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Norse tech and the settlement of the Americas
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Norse tech and the settlement of the Americas
    Posted: 20-Nov-2008 at 18:48
Originally posted by Hukumari

Linguists have approximated that the precursor to the language of the Huastecs diverged from the Proto-Mayan language between 2200 and 1200 BCE. Etc…


Exactly, between 2200 and 1200 BCE. Which is between 2000 and 3000 years earlier than the Vikings. It were Mixe-Zoque people, the Olmecs, that separated the Huastecs from the Mayans, and from then on they went a separate course. So unless you can come up with some kind of far fetched reason to dismiss all accepted archeological and linguistic scholarship on the Mayans and Huastecs there's no reason to assume Vikings contacting Huastecs would influence the Classical Maya culture (which was in collapse anyway at the time the Vikings roamed the seas), or in any case not more so than any other mesoamerican culture.


Edited by Mixcoatl - 20-Nov-2008 at 18:48
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Posts: 365 		  Quote Jams Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-Nov-2008 at 21:56
It would also be weird that the Meso American cultures didn't use iron like the Vikings did. After all, it was very widespread in use and very important to the Vikings. Of course, in the timeframe described above, the Nordic countries had just about entered the bronze age.

Edited by Jams - 20-Nov-2008 at 21:56
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-Nov-2008 at 23:12
You bet. And I wonder why the Mesoamericans didn't addopted the longships and the norse methods of shipbuilding as well. It doesn't make sense.
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-Nov-2008 at 23:18
Originally posted by Jams

....
This is something that pisses me off no end. The same way Pinguin is pissed of by certain people trying to "claim" American civilizations, I am pissed of by people trying to relate Scandinavians to "Aryan" and Nazi ideologies.
 
You bet. Scandinavians had a wonderful culture that deserved to be appreciated by its merits, and that had anything to do with the Third Reich. It is wonderful to read about the sagas, theirs religion an cosmology, theirs customs and society, achievements and founding of cities.
 
The proto-Nazis (like Wagner et.al) and the Nazis themselves just hijacked the Norse past to invent theirs own myth of the origin of the Germanic people. It is very sad that Nazis robbed cultural symbols from many cultures beside Norse, like Greek-style art, Christian legends and religious symbols of India and Tibet. Today, anyone that sees a swastica believe it is a nazi symbol, no matter it could be carver in the head of an statue of Buda.
 
 
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Posts: 1943 		  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Nov-2008 at 11:33
You are exactly right pinguin and it's a shame that so much of the Germanic heritage was abused by the Nazi regime and later made politically incorrect by the victors after the war. The swastika is the best example since it's an important symbol to many peoples around the world yet 99% of the people you meet will only associate it with Nazism. As one forumer here, xi_tujue unless I am much mistaken, pointed out; ignorance is the problem, not the symbol.

You come down far too strongly on Wagner and his contemporaries though. These people indulged themselves with a more innocent, even beautiful form of Germanic romanticism. They could not foresee how it would later be made into something harsh and ugly by the Nazis. There is an important difference here between being proud of your cultural heritage for its own sake, and being proud of it at the expense of others.
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Nov-2008 at 18:44
I wouldn't excuse Wagner or Neitzche from the evils they awoke. After all, it is hard to see a Nazi movement without the narrowness of mind of those proto-nazi thinkers. However, I love the art of Wagner no matter I preffer to read about the real norse people, and not the imitations in Opera.
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Posts: 1943 		  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Nov-2008 at 19:54
Originally posted by pinguin

I wouldn't excuse Wagner or Neitzche from the evils they awoke. After all, it is hard to see a Nazi movement without the narrowness of mind of those proto-nazi thinkers. However, I love the art of Wagner no matter I preffer to read about the real norse people, and not the imitations in Opera.


Wagner did a great job promoting the Germanic heritage, giving it a place in the contemporary consciousness alongside the Graeco-Roman one.

Nietzsche was a philosopher who is to be admired for analyzing the human being in unflattering honesty, he had little to do with spreading Germanic cultural awareness or German nationalism. The Nazi interpretation of his works may be safely dismissed as a politically motivated corruption that had little to do with philosophy. Nietzsche himself had the following thoughts about his ethnicity:

"Even by virtue of my descent, I am granted an eye beyond all merely local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives; it is not difficult for me to be a "good European." On the other hand, I am perhaps more German than present-day Germans, mere citizens of the German Reich, could possibly be—I, the last anti-political German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: I have many racial instincts in my body from that source—who knows? [...] When I consider how often I am addressed as a Pole when I travel, even by Poles themselves, and how rarely I am taken for a German, it might seem that I have been merely externally sprinkled with what is German."

Clearly Nietzsche's take on his ancestry was not that of a Nazi, especially not given his Polish descent.

I didn't really want to bring this up seeing as it has nothing to do with the topic, but we can't place blame for horrible crimes on innocents who weren't even alive to give their opinion.
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Nov-2008 at 01:34
You are right that we can't blame them for the actions of the evil genious that was Nazism. However, they helped to take the genious out from the bottle.
 
When Wagner created his wonderful Operas he awake purposedly German nationalism, and brought to the German nation all the symbology and heritage of a bigone age. Nazism used those same symbols to move the masses. Of course he couldn't foresee that nationalism would end so badly.
 
In the case of Nietzche, I personally don't agree he is so pure and innocent. Nietzche was the man that destroyed western moral and ethics. He tought people to be strong, supermen and be ashammed of feeling remorse. No wonder the product of his teaching was a cold psicotic superman that killed men, women and children without remorse in concentration camps while at night listened Wagner and read Nieztche. The philosopher's creature was a superman that knew God had died, someone that didn't believe in western values, and that killed at will. Knowing that, it is not strange that "Thus spoke Zaratustra" was part of the German soldier gear.
 
Thanks God Nietzche is dead! 
 
 
 


Edited by pinguin - 22-Nov-2008 at 01:39
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Posts: 2394 		  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23-Nov-2008 at 05:57

Originally posted by pinguin

Yeap. However, spearthrowers and composite harpoons should had produced a terrible impression on Norse if one of them was hit directly. Those weapons are designed to kill whales!

Hmmm ... I never thought of it that way ... come to think of it, you might have a point there. Although the Saga specifically states that the Skraelings didn't actually shoot at the Vikings, but behind them (don't ask me why, cause I don't know!!)

And it wasn't the spears that made them wet themselves - it was the float bladders (presumably these were the mysterious bursting balls attached to the harpoons). Again ... I don't know!! That's what the Saga says!!

But it is true, the Norse that came to Greenland were mainly merchants and town people, they were not the Vikings that went to attack Europe.

Yep ... just some civvies ... not surprising they wet themselves when a Dorset fleet shows up and starts shooting. 

Nice trick by Freydja, though, hey? Shocked
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Posts: 36 		  Quote Hukumari Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 13:54
Originally posted by Mixcoatl

Originally posted by Hukumari

Linguists have approximated that the precursor to the language of the Huastecs diverged from the Proto-Mayan language between 2200 and 1200 BCE. Etc…


Exactly etc...

This isn’t so important, but let us give a possibility to the Norwegians to explain the extraordinary travels by the Vikings as follows:


Incan bones found in Østfold


Archeologists in Sarpsborg have found one thousand year old skeletal remains that appear to be Incan.

Jonathan Tisdall  
The skeletal remains were found during conservations work at St. Nicolas church in Sarpsborg, a city 73 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Oslo, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports. 
When archeologists were to move some rose bushes they made the surprising discovery of the remains of two older men and a baby.
"When we were about to take hold under the rose bush the skeletal remains slid out. It was quite surprising," Mona Beate Buckholm, archeologist at the Borgarsyssel Museum, told NRK.
One of the skulls had characteristics that indicate he was an Inca, the South American people centered in Peru.
"There is a bone in the neck that hasn't grown and this is an inherited characteristic only found among Inca Indians in Peru. This is sensational," Buckholm said.
The archeologists now plan to try and find out what the man was doing in Østfold, and how he came there.


http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1856505.ece
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Posts: 1943 		  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 14:06
Interesting, Hukumari. A thousand years old, these bones. This guy lived during the so-called Viking Age, but it still leaves the question of whether that was when he crossed the Atlantic, or if someone shipped him over post 1492.
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Posts: 365 		  Quote Jams Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 14:18
That find has already been explained. An unnecessary interpretation made by the journalists.
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Posts: 1943 		  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 14:44
Explained how? Don't leave out the interesting part. Shocked
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Posts: 36 		  Quote Hukumari Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 14:54

Interesting: Nice comments from Reginmund from Norway and Jams from Denmark. Thanks!

As a matter of fact (too) many Indian tribes Y-DNA refer to the Vikings but I do not insist that they all were Norwegians. Surely a lot of other Fennoscandian tribes were among the Vikings. As you saw I didn’t want to use the word Scandinavian and refer to any special DNA.


Who were genetically the Vikings?

Wikipedia is telling pure nonsense:
The Vikings’ prolific expansion is exhibited in modern genetic surveys. Relatively high frequencies of Haplogroup R1a1 are found in Northern Europe, the largest being 23% in Iceland. It is believed to have been spread across Europe by the Indo-Europeans and later migrations of Vikings, which accounts for its existence in, among other places, the British Isles.

Tens of Indian tribes (“Amerindian”) have genetic roots in Fennoscandia. How can we explain this Y-DNA from Chocktow tribe?

1 direct hit to Northern Norway and one to Sweden.

With one step error to East Norway (1), Northern Norway (1), Värmland (Sweden) (1), Finland (1) and once more to Sweden [Swedish] (1).
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Posts: 36 		  Quote Hukumari Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 15:22
Let’s take one example more, even if I have hundreds of pages of Y-DNA results about Indian tribes. A typical Mapuche haplotype and only 2 complete results:
- 1 Northern Norway (Norwegian)
- 1 Neuquén, Argentina (Mapuche)

With SMGF a lot of hits with one step error in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, USA “admixed”, etc…
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 16:18
Well, I doubt Incas went to Norway. But perhaps some natives from the North east coast of North America, or perhaps pre-eskimos could have landed there. So that would make sense.
 
In anyways, I read that this famous discovery was a joke. Is there any other information about it?
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Posts: 2810 		  Quote Styrbiorn Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 17:16
Originally posted by Hukumari


Tens of Indian tribes (“Amerindian”) have genetic roots in Fennoscandia. How can we explain this Y-DNA from Chocktow tribe?

1 direct hit to Northern Norway and one to Sweden.

With one step error to East Norway (1), Northern Norway (1), Värmland (Sweden) (1), Finland (1) and once more to Sweden [Swedish] (1).


Source please.
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Posts: 36 		  Quote Hukumari Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 18:31
Originally posted by Hukumari

Originally posted by Styrbiorn

What haplotypes? What do the numbers mean? What is the source?


Meaning of numbers = samples found = same haplotype = same family = same tribe.

There are a lot of sources from many universities and tens of webpages like:
http://www.smgf.org/pages/ydatabase.jspx
http://www.yhrd.org/
http://members.bex.net/jtcullen515/haplotest.htm

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/N%20Y-DNA%20Project/
http://www.familytreedna.com/public/AmericanIndian&fixed_columns=on
http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Amerind%20Y&fixed_columns=on

Besides there are a lot of genetic investigations that usually cost from 30 to 70 US$ each. For instance JSTOR offered an investigation which reveals 3 Ainu based (Hokkaido/Japan) Indian tribes in South America with a cost of about 60 US$.

This is from page 6.

Why again - source please? I suppose you have seen them at least once. Don't you read the messages?
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Posts: 36 		  Quote Hukumari Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 19:02
Originally posted by Jams

That find has already been explained. An unnecessary interpretation made by the journalists.

Still waiting for your clarification.

Maybe mtDNA was A, 16111T, 16223T, 16290T, 16319A?
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Posts: 2810 		  Quote Styrbiorn Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27-Nov-2008 at 20:14
Originally posted by Hukumari


Why again - source please? I suppose you have seen them at least once. Don't you read the messages?



As far as I can see there is nothing there talking about any possible 1000+ year old common ancestors. All connections could have been due to post-Columbus immigration.
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