Age of discovery

If you read what Louis posted just above, it certainly comes a distant second. Even then, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's not as if things actually changed all that much in 1492 - yes, the exploitation of the Americas made European politics a fundamentally different game, but that didn't happen straight away, and I'm not convinced that American colonisation was qualitatively different from similar efforts in Asia and Africa. After all, the British managed to dominate the world for well over a century despite owning a distinctly second-rate slice of the Americas in resource and population terms.
Well, Britain was pretty heavily involved in the Americas right down into the postwar period. Even the United States was in practice an economic colony of Britain until the middle 19th century, and the South until after the Civil War.
 
Didn't change immediately, maybe. But it was a game changer. Those who crossed the Bearing Straight 15,000 years ago did not fundamentally change the course of human history. Those who followed Columbus did.
 
Noting that "those who followed Columbus" describes both Europeans and Americans. We should avoid the old canard that only white people make history.
 
If you read what Louis posted just above, it certainly comes a distant second.

Well, I think that does still understate the importance I placed on it. It was a distant second, but was still a significant second and third was far more distant than that. Even just looking at intellectual thought, the discovery of a continent never known before (and not mentioned in the Bible) was a big deal. Native American cultures probably influenced Thomas More's Utopia. The fact of the new world was a big deal to Europe even if they would have just colonized Africa and had similar economic results. Another area of influence is cooking. Italian dishes with tomato-based sauces, Thai dishes with peanuts, Belgian chocolate, Irish potato stereotypes. All these things would not exist without the new world.
 
If you read what Louis posted just above, it certainly comes a distant second. Even then, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's not as if things actually changed all that much in 1492 - yes, the exploitation of the Americas made European politics a fundamentally different game, but that didn't happen straight away, and I'm not convinced that American colonisation was qualitatively different from similar efforts in Asia and Africa. After all, the British managed to dominate the world for well over a century despite owning a distinctly second-rate slice of the Americas in resource and population terms.
Note use of the word "trajectory". It's beyond obvious I didn't mean that the sky suddenly became blue after centuries of being green in 1492.

lol, politics is the least of it. "The Columbian Exchange" does a phenomenal job going over a lot of this.

The development of the British empire is directly affected by this discovery.

Didn't change immediately, maybe. But it was a game changer. Those who crossed the Bearing Straight 15,000 years ago did not fundamentally change the course of human history. Those who followed Columbus did.
This. Columbus may have been a murderous jerk, but he opened a door that changed everything.
 
Yeah, saying Columbus was extraordinarily significant isn't the same as defending or praising him. He may have been both a terrible person and a complete idiot. It may be that someone else would have soon done the same thing. No matter what, though, his discovery for Europe was extremely important for the world.
 
Yeah, saying Columbus was extraordinarily significant isn't the same as defending or praising him. He may have been both a terrible person and a complete idiot. It may be that someone else would have soon done the same thing. No matter what, though, his discovery for Europe was extremely important for the world.

It may have been important for the world, but not for the Natives.
 
It was extremely important for Natives aswell, much more than for Europeans in fact.
 
It may have been important for the world, but not for the Natives.

May not have been happy for them, but it was certainly significant. I'd say that makes it an important event.
 
It killed 95% of them and subjugated the remainder for half a millennium. I'd hate to see your definition of "important".
Yes, equally if not more so than for Europe, but only, sadly, in the opposite direction.
 
Most of native Americans were killed by diseases, not directly by Europeans. In Africa people were immune to those diseases and as the result a much smaller % of population died during the European colonization. In Australia, Aborigines were vulnerable to many European diseases - a similar case as in the Americas.

Perhaps European diseases swept through Sub-Saharan Africa in Ancient or Medieval times (Muslim expansion?), making the surviving population immune.

Unfortunately groups of Vikings did not bring these diseases to the Americas, which in the end ended up badly for the natives 500 years later.

Maybe the Great Zimbabwe collapsed when smallpox and other diseases, spreading from the north of the continent, killed most of its population.

Zimbabwe collapsed in the 15th century - it could also be late arrival of the Black Death which had decimated Europeans 100 years earlier.
 
I would say it was the other way around. it was Europeans who became inmune to African and Asian diseases as developed populations appeared first in Africa and then Asia and most diseases reached humans through contact with domestic animals. For instance smallpox origen is certainly African and according to wiki the oldest smallpox evidences are found in Egyptian mummies.
 
I wrote "European" because Europeans were spreading them to the Americas. It should be "Eurasian" diseases of course. Developed populations appeared first in Asia, then in North Africa. But Sub-Saharan Africa was isolated from Eurasian-North African germs until people figured out how to travel across the Sahara.

the oldest smallpox evidences are found in Egyptian mummies.

Egypt is not in Sub-Saharan Africa, but was part of the Mediterranean World since Ancient times - just like the rest of North Africa.

"Colonization of native Africans" also doesn't apply to Egipt simce it had already been colonized by the Turks and other Eurasians before.
 
Egypt had contact with subsaharians since the very beginning, predating any contact with the mediterranean world, since it originated at southern egypt far of the sea. Also the Sahara was not such a desert back then so it was not the barrier like it is now.
 
Sahara was a barrier prior to 10,500 years ago (not sure since when, must check it). Then favourable winds made its eastern part (Egypt) more habitable until roughly 7,300 years ago. After that, it became a desert again.

Not sure about agriculture, but iron smelting in Sub-Saharan Africa was invented independently from Eurasia (much later, but independently). This indicates only limited or no movement of people and ideas. Note that Viking incursions to the Americas was not enough to spread diseases there, so in order for a disease to spread you rather need large scale movements. Though of course it is always a lottery if someone in a migrating group is infected or not.
 
By the way - have you heard about the theory that the Amazon Rainforest used to be a man-shaped "park", "orchard" or "garden" ??? Check:

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1017-amazon.html

It is originally in this book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/140004006X/mongabay-20

According to Charles Mann terra preta - very fertile soil of the Amazon - is largely the result of human activity.

According to this theory in the past the Amazon was a patchwork - even better, a checkerboard - of many small plots of agricultural land intermingled with similar small plots of forest deliberately spared by humans for wildlife. Essentially - it was a rain-park or a huge garden inhabited by both humans and animals, not a wild rain-forest. Local humans developed a system which could sustain (feed) large population without destroying ecological balance and wildlife! Eurasian diseases killed up to 95% of the population as the result of which human activity in the Amazon vastly decreased and plots of agricultural land were quickly taken over by forest and wildlife.

But the specific soil - terra preta - gives evidence that in the past the area was much more densely populated than today. E.g. this soil contains crushed "grains" and larger pieces of man-made pottery (and not just in particular spots, but over the whole region!). Moreover, it is assumed that certain wild plants which today grow in the Amazon were originally domesticated, and perhaps bred through selection from local wild plants, or introduced from outside to this region, by humans.

After local humans got largely extinct, these domesticated plants continued to grow but they went back to the wild.

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Some of remnants of Amazonian tribes - e.g. the Matsigenka Paquirianos of Peru - still use a very similar system as that from Charles Mann's theory.

We can call it a "glade-plot-orchard" system of agriculture inside a forest. Knowledge about medical properties of various plants & herbs is also huge.

I would say that those Amazonian forest tribes had better medicine than Europeans of the time. Largely because drugs were growing around them.

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Check also: http://yurileveratto.com/en/articolo.php?Id=209

To summ up - many things indicate that the population density of the Amazon 600 years ago was much, much higher than TODAY, in 2014.

Maybe we could learn something from those people - how to re-populate this region without destroying its nature and wildlife ???

Our civilization is not used to live just next to nature. We create nature reserves but they are far away from our homes, not in our backyards!
 
I see two issues with such theory: first, that seems a lot of things to happen in 300 or 400 years only. I am pretty sure all the amazon is packed with trees older than that. Second, conquistadores and explorers used to write down all his adventures and findings, we would have many records about how amazon looked like back then to compare to how it is now.
 
There are still Amazonian people who live like that as you say. Unfortunately they get in trouble with the Brazilian government due to issues of property rights and are often forced to move from the patches of land they worked as new loggers/settlers move in.
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As for the topic of "discovery", there could have been several peoples who made minor contact between the continents. If those occurred [ships thrown off course ie], most of those "discoveries" changed very little. There has been some talk that there may have been minor Polynesian contact with the North Andes [Some goods/residue from the Pacific, some have claimed were found near Chachapoyan sarcophagi]

The "voyage" of Abu Bakr II, if it ever occurred, would certainly have been an event that change history however. Malian historians claim the king had financed an expedition to explore the western sea but never returned. His disappearance led to the political rise of Mansa Musa, the famous Malian king who would voyage to Saudi Arabia and bring so much gold with him that he caused inflation in the Levant and Europe. The voyage of Abu Bakr II would have been after the vikings, but before Columbus - but again its disputed. At the very minimum though the legend of Abu Bakr II was a thing, so the concept of a random West African ship having been stranded in the Americas could have been a thing
 
Sahara was a barrier prior to 10,500 years ago (not sure since when, must check it). Then favourable winds made its eastern part (Egypt) more habitable until roughly 7,300 years ago. After that, it became a desert again.

Not sure about agriculture, but iron smelting in Sub-Saharan Africa was invented independently from Eurasia (much later, but independently). This indicates only limited or no movement of people and ideas. Note that Viking incursions to the Americas was not enough to spread diseases there, so in order for a disease to spread you rather need large scale movements. Though of course it is always a lottery if someone in a migrating group is infected or not.

Trans-Saharan trade started developping before the Roman Empire. Carthage was a major end point for African resources, and in the Roman era they built a large number of outposts toward and into the Sahara along the Algerian mountains and toward Kharga as part of strengthening their trade routes.

To say nothing of the coastal trade along the Indian Ocean, where the ilk of Rhapta and other trading cities along the Swahili coast have been part of the indian Ocean trade networks (which the Romans eventually became part of) since the BCs.

The introduction of camel, then the spread of Islam across both sides of the Sahara, led to the development of very regular and very large contacts, with trade caravans of thousands of camels regularly plying the desert from around the 700s. By the 1200-1400s, several sub-saharan rulers went on their hajj to mecca and were establishing houses in Mecca to host other pilgrims from their lands. A number of muslim scholars visited Timbuktu and the surrounding regions.

The notion of no or ittle contact with the Eurasian world prior to "european discovery" is a load of hogwash. Yes, Africa had relatively limited contact with Europe...because Europe was, prior to the 1500s or so, a backwater of the Eurasian world.
 
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