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It's not nearly as clear-cut as that, as there is evidence of its presence in Europe earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History https://en.wikipedi
by mkl 1y ago
It's not nearly as clear-cut as that, as there is evidence of its presence in Europe earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History
- hinkley 1y agoI'm trying to imagine under what scenarios a person or an entire ship full of people would find the New World and simply not tell anyone about it. There are some pretty big gaps in the island chains out there in the Atlantic, so it seems less likely that someone from the western hemisphere brought it to the Azores or Cape Verde before Columbus sailed across.
- colechristensen 1y agoVikings made it to North America 500 years before Columbus, their colony wasn't working out very well so they left.
- mkl 1y agoThe question is whether syphilis came from the Americas to Europe at all, or whether it was in both places already.
- hinkley 1y agoThat’s only the first question. Occam’s razor suggests that since almost no cases showed up prior to Columbus, that it was spread by his men. If a few cases show up before that? That’s not usually how infections spread it’s possible a weaker strain was here, maybe one that affected some other species and crossed over. But if it means someone else got to the Americas first, that’s a cultural bomb that would immortalize your name for documenting. So it’s worth looking at it from one side or the other to determine if the second question is worth the payoff times the probability of being true.
- bloak 1y agoFishermen may keep quiet about good fishing grounds for commercial reasons. Apparently Basque fishermen visited Greenland and Newfoundland shortly after 1492 and kept fairly quiet about it and it has been suggested that they went there before 1492, but there's no evidence for them being there before 1492, according to Wikipedia.
- hinkley 1y agoThere was that confusing moment in grade school history class where they casually stated that the pilgrims found a translator among the Indians. Moving on. Umm... How tf did the Indians have someone who already spoke English? Jamestown isn't exactly a short walk, even if it has been a dozen years. Yeah because fisherman had already been trading with them. But that's 1620, not 1491. It's reasonable to think fisherman had been leveraging this information a century after it was known.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe fault is in your teachers pretending that the pilgrims discovered jack-all. They meant to be farmers, but did not pack shovels. They were a grumpy religious splinter group that couldn't get along with others, not amazing explorers of the "New World". It's often mockingly said that they landed when they ran out of beer, which is true, but not because of frustrated frat bro reasons - they ran out of drinking water, more generally. And small beer was more nutritious than intoxicating.