landmass and population so there was a larger chance for nasty diseases to develop.
Eurasia had much better options for domesticating a wide variety animals, so in general people lived in closer proximity to lots of animals, and generally unhygienic to boot. Which all lead to more diseases spreading over.
The America's only had a few domesticated species that deadly viruses could hop from.
Cities. Very deadly pandemics generally come from diseases that jump from another species to humans.
It is not advantageous for a virus to have a very high lethality, for any parasite there is no advantage in killing large numbers of your host. It's the diseases that are kind of new to the host that can be more lethal.
This jump of a disease from one species to another happens more easily when there is a lot of close contact between them. Large cities where humans lived with animals, and in not-very sanitary conditions, were a perfect ground for this.
In America cities appear to be less dense, and animal husbandry was way less extended (AFAIK, llamas and alpacas are the only animals domesticated in America).
Population density and wars for land and resources, book argues, also propelled the development of warfare tech ("guns and steel")
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170518143819.h...
Whatever was constitutive for human beings in the period of our dwindling numbers happened in Africa
The Spanish had plenty of military engagements in the early colonization of the Americas that were easily solved purely because of their overwhelming technological advantages.
> military, political, administrative, trades
The civilisations of the Americas were trading with each other. Many of them had highly structured political and administrative centers. Just research the Inka for example, they had an administrative structure that in many ways is better than their European counterparts, a good example is how they eliminated hunger in the Empire. They had mechanisms in place to prevent the population dying of starvation, they were able to feed their whole Empire, that is not easy and requires a ton of accounting and planning.
Do not dismiss the civilisations of the Americas, and think that there is a ladder of evolution in which Europe is somehow higher. These civilisations were very advanced, and had they been able to survive in their own path, who knows where we'd be.
As for military, just check how fast the Spanish conquistadors changed from their equipment and garments to the native ones because they were better suited for work in the tropical climate, and how bitter were the confrontations with the pockets of resistance.
Disease is the key factor. Recent figures such as 90% dying from diseases is a devastating blow to any civilisation, there is no recovering from that.
I am not making the statement that all winning a war takes is superior weaponry, as your strawman would suggest. It doesn't take any one factor. Many factors add up. I'm saying this is one of them.
"This idea of "Europe won because it is good at tech" really needs to die. " Because you don't like it?
I disagree. Spanish Conquistadors were some of the greatest and most experienced warriors in all of history, and were trained veterans of the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Why people want to discount the fact that obsidian shatters on steel, Spanish had shock cavalry, dogs, and just the thought of hearing and seeing a gun go off for the first time is wild. Disease catalyzed things for sure, and is definitely one of the biggest factors in the speed in which the conquest of the Americas happned, but to entirely discount The Spanish Empires elite warriors seems like a revisionist cope, because you want to demonize colonizers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca
168 Spanish vs 3000-8000 Incan warriors
Only one Spaniard was injured and 2000+ Incan warriors were killed, the rest taken prisoner. That probably would nothave happened without cannons, horses, and swords
Actually, those were not warriors. Note the listings of the Stength of the belligerents in the information box, on the right of the article (on the right as seen in a PC browser):
>> 3,000–8,000 unarmed personal attendants/lightly armed guards [2]
The opening paragraph of the wikipedia article also makes it clear that the "battle" was more like a slaughter:
>> The Battle of Cajamarca also spelled Cajamalca[4][5] (though many contemporary scholars prefer to call it Massacre of Cajamarca)[6][7][8] was the ambush and seizure of the Inca ruler Atahualpa by a small Spanish force led by Francisco Pizarro, on November 16, 1532. The Spanish killed thousands of Atahualpa's counselors, commanders, and unarmed attendants in the great plaza of Cajamarca, and caused his armed host outside the town to flee.
Wikipedia said they had Knives and ropes
Almost all medieval battles end with routes and slaughter. What I am saying is 168 were able to take 5000 prisoners without the help of advanced technology?
Edit: sorry, captured, not killed.
Cortes was 7 y.o. when the Reconquista ended...
Also his dad was an infantry captain. And he seemed to be commanding his armies, and armies of allied tribes
And do you believe that the Southern American populations religiously waited for the White Man to bring them the concept of armed conflicts, and that they lived in perfect harmony until then, miraculously oblivious to the concept of conquest and imperialism?
The Sapa Inka and his court were all wiped out by pox in 1527, then the successor died too of pox, then their successor also died of pox as well.
Then the remaining of the court had to choose a new Inka, and we get to civil war between the new Inka (who was a teenager) and Atawallpa. The whole Empire was already in civil war for three years before the Spanish arrive, and the diseases were spreading through their lands faster than the Spanish. The last battle of the civil war counted 35 thousand dead according to recent research, and that is only the final battle, the one that gave victory to Atawallpa. This battle was few months before Pizarro appeared on the scene.
It was on the same year that the Spanish arrive in their land, that Atawallpa became Inka. Yes, this was not a stable Empire that met Pizarro, it was an Empire just out of a brutal civil war, whose new government didn't had any time to adjust or consolidate.
Atawallpa tried to manipulate the Spanish after seeing their lust for gold, he was arrogant. The Spanish didn't win because horses and guns, the Spanish won because the Empire was in shambles, because Atawallpa thought he could manipulate those white skinned people, because pox killed a ton of people including the ruling elite before the Spanish arrived.
I assume that most myths of orcs, elves, dwarves, vampires, etc. were based on ugly-looking Homo sapiens as opposed to other hominid species. Humans have also had a strong incentive to (literally) dehumanize other tribes of humans.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2020/10/27/927772107/kindred-dismantles-...
edit: But after reading, even if most of the article is heavily biased, not prudent, etc. It's still interesting and thought-provoking. I might give the book a go.
edit2: A better and most interesting point of view can be found in Julien d'Huy "Cosmogonies", which parallelized the corpus of myths and legends to genetic migrations - with the help of a bit of AI. Once you validate the theory that myths survive better than languages, and that they evolve with time, it's super interesting.
If Neanderthals were alive today I doubt we’d even class them as a separate species.
Claims about skeletal differences are probably pretty well supported by physical evidence, and again, it's a reasonably small difference in size and scale.
Differences in facial structure seem likely just from differences in skeletal structure, our face maps pretty closely to skeptical structure. But also, we can see pretty wide genetic variation in facial structure in humans, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Pastrana
Humans are pretty cannibalistic already, I don't buy his evidence that neanderthals were, but a human could survive on an almost entirely meat diet, no reason to think neanderthals weren't more inclined to.
Pupil shape seems like the farthest out there, but there is variation in pupil shape within the human population too. It's plausible... again I don't really buy his evidence as proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloboma
In general I don't think this article is meant to say "they looked exactly like this", but "they probably looked monstrous", if it turns out there pupils were the same as humans, but also they had sharper more claw like nails, the point wouldn't change in the slightest.
https://thednatests.com/how-much-dna-do-humans-share-with-ot...
Controversy around why the neanderthal went extinct exists for a while now. I think it is very unlikely that a successful human-like species goes extinct without a fight. They where stronger and bigger then homo sapiens. If it is true that they replaced homo sapiens as the dominant species for a while then maybe they are not the friendly giants they are thought to be. Even homo sapiens cannibalize, so that some physically stronger Neanderthals would also do this seems not unlikely.
The last neanderthals might have lived in relic populations in north eurasia until several thousand years ago without leaving much archeological evidence. Also oral traditions might survive for very very long. But yeah, maybe it is not so politically correct to 'talk bad' about a race that fell victim to genocide. We rather focus on the positive things about them.
As a hypothetical example: if, say, a neanderthal mother brought up interbred children it would be her myths about monsters that would be likely to be passed on.