Columbus Day Considered

Christopher Columbus was a pretty horrible person, so I have no problem ceasing to honor him with a national holiday. But he was also a uniquely important historical person whom everyone should know about, and the well attested date of his arrival, in 1492 CE, should also be something that every educated person knows.

Columbus was not the first person to make contact with the Americas after the arrival and dispersal of the predominant Founding populations of the indigenous people of South America, Mesoamerica, and most of North America around 14,000 years ago from Beringia where these populations had an extended sojourn in their migration to the Americas from Northeast Asia. They arrived with dogs, but no other domesticated animals.

There was at least one small progenitor wave of modern humans that reached at least as far as New Mexico before them about 21,000 or more years ago (as recent research has confirmed this year from earlier less definitive data), but unlike the Founding population of the Americas (itself derived from a genetically homogeneous population of less than a thousand Beringians), they left few traces and had little, if any, demographic impact on the Founding population that came after them, or had only the most minimal, if any, ecological impact on the Americas. 

Columbus also arrived after the later arrival of two waves of migration from Siberia, one of which brought the ancestors of the Na-Dene people during what was the Bronze Age in Europe, and the second of which brought the ancestors of the Inuits during the European Middle Ages, both of whom were mostly limited to the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of North America, except for a Na-Dene migration to what is now the American Southwest around 1000 CE plus or minus (in part from pressure to move caused by the ancestors of the Inuit people). The Na-Dene ultimately heavily integrated themselves into the local population descended from the Founding population of the Americas. The Inuits admixed some, but much less, with the pre-existing population of the North American Arctic and largely replaced a population of "Paleo-Eskimos" who derived from the same wave of ancestors as the Na-Dene in the North American Arctic.

A few villages of Vikings settled for a generation or two in what is now Eastern Canada ca. 1000 CE before dying out or leaving (and leaving almost no genetic trace in people who continued to live in the Americas). And, the Polynesians (and perhaps others) probably made contact with the Pacific Coast of South America and Central America several times in the time frame (generously estimated) of ca. 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, again without a huge impact on the Americas or the rest of the world and with only slight amounts of admixture.

But the contact that Christopher Columbus made with the Americas persisted and profoundly changed both the Americas and the rest of the world. He returned to Europe and then came back with more Europeans who aimed to conquer the New World (including many covert Sephardic Jews seeking a more hospitable future than they had in Iberia). 

Christopher Columbus's first contact led to a chain of events that resulted in the deaths of perhaps 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas (mostly due to the spread of European diseases like small pox and E. Coli, to which the people of the Americas had no immunity, at a time prior to the germ theory of disease, and only secondarily due to more concerted hostile actions taken by the European colonists towards the indigenous populations), led to the collapse of the Aztec and Inca civilizations at the hands of Spanish Conquistadors, brought syphilis to the Old World (especially Europe), brought horses to the Americas, led to the deforestation of much of North America, and brought crops native to the Americas including potatoes, maize, tomatoes, and hot chilis to the Old World (both Europe and Asia). Indirectly, this chain of events even led fairly directly to the Irish potato famine more than three centuries later.

His arrival started the chain of events that caused Spanish and Portuguese to become the dominant languages of South American, Central America, Mexico, and much of the Caribbean, in heavily admixed populations with mostly Iberian European male ancestry, and caused what became the United States and Canada to become mostly English and French speaking, where a policy of population replacement became the norm. Thousands of indigenous languages went extinct in this process. All but a few hundred of the rest of are now moribund or nearly so an declining. Those few hundred indigenous American languages that do survive are mostly minor secondary languages in their homelands now: only thirty-five have more than 100,000 speakers and just six have more than 1,000,000 speakers. 

In the U.S., Canada, and Greenland, the twelve most widely spoken are Navajo in the U.S. with about 170,000 speakers, followed by Cree in Canada with 96,000 speakers, Kalaallisut in Greenland with 57,000 speakers, Ojibwe in the U.S. and Canada with 48,000 speakers, Inuktituk in Canada with 39,475 speakers, Blackfoot in the U.S. and Canada with 34,394 speakers, Sioux in the United States with 25,000 speakers, O'odham in the U.S. and Mexico with 23,313 speakers, Yup'ik in the U.S. with 18,626 speakers, Western Apache in the U.S. with 14,012 speakers, Keresan in the U.S. with 13,073 speakers, and Chipewyan in the Canada with 11,325 speakers. Twenty-one more indigenous languages in this region have more than 1,000 speakers but less than 10,000. All twenty-three of the indigenous languages of the Americas with more speakers than Navajo are spoken outside this region (i.e., in Latin America).

But for Christopher Columbus's initiative to mount his expedition, similar events would have taken place eventually, anyway, but they might have taken place decades or even a century later in global history in different ways. A North America colonized along the Iberian model, for example, as much of the Western United States was at first, could have led to a very different human geography than what we see today. The eventual first lasting Old World contact might have even happened in a Trans-Pacific voyage from Asia, instead of across the Atlantic Ocean.

A Duel That Set Back Science

French mathematician Évariste Galois was a B-list genius whose work made otherwise insoluble equations possible to calculate with and solve, and also made it easier to determine when an equation could not be solved analytically. His methods are used today in solving difficult questions in particle physics, among other things.

But, due to his untimely death in a duel at the age of twenty, the point at which his work was widely known and appreciated was delayed more than seventy years. 

We will never know what other great discoveries this prodigy might have made had he lived a full life. There is every reason to think that some scientific discoveries might have been made a generation or two earlier if he had lived. Even science today might have reached greater heights with access to mathematical tools that have not yet been devised that he might have invented.

In 1830 [Évariste] Galois (at the age of 18) submitted to the Paris Academy of Sciences a memoir on his theory of solvability by radicals; Galois' paper was ultimately rejected in 1831 as being too sketchy and for giving a condition in terms of the roots of the equation instead of its coefficients. Galois then died in a duel in 1832, and his paper, "Mémoire sur les conditions de résolubilité des équations par radicaux", remained unpublished until 1846 when it was published by Joseph Liouville accompanied by some of his own explanations. Prior to this publication, Liouville announced Galois' result to the Academy in a speech he gave on 4 July 1843.

From here. See also a recent Physics Forums Insights Post on the subject.

Cursed

The 2020 Netflix drama series "Cursed", is a vaguely Arthurian tale of a powerful fairy princess and a young man named Arthur, in a medieval world in which a powerful church is seeking to exterminate the fey. These fairies are human-like, with only subtle differences from the humans and a greater connection to nature, more another race of humans from an earlier time, than another type of being entirely.

While it is obviously fiction (fairies, magic, etc.), it does a better job, I think, at conveying the deeper emotional, social, and cultural reality and feel of the genocidal ethnic, racial and religious wars of the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age transitions (and beyond), than many non-fiction efforts to describe these historical events. Sometimes fiction can be truer than non-fiction at conveying the human essentials.

Indeed, the King Arthur story itself, is a legendary history of one such transition in Britain itself, so it makes sense that done well, it would.

What Would Have Been Different If The Persians Had Defeated The Greeks? UPDATED

Feel free to discuss and consider this proposition in the comments. 

I will briefly comment that during a visit to Greece, and in particular, some tours in Athens last summer, the Greco-Persian War was vibrantly alive in the hearts and minds of the Greek people and still felt relevant today.

Of all the many counterfactuals, those “what-ifs” posed by history, perhaps the most arresting, if only because the most sweeping, asks: "what if the Persians had defeated the Greeks in the Greco-Persian War of 490–479 B.C.?" 

Had this happened, there might have been no Plato, no Aristotle, no Roman Empire, no Christianity, no Western Civilization. A Great King, a lineal descendant of Darius, might still rule the world. All might worship the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda, with men going about in turbans, women remaining at home or in harems. But that, as every counterfactual invariably ends—generally accompanied by a sigh of relief—didn’t happen.

From this book review reviewing Peter Green, Xerxes at Salamis (1970, reissued as The Greco-Persian Wars).

I'll also note that the answer is multi-faceted. 

One aspect of the question is a question of what matters in terms of historical causation.

If you are believer in the "Great Men" and "key moments" theory of history, events like this really can make an immense difference. 

But, if you think that history is largely a function of big, long term fundamental forces like climate and technology and inevitable secular trends (an approach often associated with Marxist historical interpretation but by not means so ideologically bound), you may be inclined to say that if the Persians had defeated the Greeks in the Greco-Persian War of 490–479 B.C., the fortunes of the parties probably would have been reversed in a second Greco-Persian War of 453-444 B.C., without leaving the world notable changed in the long run.

In this view, "Great Men" may change the finer grained details of history, but only rarely the overarching long term trends that matter in the long run. The alternative history would surely be different in some respects, because history does not repeat itself, but it would rhyme with the world we live in, taming our utopian and dystopian instincts.

In the language of mathematics, historical causation is a "chaotic" process, i.e. one in which small changes in the conditions in one moment are capable of producing big differences in outcome down the line due to the non-linear processes involved in how events unfold. But, historical trajectories have an "attractor" to which the non-linear processes' developments tend to gravitate, although the strength of these attractors is not a matter upon which there is a strong consensus, even when it is possible to meaningful define or describe that strength with more than a mere gut feeling. 

Even then, however, a question like this opens up the question of what is really fundamental, and what is window dressing.

An absence of Plato and Aristotle does not imply that the Persian tradition might have offered us equally formidable philosophers and proto-scientists. Cf. Hindu philosophy was mathematical. Indeed, some non-Western figures readily present themselves as alternatives. 

We might not have "Western Civilization" but that is not to say that Persian civilization under the different conditions it would have encountered in the scenario suggested would have been all that different in the ways that matter. Surely, an ascendant global Persian civilization would have still been more similar to our "Western Civilization" than the civilizations of India, China, Japan, the expansionist Bantu tribes of Africa, or the Aztecs.

A Persian Empire, had it extended to Hadrian's Wall, would probably have turned out more similar to the Roman Empire than the Persian Empire of our history books, but it would surely also have been quite distinct in myriad particulars. The notion that "A Great King, a lineal descendant of Darius, might still rule the world", likewise, seems about as plausible as the notion that because the Greeks won, a Roman Emperor still rules the world.

The Roman Empire with late Iron Age technology, was not sufficient robust to survive to the modern day, and neither would a Persian Empire.

Arguably, the therapeutic deism of the typical layman with little training in religious doctrine, who is nominally Christian, is actually closer, doctrinally, to Zoroastrianism than to Christianity or Judaism understood at the level of the doctrines that matter to educated elites.

It could be that 19th century businessmen might have ended up wearing turbans rather than bowler hats or beaver caps and silk neckties, if this had come to pass. But, anyone who thinks that fashion has much intrinsic value vastly overestimates the importance of function over form.

And, the suggestion that in world where the Persians rather than the Greeks prevailed that we would have women remaining at home or in harems, misapprehends the extent to which women's roles are functions of economics more than culture. 

King Solomon is a household name to every small town Christian and Jew in America, and he generally has a very high favorability rating. But, that doesn't mean that modern Americans maintain vast harems in order to follow his allegedly wise example. And, women remained at home to a much greater extent than they do today as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s Baby Boom in the United States.

IMPORTANT UPDATE (July 6, 2020):

One noteworthy aspect of Zoroastrianism is that, in contrast to other ancient religions (including Judaism, and later, Christianity), Zoroastrianism appears to have banned slavery on spiritual grounds. This is important to bear in mind in the context of discussing the Persian War, below. The Greeks thought of the war as the defense of their glorious traditions, including the political participation of citizens in the state, but it was the Greeks who controlled a society that was heavily dependent on slavery, whereas slavery was at least less prevalent in Persia than in Greece (despite the religious ban, slavery was clearly still present in the Persian Empire to some degree).

From here.

Did Pre-Columbian Mexico Have "Venus" Figurines?

I'm making this post as a "bleg" (a blend of "blog beg") as a request for crowd sourcing help in solving the riddle of whether figurines like the second picture below were present in Pre-Columbian Mexico. Comments from anyone who knows or has relevant information would be greatly appreciated.

Figurines like the one immediately below, known anachronistically as "Venus figurines" were common in prehistoric "Old Europe" (which is one of the reasons that archaeologist Marija Gimbutas guessed (probably incorrectly we can now deduce from the relationships of people in early Neolithic cemeteries from ancient DNA) that pre-Indo-European first farmers had a matriarchal culture. 

Venus of Dolní Věstonice, the earliest discovered use of ceramics (29,000 BCE – 25,000 BCE) 

by Petr Novák, via Wikipedia

The image below is of a figurine from my room at resort in Cancun a few years ago, without interpretive context (presumably to confer good luck in the fertility department for honeymooners, and, for what it was worth, it was a romantic place to stay).

Photo from a resort room in Cancun, Mexico, ca. 2014 CE,

taken by me with an actual camera (before I had a smart phone).

The figurine shown directly above is a cheap, mass produced knockoff. But, it is also a reproduction of pre-historic art of some kind, and not a modern style. At the time I wondered if this was a reproduction of a prehistoric European Venus figurine (the boring possibility), or if, much more interestingly, if this was a reproduction of a local figurine from Pre-Columbian Mexico, perhaps in the Olmec, Mayan or Aztec cultures, that had developed independently on a local basis in the New World, despite its similarity to Old World Venus figurines.

There was something vaguely similar, but the examples that I've seen are not close enough to be the source for the figurine depicted in my photo above.

Double-faced female figurine, early formative period, Tlatilco, c. 1500–1200 B.C.E., 

ceramic with traces of pigment, 9.5 cm. high 
(Princeton University Art Museum)

Tlatilco figurines are wonderful small ceramic figures, often of women, found in Central Mexico. This is the region of the later and much better-known Aztec empire, but the people of Tlatilco flourished 2,000-3,000 years before the Aztec came to power in this Valley. Although Tlatilco was already settled by the Early Preclassic period (c. 1800-1200 B.C.E.), most scholars believe that the many figurines date from the Middle Preclassic period, or about 1200-400 B.C.E. Their intimate, lively poses and elaborate hairstyles are indicative of the already sophisticated artistic tradition. This is remarkable given the early dates. Ceramic figures of any sort were widespread for only a few centuries before the appearance of Tlatilco figurines. . . .

The Tlatilco figurine at the Princeton University Art Museum has several traits that directly relate to many other Tlatilco female figures: the emphasis on the wide hips, the spherical upper thighs, and the pinched waist. Many Tlatilco figurines also show no interest in the hands or feet, as we see here. Artists treated hairstyles with great care and detail, however, suggesting that it was hair and its styling was important for the people of Tlatilco, as it was for many peoples of this region. This figurine not only shows an elaborate hairstyle, but shows it for two connected heads (on the single body). We have other two-headed femaile figures from Tlatilco, but they are rare when compared with the figures that show a single head. It is very difficult to know exactly why the artist depicted a bicephalic (two-headed) figure (as opposed to the normal single head), as we have no documents or other aids that would help us define the meaning.

Tlatilco figurine of a woman with a dog, Tlatilco, c. 1200–600 B.C.E., ceramic 

(National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

As in the case of their Old European counterparts, male figures are rare.

A lot of Pre-Columbian structures from the Neolithic cultures in the Americas such as those in Mesa Verde in Colorado, show remarkable similarities in design and construction techniques to those of early Neolithic architecture in Anatolia and the Balkans from several thousand years earlier.

Mesa Verde was built by the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from 600 to 1300 CE 
(image from the National Park Foundation).

Çatalhöyük, Turkey, after the first excavations by Omar Hoftun - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

There are also similarities between the structures built in Neolithic/Copper Age Age Mexico (below top) and those of the Bell Beaker period in Wales (below bottom).

Reconstruction of a house, c. 1200 B.C.E., central Mexico

(National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City) from here.

Keith Gibbs Via Wales Online via Bell Beaker blog.

If you'd seen similarities that strong within a few centuries of each other in two places that could have been in contact with each other in that era, you would presume that the earlier one was the source for the methods seen in the later one.

But, these similarities were almost surely a case of independent development of the same technologies and techniques. This is because they pre-dated any contact between the Old World and the Americas that far South that could have transmitted it. There had probably been Austronesian contacts in Pacific Coastal South America and proto-Inuit contacts in the Arctic at about the same time that Mesa Verde was built, but neither of these cultures built early Fertile Crescent Neolithic style structure. Neither did the earlier Paleo-Eskimo peoples who were the main source other than the Founding Population of the Americas of the Na-Dene culture and people. 

So far as I know, neither of these Old World cultural influences on the Americas had Venus figurines, and there is too long of a gap in the archaeological record from the Founding population (which could have been a source for Venus figurines as illustrated by the date of top photo) to the earliest known uses of ceramics and construction of Neolithic era structures in the Americas. Any technologies that were present at the time of the Founding population of the Americas would have been lost by the time that ceramics were being use, or the farming had been independently invented in the New World.

In both cases, to the extent that they are independent developments they inform our ideas of how much of the detail of historical technologies and physical cultures was pre-determine by the constraints faced by the people employing them, and how much they were unique creative developments that could have turned out differently.