How might the columbian exchange have gone down if the vikings

>>2046837
I loathe alt history topics because I hold the view that you cannot at all predict how other factors would have played out.

But what do you mean exactly?

>>2046906
I mean, the vikings werent as interested in eliminating native beliefs for example, like the catholics of spain were.
My personal ideas are that things would have been better as the concept of "convert or die" that the spanish had was alien to the vikings who werent catholics

>>2046928
I can understand that, but what I meant: do vikings isolate themselves on North-America, is there exchange with North-American vikings and European vikings, etc.

I do honestly think that if North-America had more cultural exchange in earlier periods things might have worked out better.

What if vikings gave them smallpox before leaving or completely integrating? After 500 years they should have developed some immunity for it so it wouldn't have been that big thing when the spanish came.

>>2046942
i dont know if they would have, i imagine that they might have been somewhat isolated considering what happened to greenland.
Also did they impact the native americans in any real way?

>>2046957
also they could have brought horses which would have given the natives a major advantage against the western europeans.

Iron spreads throughout the americas, a mesoamerican death cult spreads back the other way and eventually engulfs the world, finally all the sacrifices release enough orgone energy to cause a breach between our universe and the ultrahyperbolic realm, humanity is enslaved by the old gods and mutated to service designs we cannot comprehend.

>>2046958
>Also did they impact the native americans in any real way?
Not sure.
My knowledge on it is very limited.

But in your scenario wouldn't non-viking Europeans (or Asians) eventually discover the Americas?

And that is a problem with alternative history, people seem to assume that if you change one happening the others stay the same. I disagree since A can lead to B and so on.

Honestly it doesn't matter one whit what the vikings would've done, there simply weren't enough of them even in their homeland to make much of an impact through conquest or cultural transmission, and seafaring technology wasn't quite there yet so they had no practical way of shipping many thousands of people to the American continent like the Spanish etc did. The viking presence in N. America was never going to amount to more than a couple pretty modest colonies.

If their settlements had persisted, then maybe they could've introduced smallpox, measles etc sooner and perhaps more gradually, giving the natives a few more centuries to develop resistance to them? But those diseases already had to be introduced multiple times at multiple places, they didn't blanket the entire continent after the first outbreak, so that would've had a limited effect, probably. And it probably wouldn't have happened at all, given that the main factor limiting the spread of disease to the continent was their seafaring technology, not the size of their settlements. But frankly that's straying more into biology than history.

tl;dr nobody knows for sure but a world where their settlements hung around for a couple more centuries probably looks quite a bit like the world today.

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14KB, 227x222px

>>2046972

>>2046972
this

>>2046957
>After 500 years they should have developed some immunity for it so it wouldn't have been that big thing when the spanish came.

A single guy most likely brought smallpox to Americas and it killed 90% of natives. In 500 years they might have brought their numbers up somewhat which would make colonization harder than historically.

>>2046997
>they didn't blanket the entire continent after the first outbreak
that's by the way exactly what happened. after first encounters all the tribes europeans encountered were already basically living post-apocalyptic dystopia since their population was almost wiped out before they had ever seen a white man.
>>2047022
if i remember correctly he was an algerian slave of cortéz?

>>2047054
It's not. You may have read that on Cracked.com, or in 1491, or in Guns, Germs and Steel -- they're wrong. The epidemics were absolutely apocalyptic in the areas where they hit, but they *did not* sweep up and down the entire continent from the initial outbreaks the way some people have claimed. The initial plague made its way down from Mexico into South America and the Andes, but almost certainly did not make it past the Chihuahuan Desert in the north. The reason much of what would become the United States seemed so sparsely populated is because it was always sparsely populated (although there were large centers of civilization in the interior, and later outbreaks did sweep west and depopulate them).

>>2047204
>You may have read that on Cracked.com, or in 1491, or in Guns, Germs and Steel -- they're wrong.
Not her, but damn pop science strikes again. Are they wrong because of new findings or what?

>>2047255
>not her
>her
t. Redddit numale invader

>>2046837
>a culture founded on savagely and parasitically raiding, raping, pillaging and murdering defenceless people
They would have probably been much worse off.

>>2047268
>t. Redddit numale invader
Damn son, you got me. Should've been more secretive.
How did you know tho? You would have to be immersed into Reddit culture to know the cues that lead to it.

>>2047204
The hell are you talking about?

The final remnants of the Missisipian culture was wiped out by a smallpox epidemic brought by a Spanish expedition. By the time major European colonization arrived there was virtually nothing left.

>>2047385
Yes, the de Soto expedition introduced smallpox to the southeast -- that wasn't part of the *initial* plague, the one that devastated Tenochtitlan and much of Mexico and Central America and quickly spread south and destabilized the Inca, etc. It was a separate outbreak, and it didn't blanket the continent either -- that outbreak did not reach the northeast, the Great Lakes Region, the Great Plains, the Northwest, etc. That's the point I'm making -- that it was introduced and reintroduced many times, and that it wasn't able to hop many of the geographical barriers & sparsely populated areas separating the regions of the country and the culture groups that inhabited them. Smallpox and measles and chicken pox and so on are contagious, but they can't teleport!

When I say "sparsely populated" I'm talking in relative terms. Obviously there were large settlements and centers of civilization, e.g. the Mississippi River Valley, although not as large as the ones in Mexico and Central America and the Andes, and obviously they were depopulated by disease (though again, not by that initial outbreak -- it took several to reach all of them). But the estimates that put the Precolumbian pop. of the Americas at 70, 80, 90 million, with tens of millions of people in the United States and Canada, are fantasies. It was comparatively much less densely populated than what would become Latin America.

>>2047255
Nothing new has come to light, really. The truth is there just never was very much evidence for it at all -- it's not like everybody bought the idea for decades and then it was overturned. Since about the 70s people have been trying to inflate the Precolumbian population of the Americas, partly historical revisionists doing so for political reasons, partly well-meaning people trying to answer the question, "Why was the United States so sparsely populated when Mexico had some of the largest cities in the world?" Which is an interesting question, but you don't need conspiracy theories to answer it.

For obvious reasons it's a very politically-charged estimate, and the idea that the United States & Canada were densely populated, with large cities rivaling those of Mexico and South America, has a lot of appeal to a lot of people. But the truth is, there'd be TONS of archaeological evidence for that, and there isn't (as mentioned in prev. post there were large settlements in parts of the country, but not that large, and not as many). Civilization doesn't just vanish without a trace. And there was plenty of European exploration of the United States before there were settlements there, fur traders and the like, and when smallpox spreads to a population, it strikes again, and again, and again -- if there was a massive dying-off of civilization north of Mexico, we'd know.