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Blue beads could be the oldest evidence of European goods in North America
- Turing_Machine 6y agoMarco Polo (1254-1324), who was on a Venetian trading expedition to China in the late 13th Century, related accounts from other traders that certainly sound like they were in contact with Arctic peoples, e.g, stories of "immense white bears" and "sledges" that were drawn across the ice by teams of dogs. So if the Polo family (and others) were trading Venetian goods into China, and other traders were trading Chinese goods into the Arctic, it's not really too surprising that some of those Venetian trade goods wound up in Alaska. It's very cool that they've found physical evidence though! Edit: This part: "A growing body of evidence from the Bering Strait region indicates that the movement of non-native materials from northeast Asia to northwest Alaska has been occurring via undefined routes since the first millennium AD, if not longer." ignores the fact that Native Alaskan and Siberian peoples were regularly crossing the Bering Strait long before Europeans arrived on the scene. Not only did they have excellent boats (good enough to hunt whales!) but in the winter you could just travel across the ice. There's not really much of a mystery here about how trade goods could have flowed. The same is true of the popular "land bridge" story, by the way. While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait. Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family in Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed.
- fogihujy 6y agoYeah, the physical evidence is the cool part; we know people went from A to B even back in those days, but this show just how massive the ancient trade networks were.
- chmod775 6y ago>Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family in Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed. You lost me on this sentence. How is Alaska Natives having family across pond in modern times related to land bridges 2000 years ago and what did the Cold War do to those families? I just don't understand. What am I missing?
- throwanem 6y agoNot OP, but your quote directly follows this: > While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait. Crossing in boats, that is, not via land bridge. One assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more physically difficult, but politically impossible due to the mutual suspicion (especially of espionage on the part of the other) between the two powers whose territories it involves.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago> One assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more physically difficult, but politically impossible due to the mutual suspicion Exactly so. While there's reluctance to admit it (even now) there are stories that some Alaska Natives maintained contact with their friends and relatives in Siberia, even during the Cold War. I can certainly believe it. There's a lot of lonely coastline in that area, and not much monitoring -- certainly not back then. But yeah, the main thrust of what I was saying was that the indigenous people had boats capable of making the crossing long before Europeans arrived on the scene, so the "land bridge" idea is not the pat explanation that many seem to think it is. The "land bridge" may have existed, and was probably used when it did exist, but it's clearly not the whole story. We know that Alaska Natives were making this trip, and even longer ones, regularly before the arrival of Europeans. Heck, the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska were running water-based slave raids as far afield as California before the Europeans arrived.
- roywiggins 6y agoThere's even a special visa waiver for people with family across the Bering Strait: "the program allows indigenous residents from both sides of the Bering Strait to visit for up to 90 days without a visa. Travelers must have documented invitations from family or other residents living on the other side." https://apnews.com/article/5e16cfadd90c478d80a374ef1cd99c2d https://apnews.com/article/5e16cfadd90c478d80a374ef1cd99c2d
- throwaway2048 6y agoThere is a long standing stance in anthropology and archeology that native peoples of the Americas had virtually zero contact with groups outside of their immediate surroundings. I find it extremely condescending and stupid.
- konjin 6y agoThe reason for this is that when they did have contact they all died. The natives in America were vastly more inbread (which really is saying something) than the Europeans who came in. They had so little genetic diversity that when one died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the same strain. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThat's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Europe and Asia have the same issue compared to Africa, which is why Native Americans have an exceptionally severe case of it. Secondly, your characterization here shows a really fundamental misunderstanding of the literature. To quote an actually relevant paper [1]: > The difficulty of finding incontrovertible evidence to support genetic hypotheses has resulted in a variety of alternative perspectives which de-emphasize the genetic hypotheses as missing key points. [1] https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032 https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032
- s1artibartfast 6y ago>That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects Isn't this a simple matter of WHAT versus WHY (i.e. they were inbred because of founder effects)
- AlotOfReading 6y agoNo, founder effects are basically sampling bias. You can still have people that are genetically distant reproducing (and in fact, the popularizer of this particular vein of theories in Brazil, Francis Black suggested mandating exactly this to much criticism), but the overall population diversity will remain low. However, founder effects can be associated with inbreeding if it's a sufficiently small population. I'd imagine this probably wasn't a major factor for early Americans, as the effective population size (note, not actual population size!) was on the order of thousands.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoThis is a great point. There's a sadly consistent theme of simply underestimating native peoples throughout history. Polynesians were in contact with south America for centuries before Columbus for example. Their naval technology was capable of reliable navigation over vast distances in the pacific. There's genetic evidence that people went back and forth between SA and Oceania with some regularity, a feat more impressive than crossing the Atlantic, but you almost never hear it talked about.
- dangerbird2 6y agoNot just generic evidence: Polynesian peoples almost certainly imported sweet potatoes to Oceania and east Asia hundreds of years prior to Columbus. In fact, the proto-Polynesian word for sweet potato is likely a Quechua loan word
- Camillo 6y ago> Somehow, these blueberry-sized beads made their way from what is now Venice, Italy, to the Brooks Range mountains of Alaska at some point during the mid-to-late 15th century, according to new research published in American Antiquity. They somehow managed to put the "what is now" hedge in the worst possible place in that sentence.
- dmos62 6y agoI find the placement fine. How would you write it?
- vijayr02 6y agoNot OP - I don't think this statement needs that phrase. Venice was Venice 500 years ago.
- dmos62 6y agoHaha, missed that.
- laurencerowe 6y agoWhile Venice was Venice, Italy wasn’t yet Italy.
- BerislavLopac 6y agoIt was. "Italy" (Italia to the natives) is both the name of the modern country (which didn't exist back then) and the peninsula (which did).
- Tade0 6y agoAt the time Venice was the capital of the Republic of Venice, so its inhabitants would think of themselves as first and foremost Venetians. Also Venice isn't located strictly on the peninsula.
- unwind 6y agoMeta: this was posted 9 days ago [1], with some discussion then. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26053821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26053821
- davidw 6y agoAnd 11 days ago when it came out, with no discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033759 It's pretty amazing to think of something traveling from Venice all the way to a place that's very remote in this day and age.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jhoechtl 6y agoIs it impossible that an early western settler brought these artifacts when they were already old? Like me carrying a roman coin and loosing it in today Siberia for example?
- konjin 6y ago>Venetian glass trade beads in radiocarbon-dated contexts that predate Columbus's discovery of the Western Hemisphere. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/abs/precolumbian-presence-of-venetian-glass-trade-beads-in-arctic-alaska/3465746929B31ADBC6E1D1A23D09A2CD https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
- scribu 6y agoEuropean settlers reached Alaska only in 1741, so the organic material around the beads - which is what was used for carbon dating - would have had to survive wear and tear for centuries. Not very likely.
- loufe 6y agoI sometimes wonder what the value of lines like this are. Should't the reader be convinced of the magnitude of the find by the facts and the way they're presented, themselves, without having to throw some distant third party in for props? > Ben Potter, an archaeologist from the Arctic Studies Center at Liaocheng University in China who’s not involved with the new study, said it’s a “very cool” discovery.
- goodcanadian 6y agoMy wife had one of her research projects get some media attention. For one interviewer, she wouldn't give the quote that they wanted (essentially a value judgment that her research couldn't possibly answer), so they got the quote from someone else who had nothing to do with the project. I can't say that is what happened here as the quote seems quite innocuous. Alternatively, they do sometimes want to get a view from someone unrelated to the project in order to get a feel for how important/interesting the result truly is.
- thgaway17 6y agoIt’s to demonstrate that other experts in the field, who don’t have a connection to this particular study, found the results significant. Seems useful to me.
- pjc50 6y agoJournalism, oddly, doesn't report or even attempt to determine "facts", it reports what people say about things.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoFollowing a 'we report, you decide' principle seems like it would invite the least bias.
- pjc50 6y agoYes, that's the theory, although anybody half competent can cherry-pick the interviewees and the quotes to match what they think the story "ought" to be.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIt's not necessary for a Venetian to go to Alaska, for the trade beads to end of there. It's only necessary for neighbors to trade with neighbors, and they can diffuse around the globe. Like an ancient game of Telephone. Long-range traders can give the process a jump start, but the end result can be indistinguishable from diffusion.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoI disagree that it would be indistinguishable. You need to chain together a long series of probabilities that leads to exponentially less product arriving through diffusion than through long-range traders, and a clear trail would result.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThe typical approach to direct contact is to look for the signs of the people making the journey (genetic, linguistic, and cultural transmission). If you don't have these, they're often practically indistinguishable because the archaeological record inherently tends to be spotty, without continuous data points for uncommon trade goods. Moreover, the Asian northeast is vast and only lightly surveyed.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoYou only need time. The probability of any individual product arriving is indeed small. The probability of some item arriving is certainty, given enough time.
- sambroner 6y agoThis is a really interesting point that seems to be overlooked, but is unbelievably interesting. My understanding is that there was neighborly trading over the Bering strait and from Newfoundland to Greenland... It makes me wonder, could a merchant sailor in a pub in England have heard a story from the a friend of a friend of a friend about the North American coast?
- twiceinawhile 6y agoThis transfer of beads happened during the time of the mongol empire which stretched from deep within europe to china and all the way to the eastern siberia. It is no secret that the mongol empire was one of the greatest facilitator of cultural and economic diffusion. Generally the idea was that goods and ideas flowed from the east to the west, but certainly some from the west flowed to the east and eventually to alaska. It would be interesting to know if anything from alaska made its way westward.
- jmartrican 6y agoThey date the twine used, not the actual beads themselves. It could be the case that the beads were put on some old twine. Or that the twine and beads were old, but landed in Alaska at a much later time.
- goda90 6y ago"This date range was subsequently affirmed through the testing of charcoal and caribou bones found at the three sites." Looks like they compared to the site as well, confirming the beads were there in pre-columbian times.
- jmartrican 6y agoThanks for pointing that out. I missed that part.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>It could be the case that the beads were put on some old twine. The inverse is far more likely. Twine is basically a consumable whereas being non-reactive to most of the things people come in contact with is all but a requirement of jwelry.
- Archelaos 6y agoThe article states that the twin was not directly associated to the beads (so no putting them on some old twine), but was from the accompanying bangle (probably item "o" in the image), which was dated 1397–1488 and "was subsequently affirmed through the testing of charcoal and caribou bones found at the three sites". This is a typical situation when dating items indirectly from their find context. The standard counter-argument is, of course, that the item was added at some other point in time to its find context. So in this case the counter-argument would be that the beads had been added at least a few decades later, while anything else that had been dated is from 1488 or earlier. (A few decades, to allow for some time for their journey from the Atlantic coast to Alaska.) How likely or unlikely is that?
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- CryptoPunk 6y agoThere was also almost certainly trade between the New and Old World by way of the Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland, which knew about the North American mainland, and very likely visited the Labrador region for lumber. The short-lived Norse colony built in L'Ance aux Meadows, Newfoundland in 1000 AD had an iron forge [1], which would have produced items in high demand among the indigenous people of that region. It seems unlikely that there wouldn't have been sustained trade once demand for these types of items had been established. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoTo Alaska???
- CryptoPunk 6y agoNo, it seems the beads came across the Bering Strait. I don't see why Venetian beads entering North America from the Maritimes would head north west across the tundra to Alaska instead of south and south west toward more populated regions. Plus by the 13th and 14th century, when Venetian trade was rising, the population of the Norse colony in Greenland was dwindling and the colony was approaching its end, due to cooling climate.
- technicalbard 6y agoIf the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple of hundred years - EASILY. Remember that the Inuit of North America only entered from Asia in the last 4000 years or so, and speak a language that is closely related to languages in Siberia... So these beads could have come to Alaska from east OR west. We will probably never know for sure.
- yongjik 6y agoI'm not so sure about the "easily" part: from [1], most part of Greenland was colonized after Vikings settled on Iceland. So I'd imagine it wasn't exactly a leisurely trip from there to Alaska. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people
- BeefWellington 6y agoWhat's interesting about this is that this article suggests nobody else from Europe set foot* in North America before Columbus, but the Norse had a settlement in Newfoundland in approximately 1000CE^[1] and are known to be prolific global traders. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI don't think it makes that suggestion at all. In fact, it is specifically about evidence of pre-Columbus artifacts >Much of the public imagines Columbus as the only (or first) connection between the old and new worlds, yet there are many instances of cultural connectivity in the Bering Straits region—and this is one The discovery and article highlight a more nuanced discovery: >the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent,”
- aksss 6y agoWhat's fascinating to me about this is how often the Brooks Range keeps popping up in the critical archeological record. I used to assume that people who come from Siberia to North America are crossing the land bridge and taking a direct route southeast to more temperate climates and to get back to the coast asap. However, it makes a lot of sense that they'd stick between the major river and the caribou herds to sustain them in travel east and west. Travel would have been easier, food more plentiful, even if somewhat (okay, significantly) colder than the South Central coast line. The South Central and South East coastlines are arguably less hospitable without specialized knowledge of watercraft and saltwater fishing and hunting skills.
- mymythisisthis 6y agoFishing fleets had been trading with people in the Arctic for some time. The joke is that when John Cabot 'discovered' N. America, he had to sail around all the fishing boats to get to shore.
- shmerl 6y ago> Christopher Columbus reached the Americas in 1492. Dating these beads to the pre-colonial era is thus very significant. Vikings were there way before that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
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- Archelaos 6y agoIf we speculate about routes for the beads from the Atlantic instead of from Siberia, there are at least four vage possibilities: a) A route from the Caribean European settlements established after 1492 b) A route from New Foundland fishermen bases established around 1500. c) A route from the New Foundland Viking bases from the early 1000s. d) A route from Norse Greenland (980s to late 15th century). Possibilities a) and b) are likely too late regarding the dating. Possibility c) is too early (no Ventian beats in the early 1000s). But d) seems to me at least as plausible as a Bering Strait route.