their human route to the Americas was via Beringia;
their Persia had Mithraism earlier than ours did;
their Sherlock Holmes was a real person, not a fictional character.
Anderson avoided presenting information about the near future in the Time Patrol series. Manse Everard lives through a 1955-1990 period that is indistinguishable from ours. However, Anderson had no way to defend his narrative against increasing knowledge of the past.
IMPORTANT Addendum, 22 Oct 2017: It seems that I got this wrong, having seen only a part of the program. Certain questions were asked but the answers given apparently were that people could not possibly have crossed the Pacific and must have traversed Beringia. Oh well. (Dr. Roberts researches how people got from Africa to everywhere else.)
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think the archaic Caucasians we see in the "Beringia" section of THE SHIELD OF TIME could have just as easily reached the Americas by the Beringia land route as the later Paleo Indians.
Sean
I'm extremely skeptical of theories positing an earlier human occupation of the Americas.
If even a few hundred humans had been present, within a thousand years -- a period barely perceptible to archaeology -- they'd have been all over both continents in substantial numbers, and the evidence would be plentiful and unambiguous as it is in Eurasia and Africa. And as it is for later periods in the Americas.
It's not possible for humans to be here, but to remain so scarce that there isn't abundant unambiguous evidence of their presence, because confronted with abundant food, a favorable disease environment and an open land frontier, human hunter-gatherers will double in numbers every generation -- about every 25 years.
The math on that is quite unambiguous.
There's a distinction between Mithraism as it was practiced in the Roman Empire, and the -god- Mithras/Mitra.
Mitra was a very ancient figure among the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian peoples; he's mentioned in the oldest Vedas (composed around 1200 BCE) and the earliest layer of the Avesta (around 1000 BCE), and he's mentioned in diplomatic documents from the Kingdom of Mitanni in what's now Syria and Iraq around 1500 BCE.
The later Mithraic cult incorporated both the name of the deity and a lot of the symbolism and ritual associated with him in ordinary Indo-Aryan-Iranian polytheism.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Aha, that helps to make sense of what I thought was an anachronistic or "premature" mention of Mithras in Anderson's "Brave To Be A King."
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
You made very good points here. So much so that I have to wonder if Anderson made a mistake in how he presented the archaic Caucasians seen in the "Beringia" section of THE SHIELD OF TIME. Anderson did try to suggest that, for whatever reasons, the "culture" and technology used by these persons were so poor and primitive (and themselves so few) that they were simply wiped out by the paleo Indians.
Sean
I did have a problem with that part of the story.
Specialist tools for big-game hunting are at least 300,000 years old; spears of that date in association with butchered skeletons of horses and other large grazing animals have been found in digs in Germany, which would be Homo Ergaster and predate both Neanderthals and Sapiens; those specific ones would probably be ancestral to Neanderthals and/or Denisovians.
Neanderthals also probably used hafted weapons and tools, composites of wood, stone and bone.
And if they did, all humans did.
Stable bone-isotope ratio analysis of Neanderthal skeletons indicate that they had the same ecological footprint as lions -- they ate nothing but the bodies of big grazing animals.
Early Sapiens, Cro-Magnons, around 35,000 BCE, showed a footprint more like wolves, with about half their calories coming from big grazing animals and the other half coming from birds, fish, and small mammals.
Neither ate any significant amount of plant foods.
Amerindians do show strong evidence of having both west and east Eurasian DNA -- in everyday terms, they're an Asian/European cross, except that both those categories were just in the process of developing as separate populations when they came to the Americas.
It's only just recently become possible to tease out the archaic genes from more recent European admixture, and also to access ancient DNA directly.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
MORE very interesting comments by you! So, I conclude we still have much to learn about any pre Paleo Indians who may have lived in the Americas before their arrival.
Sean
Yup. As regards the story, essentially -all- humans and pre-human hominids since about 1.8 million years ago were apex predators; they just got better and better at it. The "tulat" were mere scavenger-foragers, and I doubt that anything since Australopithecus was really that backward.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I have to agree. And that makes me wonder why Poul Anderson described the Tulat of "Beringia" as being so primitive. One reason I thought of is that the hypothesis of pre Paleo-Indians living in the Americas was so tentative and uncertain that Anderson it made sense to show them as being extremely backward.
Sean
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