5 ms·

Vikings lived in North America by at least the year 1021

giantg2 5y ago
I would be interested hear why they didn't create mass die offs from smallpox, etc like the later explorers. Or maybe there is evidence of a population reduction around that time and I just didn't know about it.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  CGP Grey has a great video about this topic: Americapox: The Missing Plague - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk TL;DR; You need big cities to keep plagues ongoing.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  'Waiting for America like a Swede' meme send to printer Ok, something has been cut very cleanly by somebody. I can't find anything solid linking vikings with the data shown here, Why should be a viking and not (for example) a portuguese? or a japanese? With four chunks of wood, are they 100% sure that this is not a native recycling wood token from a beaver dam? I cant avoid to notice that the figure of Columbus had received a lot of hate, spitting and cancel culture acts in the last years, So I feel justified to wonder to myself if this is really science or just politics.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    My second question is why they so naively assume that if a tree is chopped down in 1021 and the same wood appears in a hut, this means that the hut is made in 1021. You can cut a tree, make a ship, travel with it for several decades to the other coin of the planet, end in a wreckage and build a hut with the same material much later. There are buildings made of wood that survived for 900 years. If one is burnt down today and demolished and I pick some and made a hut in Australia with the salvaged wood, this would mean to historians that I was in the area 900 years before? So if we have and event and people refusing to discuss or see the obvious explanation standing in the middle of the room... Is not a good sign.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >My second question is why they so naively assume that if a tree is chopped down in 1021 and the same wood appears in a hut, this means that the hut is made in 1021. I suggest you click through to the Nature article. The actual article seems to be largely about how the researchers dealt with the exact problem you call out, better than previous work. It is put front and center as one of the basic difficulties in determining a date. The authors describe how earlier researchers got it wrong, and how they managed to deal with the issue. As they explain, the term of art is "inbuilt age": "The term inbuilt age refers to the difference in time between the contextual age of the sample and the time at which the organism died (returned by 14C analysis), which can potentially reach hundreds of years" Not to be disparaging, but I would like to know what motivates you to write about people refusing to discuss or see the obvious, after choosing not to look at the document in question. Did you really think it would be about something else?
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        Didn't have time yesterday. As I expected the conclusions aren't justified by the data shown in the nature's article.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        Data never justifies anything by itself. The article is about what they did with the data to get the conclusions. Where do you think they went wrong?
        pvaldes 5y ago
        "Evidence of something" means "I can prove something with this data and I'm 100% sure about that this happened". The phrase "Evidence that Vikings lived in North America by at least the year 2021" is not justified by the data shown in the article. There are several assumptions scattered on the paper that are taken as evidence but are simply wishful thinking. For example: "All the three samples had the same age. Statistics say that this wouldn't be probable so is not salvaged wood and a man should have chopped it. Evidence" Using your math bodyguard to support something that can be disproved easily with logic or empirical observation is putting style over substance in science. It happens all that time... and is deeply wrong. Do you want to know what I would call go to a place and finding 100 trees that died in exactly the same day of the same year? I would call it a flood. A wildfire. A plague. A storm with strong winds. Botanical knowledge and observation of the real world teach us that mature trees die often in clusters by natural causes and that when a tree dies their neighbors get more exposed and increase its probability to fall in a domino effect also. So the authors assume (wrongly) that the samples are independent and end with a weak conclusion. Wishful thinking. This is just one of the problems that I spotted in the article and not even the worse offender I'm not saying that vikings weren't in America in 2021. I'm saying that when you scratch a little the article does not prove that. I'm sure that this year will be token for granted as true without critical thinking from now on because, hum... fits in the narrative. The problem probably is that some external information is simply taken for granted by specialists on this field (and I'm not one of them), so we can't evaluate it. It happens often.

I would be interested hear why they didn't create mass die offs from smallpox, etc like the later explorers. Or maybe there is evidence of a population reduction around that time and I just didn't know about it.

Hokusai 5y ago
CGP Grey has a great video about this topic: Americapox: The Missing Plague - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk TL;DR; You need big cities to keep plagues ongoing.
pvaldes 5y ago
'Waiting for America like a Swede' meme send to printer Ok, something has been cut very cleanly by somebody. I can't find anything solid linking vikings with the data shown here, Why should be a viking and not (for example) a portuguese? or a japanese? With four chunks of wood, are they 100% sure that this is not a native recycling wood token from a beaver dam? I cant avoid to notice that the figure of Columbus had received a lot of hate, spitting and cancel culture acts in the last years, So I feel justified to wonder to myself if this is really science or just politics.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  My second question is why they so naively assume that if a tree is chopped down in 1021 and the same wood appears in a hut, this means that the hut is made in 1021. You can cut a tree, make a ship, travel with it for several decades to the other coin of the planet, end in a wreckage and build a hut with the same material much later. There are buildings made of wood that survived for 900 years. If one is burnt down today and demolished and I pick some and made a hut in Australia with the salvaged wood, this would mean to historians that I was in the area 900 years before? So if we have and event and people refusing to discuss or see the obvious explanation standing in the middle of the room... Is not a good sign.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >My second question is why they so naively assume that if a tree is chopped down in 1021 and the same wood appears in a hut, this means that the hut is made in 1021. I suggest you click through to the Nature article. The actual article seems to be largely about how the researchers dealt with the exact problem you call out, better than previous work. It is put front and center as one of the basic difficulties in determining a date. The authors describe how earlier researchers got it wrong, and how they managed to deal with the issue. As they explain, the term of art is "inbuilt age": "The term inbuilt age refers to the difference in time between the contextual age of the sample and the time at which the organism died (returned by 14C analysis), which can potentially reach hundreds of years" Not to be disparaging, but I would like to know what motivates you to write about people refusing to discuss or see the obvious, after choosing not to look at the document in question. Did you really think it would be about something else?
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      Didn't have time yesterday. As I expected the conclusions aren't justified by the data shown in the nature's article.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        Data never justifies anything by itself. The article is about what they did with the data to get the conclusions. Where do you think they went wrong?
        pvaldes 5y ago
        "Evidence of something" means "I can prove something with this data and I'm 100% sure about that this happened". The phrase "Evidence that Vikings lived in North America by at least the year 2021" is not justified by the data shown in the article. There are several assumptions scattered on the paper that are taken as evidence but are simply wishful thinking. For example: "All the three samples had the same age. Statistics say that this wouldn't be probable so is not salvaged wood and a man should have chopped it. Evidence" Using your math bodyguard to support something that can be disproved easily with logic or empirical observation is putting style over substance in science. It happens all that time... and is deeply wrong. Do you want to know what I would call go to a place and finding 100 trees that died in exactly the same day of the same year? I would call it a flood. A wildfire. A plague. A storm with strong winds. Botanical knowledge and observation of the real world teach us that mature trees die often in clusters by natural causes and that when a tree dies their neighbors get more exposed and increase its probability to fall in a domino effect also. So the authors assume (wrongly) that the samples are independent and end with a weak conclusion. Wishful thinking. This is just one of the problems that I spotted in the article and not even the worse offender I'm not saying that vikings weren't in America in 2021. I'm saying that when you scratch a little the article does not prove that. I'm sure that this year will be token for granted as true without critical thinking from now on because, hum... fits in the narrative. The problem probably is that some external information is simply taken for granted by specialists on this field (and I'm not one of them), so we can't evaluate it. It happens often.