[Dave]

Malatant of Shadow, your post is mostly true, but I take objection to you claiming the Vikings got their butts kicked. This is not true. The Norse largely prevailed in their military encounters with Indians. However, the cost was not worth the price. The vikings withdrew because they concluded that any colony would constantly be at war with the Indians.

Additionally, I would like to add a point of refinement. It wasn't just that the lack of domesticated animals (or exposure to cow and small pox) meant that Indians lacked resistance to small pox or other Old World pathogens, but they had weak immune systems in general. Because the New World had never been inhabited by hominids, pathogens which could infect Indians were so rare that Indians evolved weaker immune systems overall. This is why Indians suffer less from auto-immune diseases than other races.

[Malatant of Shadow]

Malatant of Shadow, your post is mostly true, but I take objection to you claiming the Vikings got their butts kicked. This is not true. The Norse largely prevailed in their military encounters with Indians. However, the cost was not worth the price. The vikings withdrew because they concluded that any colony would constantly be at war with the Indians.

le.

Do you have evidence of Norse settlements in Iceland or Greenland making a deliberate decision to withdraw from the New World? As far as I know, the only written account of Norse settlements in North America are in the Icelandic sagas, which are not generally considered reliable history. There is however archaeological evidence of Norse settlements, which generally bears up what I said, and also what you said in another way: the Vikings found the resistance of the natives too great to make a settlement viable, which is another way of saying "they got their butts kicked." Later Europeans didn't face the same difficulties once the plagues had reduced the native population.

Additionally, I would like to add a point of refinement. It wasn't just that the lack of domesticated animals (or exposure to cow and small pox) meant that Indians lacked resistance to small pox or other Old World pathogens, but they had weak immune systems in general. Because the New World had never been inhabited by hominids, pathogens which could infect Indians were so rare that Indians evolved weaker immune systems overall. This is why Indians suffer less from auto-immune diseases than other races.

There is no reason to believe that the fact the Americas were never settled by H. erectus would lead to weaker immune systems. Nor could I find any evidence that Native Americans are less at risk for autoimmune disorders than other peoples; in fact, for some types of autoimmune disorder they seem to be more susceptible. The natives weren't immune-weak in general, they just had no immunity to the specific diseases that Europeans brought with them. If they had had large domesticated animals they probably still wouldn't have had that immunity because the specific diseases suffered by the Old World wouldn't have manifested in the Americas, but they might have had diseases of their own that they were immune to and Europeans weren't, and then everyone all over the world might have lost 90 percent of their population. Not a pleasant thought!

[Dave]

Do you have evidence of Norse settlements in Iceland or Greenland making a deliberate decision to withdraw from the New World? As far as I know, the only written account of Norse settlements in North America are in the Icelandic sagas, which are not generally considered reliable history. There is however archaeological evidence of Norse settlements, which generally bears up what I said, and also what you said in another way: the Vikings found the resistance of the natives too great to make a settlement viable, which is another way of saying "they got their butts kicked." Later Europeans didn't face the same difficulties once the plagues had reduced the native population.

It's from Jared Diamond's book Collapse, which should be suitable to you since you seem to be cribbing your post from his previous work Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the first encounter the Norse killed nine of ten Indians (the tenth got away). A big part of the Norse problem was their hotheaded desire to kill everything, unlike later European imperialists who used many tools to secure domination. The first recorded encounter of the Norse meeting Eskimos for instance involves them stabbing an Eskimo in various places to see how he bled...

I'll revisit the text in the book later so I can give you something more specific.

There is no reason to believe that the fact the Americas were never settled by H. erectus would lead to weaker immune systems. Nor could I find any evidence that Native Americans are less at risk for autoimmune disorders than other peoples; in fact, for some types of autoimmune disorder they seem to be more susceptible. The natives weren't immune-weak in general, they just had no immunity to the specific diseases that Europeans brought with them. If they had had large domesticated animals they probably still wouldn't have had that immunity because the specific diseases suffered by the Old World wouldn't have manifested in the Americas, but they might have had diseases of their own that they were immune to and Europeans weren't, and then everyone all over the world might have lost 90 percent of their population. Not a pleasant thought!

There's plenty of reason to believe that.

One, a trait that is no longer adaptive tends to decline over the generations.

Two, autoimmune disorders are the result of an immune system going haywire and attacking itself. In an environment with few dangerous pathogens, a strong immune system is therefore maladaptive.

If the Indians had had large, domestic animals and urbanization they might not have had resistance to small pox, but they would've had stronger immune systems. Fortunately they did not, so they died off and allowed European civilization to flourish here.

I can give more specifics from the book The 10,000 Year Explosion by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending later.

[Malatant of Shadow]

It's from Jared Diamond's book Collapse, which should be suitable to you since you seem to be cribbing your post from his previous work Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the first encounter the Norse killed nine of ten Indians (the tenth got away).

I'll check it out. I'm not exclusively using GG&S though I have read it. The fact of the loss of the vast majority of the pre-columbian population is fully documented, and the consequences of that are inevitable.

I was aware of the encounter you describe, but that was an isolated incident in which the Norse outnumbered the natives on the spot as well as having better weaponry and taking them by surprise. The natives returned later on and did much better. There's no doubt that the Norse were fierce warriors and had superior arms to the natives, but they were grossly outnumbered and their settlements proved unsustainable for that reason.

A big part of the Norse problem was their hotheaded desire to kill everything, unlike later European imperialists who used many tools to secure domination. The first recorded encounter of the Norse meeting Eskimos for instance involves them stabbing an Eskimo in various places to see how he bled...

Yes, I can see that would lead to immediate hostilities, but hostilities developed between the English settlers and the natives, too. It worked more or less like this. The first English settlement, Jamestown, was built before the plagues had swept through North America, when the native population was still large. Although the English weren't (quite) as brutal as the Vikings, hostilities still developed and Jamestown was wiped out.

Later, English settlers arrived in what is now New England; these were Puritans leaving the mother country to establish a religious utopia. They arrived AFTER the plague had swept through and they found villages that had been completely depopulated. Securing the remaining natives' permission to build their settlements in the abandoned villages was easy enough as the natives didn't have the numbers to reoccupy them anyway. That was fine at first, but over time clashes between the natives and the English began to occur, and wars broke out -- this time, though, the natives had no significant numerical advantage, and that allowed the English technological superiority to prevail. Even so, it was a near thing; King Phillip's War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip%27s_War) destroyed about a dozen towns and wiped out a tenth of the male English population of military age, AND the natives were not united against the English, some fought on the side of the colonists. If the English had tried to settle North America before the plague had decimated the natives, I don't see any way they could have done it.

And that was the pattern throughout the European conquest of the Americas. In Mexico, Cortez' small force of Spaniards was helped by the fact that the Aztecs were bloody bastards that nobody liked and so a lot of the natives sided with the Spanish, but while that is what let them loot Tenochtitlan it's not what let them stay and establish permanent dominance. The fact that some 70-80% of the population had died is what let them do that. Spanish immigrants quickly were able to achieve enough numbers to hold the natives down, which would not have been possible if the native population hadn't already been drastically reduced.

European technological superiority would have allowed them to establish some form of exploitation of the New World anyway, I believe, but it would have been very different, more like Africa as I said, where native peoples remained by far the majority even in South Africa where there was significant white settlement. Nothing like what we see in North America, where the great majority of the population is non-native, ever occurred in Africa. (It did occur in Australia, but the aborigines were MUCH more primitive than the Native Americans -- full-on hunter-gatherers.) Today, we would probably see developing Native American nations here instead of the countries that we do see. Maybe the Iroquois or the Cherokee would have been able to rise to great-power status over the centuries. Maybe not; maybe the continent would consist of a lot of little nations constantly fighting each other.

There's plenty of reason to believe that.

One, a trait that is no longer adaptive tends to decline over the generations.

Two, autoimmune disorders are the result of an immune system going haywire and attacking itself. In an environment with few dangerous pathogens, a strong immune system is therefore maladaptive.

These are theoretical reasons. When I said there is no reason to believe that, I meant that there is no EMPIRICAL evidence that it is so. For example, we do not SEE less susceptibility to autoimmune disease among Native Americans, and therefore if we have a theory that they SHOULD be less susceptible then that theory has something wrong with it.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/autoimmunediseases.html

"Women - particularly African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American women - have a higher risk for some autoimmune diseases."

http://thyroid.about.com/library/autoimmune/blwhat.htm

"Some autoimmune diseases occur more frequently in certain minority populations. . . . Rheumatoid arthritis and scleroderma affect a higher percentage of residents in some Native American communities than in the general U.S. population."

No matter how much it makes sense to you based on the speculation you've stated that Amerinds should be less susceptible to autoimmune disorders, in fact that can be observed not to be the case.

[geb]

The entire pseudo-conception that American indians were not present on the American continent until only a few thousand years ago is meant to serve as an excuse to the European colonisation on the hypocritical claim that thereby one cannot consider any true natives to the Americas - and hence no stolen land.

[ThirdTerm]

This is the most comprehensive survey of genetic diversity in Native Americans to date, and the first to account for recent non-Native admixture. Our analyses show that the great majority of Native American populations—from Canada to the southern tip of Chile—derive their ancestry from a homogeneous “First American” ancestral population, presumably the one that crossed the Bering Strait more than 15,000 years ago. We also document at least two additional streams of Asian gene flow into America, allowing us to reject the view that all present-day Native Americans stem from a single migration wave, consistent with more complex scenarios proposed by other studies. In particular, the three distinct Asian lineages we detect: "First American", "Eskimo-Aleut," and a separate one in the Na-Dene speaking Chipewyan, are consistent with a three wave model proposed by Greenberg, Turner and Zegura based mostly on dental morphology and a controversial interpretation of the linguistic data. However, our analyses also document extensive admixture between First Americans and the subsequent streams of Asian migrants, which was not predicted by the model of Greenberg and colleagues, such that Eskimo-Aleut speakers and the Chipewyan derive more than half their ancestry from First Americans. Further insights into Native American history will benefit from the application of analyses similar to those performed here to whole genome sequences and to data from the many admixed populations in the Americas that do not self-identify as Native.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615710/

[Ummon]

Obviously they are a lost tribe of israel. Alternatively, because there are pyramids in the new world (ok ziggurats) and egypt then aliens must have transported mesopotamians to the new world. It is only rational