The whole “Columbus discovered The Americas” meme is stupid; rather obviously the people who settled down there 13,000 years before Columbus came, did. After all, they were there to greet him when he arrived, and promptly murdered a few of them. There were literally millions of people who discovered and inhabited the americas before Columbus was even born. What a strange conceit that it takes a white european to “discover” a place.
But, of course, the vikings reached the americas before Columbus did, too, and they were white and european. So, Columbus is now diminished to the point where we won’t mention that whole embarrassing incident any more in this posting.
Until recently it was a question “when?” the viking camp at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland was established. That question has now been answered, by some clever sciencing.
[guard]
This study, published in the journal Nature, made use of the cosmic-ray induced upsurge in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations during a known solar storm in AD993, which released an enormous pulse of radiation that was absorbed by trees at the time.
The logs, with bark still attached, were from trees alive during that solar storm, and excavated from the site. Such solar storms are reflected in annual tree growth rings. In all three samples, 28 growth rings were formed after the one that bore evidence of the storm, meaning the trees were cut in AD1021.
There is some other supplemental evidence, such as that the trees were cut with metal axes, which were not available to the natives of Newfoundland at the time. But it’s irrelevant: the layout of the buildings, the forge, etc., were all viking tech of a certain period and the camp could be dated reasonably accurately by the tech and references to “Vinland” in the sagas.
Using the variation in tree rings because of solar storms to date a log precisely – that’s clever! Yay for science.
Ethan Siegel just wrote about what to expect from the next similar solar flare: A giant solar flare is inevitable, and humanity is completely unprepared
Jörg@#1:
I’m sure our F-35s can protect us. Right?
Right. Btw., I just saw this book review:
Jon Schwarz/The Intercept: ‘“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon’
https://theintercept.com/2021/10/27/pentagon-budget-book-spoils-war-andrew-cockburn/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58728310-the-spoils-of-war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cockburn
‘In the introduction to “The Spoils of War,” an extraordinary new book by Andrew Cockburn, he makes a straightforward assertion about the U.S. military. “War-fighting efficiency has a low priority,” he writes, “by comparison with considerations of personal and internal bureaucracies. … The military are generally not interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement.” …
The proof of this unpalatable pudding is in the eating. Consider America’s just-concluded 20-year war in Afghanistan. As the Taliban took over the country in days, it might have seemed that the whole thing was a colossal failure. But if you check your portfolio of defense contractor stocks, and visit the enormous mansions in the northern Virginia suburbs surrounding the Pentagon, you’ll see that, in fact, it was an incredible success. …’
Jörg @#3:
Jon Schwarz/The Intercept: ‘“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon’
I’m familiar with Alexander Cockburn; he is one of those well-respected voices of dissent, spoken highly of by Noam Chomsky. I read a lot of his material over at CounterPunch. He is one of those “skeptics about the military” that you hear echoes of in my writing. I’ve tended to focus on smaller-picture failures like the F-35 as examples of what a waste the whole thing is, I’ve recently been reading a bunch of interviews with Chomsky and he has similar things to say about the great waste of it all. I owe you all a review and some quote-mining from that. Chomsky’s view is that military spending in the US is a substitute for a command economy and a massive subsidy to high tech. I tend to agree with Chomsky more – but I think that they’re both right (just different framing)
I’ll queue that up on my reading list, thanks!
If we have such good timber samples from L’Anse aux Meadows, you’d almost think we could’ve used regular tree ring analysis for dating the site.
That’s really cool. I always thought finding this site was an amazing thing.
And yes that always bugged the shit out of me to hear someone approach a land, with people in it, and claim that they had “discovered” it. No, you did not. There were already people there, and yes, they count too.
@kestrel:
And yes that always bugged the shit out of me to hear someone approach a land, with people in it, and claim that they had “discovered” it.
Imagine if I waded ashore in North Carolina, tomorrow – 500 years (a pittance!) after the people with the beach-houses came here, and announced that A) this is all mine, glory to god! B) I have decided that everyone here are to be called “dipshits” and you all work for me, now. C) Bring me all the gold you’ve got or my spearmen will fuck you up.
What a racket. If I did that today, I’d probably get tased if not ignored. But back in the day that was a famous political event. What the fuck is wrong with europeans?
This is indeed very cool. I believe there is more than one site where they found some iron working hearths and evidence of the Vikings in North America.
Leif Erickson was not the first, as he was following the accounts of a few hundred years earlier voyage that claimed that there was land east of Greenland.
West of Greenland. Spellcheck is such a stupid invention.
But do you have a flag?
I once wrote an alternate-history story where the Vikings never left the new world. Their colony remained and kept trading with the skraelings (their word for the natives) for centuries. So when the Black Plague swept through Europe, the Vikings carried it to the New World, which also had a population crash. But by the time Columbus got there, the population had recovered. Without the plague at their side, the natives were able to put up a far stiffer resistance, so the Europeans were never able to establish a solid foothold in North America and had to focus their attention elsewhere.
Off topic, but is likely to interest you:
Human History Gets a Rewrite
a review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow