Ever run across a fact or an idea and know that it has some kind of Alternate History potential but you’re not quite sure what to do with it?  Here are a few facts or ideas that I’m going to do something with, but I haven’t figured out quite what yet.  

Black Roanoke?  Back in the 1580’s the British made two attempts to colonize North Carolina.  Both failed.  As the first one was about to break up, Drake showed up at the site of the colony.  He had been raiding Spanish colonies and had several hundred prisoners, including some slaves that he had taken as booty.  

The British colonists were fed up with North Carolina and wanted desperately to go home.  Drake apparently off-loaded some or all of his prisoners on the shores of North Carolina to make room for the colonists.  The captives and slaves then disappeared from history.  My guess is that most of them starved to death and a few tough survivors intermarried with the local Indians.  I wonder if there is anything credible that I could do in terms of alternate history with those people.  I’ll have to think about that.

Dogs first domesticated in South America?  This was inspired by Robert Alley, who was inspired by Docimo.  What if domestic dogs hadn’t become domesticated?  Would something else have taken their place?  The other species of wild dogs would have been logical candidates.  What if one of the South American wild dog species had been the first domestic dog?  Domesticated dogs were probably necessary for domesticating large herd animals, and may have even been a factor in allow farming to develop because they could alert humans to human or animal crop thieves and in many cases chase potential thieve away.  Agriculture starts several thousand years later and happens first in South America?

What if the first fleet of prisoners to Australia had revolted and scattered before the second one arrived?  There was a long period of isolation and a lot of brutality on the part of the guards.  How would the people of the second fleet react to burned-out infra-structure, roving gangs of escaped prisoners, and presumably very hostile aborigines who have spent the last year or so being raided by those roving gangs.

Monitor world: A recent article in Natural History talked about the fact that monitor lizards tend to parallel mammal predators in behavior and sometimes appear to show a great deal of brainpower for lizards.  Small monitors seem to be capable of competing with the Marsupial predators of Australia and New Guinea on reasonably even terms but they don’t seem to be able to compete with more modern predators on other continents to the same degree.  What would it take to have a large island or a continent where monitor lizards are the dominant predators?  How would they develop?

Jamestown hurricane: What if the infant colony of Jamestown had been hit by a hurricane sometime in the first ten years, with a lot of people killed and the infrastructure knocked down?  That happened to several failed colonization attempts in the US southeast.  Would the colony have been rebuilt or abandoned?  How would that have affected other later colonization attempts like those of the Pilgrims?

What if we hadn’t stopped clubbing each other?  An article in Natural History says that the main differences between the skulls of Homo erectus and those of more modern men appear to be designed to give the earlier versions of men more protection against head trauma.  The author claims that the head protection was probably due to settling disputes primarily by fighting with clubs or rocks.  When the emphasis shifted to cutting weapons, the buttressed skulls weren’t as advantageous and they eventually went away.  Does this guy know what he’s talking about?  If so that raises some questions.  If the shift to cutting weapons hadn’t happened, would we still have those thick skulls?  Would our brains have developed in the same way?  By the way, the author mentions that a few tribes where clubs are still used for settling disputes have some of the buttressing features in many skulls.