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December 2010 Main Page Mexican-American War Mark II
A big bunch of AH Challenges this time. Soviet-Japanese War in 1939
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
First,
obviously keeping modern humans out of the New World until 1492 would
be very difficult. There was a continuing flow of technology and genes
across the Bering Strait with the various Eskimo groups. Obviously
also, the butterflies would make having our Europe of 1492 and a New
World populated by sims unrealistic.
Be that as it may, assuming Europe is essentially our Europe in 1492, things start diverging in a hurry--not so much from 1492 until 1519, but drastically from then on. The gold from Mexico and then Peru transformed European economies. It gave the Hapsburgs the economic power to compete with the Turks as a great power peer. It also reduced the economic clout that the large Ottoman gold and silver stocks gave them. The impact of that gold transformed European industry. Spain bought a lot of their manufactured goods outside of Spain because the gold caused inflation that priced Spanish manufacturing out of the market. The gold stimulated ship-building and cannon manufacture over much of western Europe. Once the Dutch and English got into the game of pirating Spanish gold shipments, that gold stimulated their economies more directly. A lot of the capital, technology, and organizational structures that the English, Dutch, and French used to colonize the New World came directly or indirectly from New World gold or from efforts to extract it from Spanish hands. I'm not at all sure that Central Europe would manage to stay out of Turkish hands without the New World gold. I'm not at all sure the Dutch would even exist without New World gold. Would the Catholic church have the strength to launch the counter-reformation without New World gold? Would essentially private groups in England have the capital or organizational ability to colonize without the gold of Peru and Mexico? Would they have the motivation early on? About the Sims themselves: (1) I doubt that Homo erectus would be as primitive as portrayed in "A Different Flesh". Yes, there was undoubtedly a phase where Homo erectus was that primitive, probably about 2 million years ago. The lineage evolved though. By about a million years ago at the latest they were able to cross small bodies of ocean (to Flores, for example). That would have taken far more organizational and communications skills than the sims had. So let's say that Homo erectus gets over to the New World in the early stages--1.5 million years ago at the latest. At that point, they would have already had tools of a sort. Tool-use predates even the earliest Homo erectus. They probably didn't have controlled use of fire, though they almost certainly had a sophisticated knowledge of how to exploit naturally occurring fires. We've recently discovered that even chimps have that. At that technological level, the species is going to have to adapt to their environment far more than modern humans have to. With 1.5 million years to play with, there is a very good chance that a number of species of sims would develop--small tropical forest sims like our time-line pygmies, open country distance running predators, ambush hunters similar to Neanderthals, maybe even semi-aquatic forms in the warmer coastal regions and semi-aboreal ones in the tropical forests, heading back toward an ape-like ecological niche and competing with the New World monkeys for fruit. Without fire or clothing and with sim level tech I don't see how sims would survive New England winters, or Illinois winters for that matter. Depending on how much of the story canon we want to preserve, maybe they could secondarily fur out and develop extra-large fat deposits to get through the winters. Maybe they could do some kind of semi-hibernation or migrate north in the spring and head back south in the winter. How would the sims respond to European colonization if it came? Depends on how much their tech and intelligence level developed over the 1.5 million years between arrival in the New World and 1492. If we go with the canon, they didn't develop much in terms of their ability to control fire or their tool-chest in those years. I'm skeptical of that, but having sims develop into a species nearer modern human capability is a very different story than "A Different Flesh". Let's go with the canon model. The sims are a little more capable than chimpanzees, but not too much. They are able to throw rocks, shape and carry hand-axes, and use improvised clubs. They probably are smart enough to pick out a good club if they're expecting battle. They are capable of using simple spears, just sharpened sticks basically. Chimps have recently been observed doing a variation on that to get animals out of tree hollows, so certainly the sims would be able to do it. Would they be able to throw spears and use them to keep a predator or rival human away? I don't see why not. Would a sim be able to go to the next stages: attaching a sharpened stone point to a spear, using a sling to give thrown rocks more power and range? Probably not. On the other hand, if these things have developed the ability to hunt big game, and I'm pretty sure they would--too much protein in too easy a package for them not to, then they might be surprisingly formidable to someone carrying Musket 1.0. Population density would be their downfall. Not enough of them. The sims would probably be susceptible to most, though not all human diseases. I'm not sure if they would be susceptible to smallpox. There are no known animal reservoirs for smallpox, which I think means that chimps can't get it (not 100% sure of that). If chimps can't get smallpox, it's an open question as to whether or not sims could. They're closer to people, but how close do you have to be? Speaking of diseases: If the sims have been in the New World for over a million years, then chances are that several New World diseases have had time to adapt to them. There is a good chance that European settlers will confront quite a few diseases they have no immunity to. On the other hand, sim population density wouldn't be high enough to give crowd diseases a chance to develop, so expect more chronic stuff and diseases with animal reservoirs rather than quick-kill diseases that spread human to human. Another aspect of this scenario: while the plant resources of the New World would be skimpier than they were historically, the animal resources would be considerably more abundant. When Columbus lands in the West Indies, chances are there are no sims there, but the native faunas of the islands would be intact and very cool. We're talking some very weird monkeys, unfortunately all now extinct, a giant flightless owl on some islands, ground sloths that were in a range of sizes, some down to the size of a cat, giant rodents, some nearly bear-sized, weird insectivores like the Solenodons, and probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. Of course most of those animals would probably be extinct a few hundred years after European settlement, but at least the Europeans would have a chance to find a use for them. And that's just the West Indies. For the New World as a whole there is a good chance that there would be additional species of llamas, horses, probably Mammoths and Mastodons, probably giant capybara-type rodents (think guinea pig on stilts, but deer-sized), giant beaver (bear-sized), a couple of giant spider monkey species, giant peccaries and probably quite a few others I'm not thinking of. I'm guessing that some of the ice-age New World animals would go extinct even with just having to deal with sims rather than modern man. The big Ground Sloths and Glyptodonts seem particularly vulnerable to anything like early man. Sabertooth tigers tend to not make it when humans are around. Niches overlap too much. If they're in the book, which from very old memory I think they may be, then I would say they would be very rare and maybe in northern areas that the sims can't utilize. Giant short-faced bear and the North American lion (apparently actually a kind of giant Jaguar instead of a true lion) might or might not make it. For the coolness factor I would give them the benefit of the doubt. Would any of these species be domesticated by Europeans? I don't know. Europeans already had a pretty wide range of domestic animals, and any new ones would have to offer substantial advantages to be worth it. I could see European nobles taking Mastodons back to Europe and keeping them on hunting preserves, maybe even establishing semi-wild herds. I'm not sure what all else they would find useful beyond keeping them in zoos. It seems to me that if H. erectus made it to the New World they would probably make it to Australia too. The trek to Australia would be much easier, and the conventional wisdom is that humans made it to Australia earlier and at a earlier technological stage than they made it to the New World. Of course that assumes that H. erectus made it to the New World due to some enhanced ability to cross water gaps. The issue is that during the period H. erectus would have been available to cross the Bering Strait, there were, as far we know, two climate states: Ice Age with the Bering Land Bridge, and Interglacials with a very big, very cold stretch of ocean between the two hemispheres. Interglacial and Land Bridge were mutually exclusive and probably had been since late Miocene/very early Pliocene, though my info on that may be dated. (Anyone with more detailed info on the Bering Strait chronology is extremely welcome to jump in here). I suppose you could have the transfer to the New World happen extremely early, with very primitive H. erectus, which could push it back to around 1.75 million years ago or slightly earlier, and then have a late non-Ice Age land bridge develop briefly, just in time to get them across. Given probable actual geography, the easiest way to get to the New World would be during an Ice Age, going along the southern coast, rafting from ice-free pocket to ice-free pocket. But ability to do that probably means the ability to get to Australia, the Philippines, Sulawesi, etc. Subsequent waves of humans would probably wipe out any H. erectus except possibly in Australia. H. erectus in Australia would have some interesting implications. If they got there early enough, Australian animals would have time to adapt more fully to human-type predators, which would probably mean that the most vulnerable of the Diprotodonts would die out, but some of them might make it. The key is being able to move faster than a man can run, at least for a short distance. If an animal can't do that, hunters will cut them to pieces. If the big diprotodonts died out, a million plus years would presumably give the big kangaroos time to get even bigger and take their place, though there is a limit to how large a hopping animal can efficiently get, and I suspect that some of the big extinct kangaroos were close to that size. I suppose large kangaroos could go secondarily quadruped, but that would take quite a bit. From old and possibly faulty memory I believe that most larger kangaroos have difficult moving their hind legs independently, which would limit the kinds of gaits they could do. Developing effective quadrupeds from kangaroos would probably take longer than a couple of million years. Given enough time, something like the pig-footed bandicoot might have become a decent large quadruped, but again that would take a lot more time than they had. Marsupials had a problem developing fast-moving quadrupeds because if they lost toes and transformed paws into hooves, they could only do it for the back feet. They had to retain grasping ability in the front paws so they could crawl from womb to pouch after they were born. While bandicoots are marsupials, they independently developed true placentas, and that may account for the fact that they have some recently extinct forms with something very like hooves. I'm not quite sure how that worked because I'm reasonably sure bandicoots still go through a pouch stage. And I'm rambling. Sorry about that. Hopefully informative rambling. In nature very few things are impossible. A really primitive--as in pre-fire--version of early man making it across the Bering Strait is one of the more difficult ones though. It isn't just the cold. It's also the very long nights during the winter. When you're talking maybe four hours of cloudy daylight, sight-oriented beings like our ancestors just don't do well. Little foraging time. No way to do a lot of the communications stuff that depends on facial expressions. And without food storage you have to figure out something to eat during the winter, plus it has to give you enough calories to offset the losses you would get trying to keep warm. You could migrate or hibernate, but migration over those kinds of distances is difficult for a not particularly fast animal, and hibernation is not trivial to develop. The monkeys and apes of the European Pliocene had enormous incentive to develop that kind of adaptation when Europe cooled and the Ice Ages started, but they died out instead, though one type of Macaque may have survived in Italy until the late Pleistocene. By the way, that might be an interesting alternative in its own right. Monkey or ape trapped in Europe (Italy or Spain) in the ice ages develops a very cold country capable form. It wouldn't have the extremely short days you would get in the Bering Strait area in the winter, but it would have to be incredibly hardy, and would probably have to be able to hibernate or store food some way. In a lot of ways bears are the cold country equivalents of apes and monkeys. Having actual monkeys running around the equivalent of Renaissance Italy could be fun, though of course something like that would cause enough butterflies to make Rome, and thus a Renaissance unlikely. Posted on Jan 3, 2012. More Stuff For POD Members Only |
