Among the Cloud People, Aryuk of the Tulat:
"...noticed persons who were wrinkled, toothless, bent, blind. Here the weak need not go off to die. The young and strong could feed them." (p. 189)
Some social progress in 13,211 BC.
Red Wolf who speaks for the Cloud People is:
"...clad in fur-trimmed leather and a headband with three eagle feathers..." (ibid.)
A proto-Native American.
This section is narrated from a collective viewpoint, then from Aryuk's, except when we are told that:
"If [Aryuk] had thought about [his name], he might have understood that it said 'Northwest Breeze' with an accent different from his, but he never did think about it." (p. 190)
In this single sentence, the omniscient narrator intervenes.
Ralph Corwin, Tall Man, lives among the Cloud People and converses with Aryuk. Wanda Tamberly will not arrive until II.
Corwin has negotiated the return of Aruk's daughter, Daraku, from the Cloud People but she and the baby that she has been carrying die. Nature comments and the Tulat anticipate:
"Afar a mammoth trumpeted. The wind loudened. This was going to be a cold summer." (p. 193)
9 comments:
Again, a lot of this is out of date.
For example, hominins hit modern height long before the emergence of h. sapiens -- over a million years ago, h. erectus often hit 6ft for males.
Hunter-gatherers usually had high-protein diets and were not significantly shorter than 21st century types from prosperous countries.
_All_ human hunter-gatherers before agriculture were apex predators, living at the top of the food chain. This pattern emerged -before- the evolution of our species from less advanced hominin ancestors.
Living into your 60's was also common, and older people not unknown. There are plenty of Old Stone Age skeletons, including some Neanderthals, which show age-related disabilities which mean they were supported by their band long after they could manage on their own.
Human beings shrank drastically with the advent of agriculture, both because diets shifted towards carbs and away from protein, because chronic malnutrition became more common, and because of the higher disease load in childhood from living in larger, denser and less mobile communities.
Average lifespans shrank too.
The Tulat as shown are more primitive than human beings have -ever- been. You'd have to go back to australopithecines to get that level.
Also, genetic research has shown that the specific mixed background of Amerindians -- showing a mix of East Asian and ANE (Ancient North Eurasian) -- took place -before- the migration to Beringia and then down into the Americas. It wasn't the result of meeting a preexisting population.
As it happens, post-Neolithic Europeans also have a heavy infusion of ANE genes via the Yamnaya and the related Corded Ware migrations in the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age period.
So Europeans and Amerindians have about a 30% genetic correspondence, stemming from mixtures taking place as long as 20K years ago.
Oh, well, we know that the Time Patrol timeline is different from ours.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I wish all this had been known by Anderson at the time he was writing THE SHIELD OF TIME. I would have been very keen to have known how he might have written/rewritten the "Beringia" section of that book.
Ad astra! Sean
The genetics also indicate that the Amerindian populations (except the Eskimo/Innuit) descend from extremely small founder populations.
Probably no more than few hundreds in all, certainly no more than 1-2 thousand.
The initial migrations were extremely small, and despite their dispersion and huge growth, by 1492 they were still -extremely- genetically uniform, much more so than Old World peoples... a fact which itself had substantial historical consequences, since it was key in their vulnerability to Old World diseases.
To me, that indicates that the Americas must have had no human population before the ancestors of the Amerindians arrived; otherwise, how could such small populations have printed their genes on so large an area?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And of course the inundation of the Bering land bridge, separating the Americas from Asia, would have prevented any further large scale migrations, and hence any increase in genetic diversity. I think it's a dead certainty that if the land bridge had continued to exist, a similar disease environment like that of Europe/Asia would have been seen in the Americas.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: possibly, but possibly not.
The Arctic acted as a "filter"; it couldn't be crossed quickly or by large numbers, because of the size and harsh climate, and the cold also served to restrict disease transmission, as did the dispersed population.
Many northern Siberian tribes proved very vulnerable to smallpox from the 17th century on; their populations were too small and too dispersed to keep it endemic, so they tended to get terrible epidemics periodically, introduced by outsiders.
To transmit the Eurasian disease environment, you'd need denser populations and frequent travel.
Add in that the Pacific is much bigger than the Atlantic and takes longer to cross. Even after 1492, it took a while for most diseases to cross, because the weeks of transit time were -usually- enough for anyone sick with a serious disease to either recover or die.
Usually wasn't enough, of course, particularly as voyages became more frequent and involved more people.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected. The Bering land bridge was in a cold, remote, thinly populated region. With a harsh climate acting as a filter.
And diseases like smallpox could wipe out entire Siberian tribes, because of small populations. Got it.
In Prescott's HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO, I read of how the Conqueror, Cortes, immediately quarantined a ship which arrived with crew/passengers infected with smallpox, in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading. But it failed, smallpox DEVASTATED the Indians.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: for a whole bunch of reasons, besides the obvious one that they were previously unexposed.
Eg. many of those stricken died not strictly of the disease, but because there weren't enough uninfected adults to do nursing and care for the sick. That's what pushes fatalities up to over 90% in some cases.
People starve, die of thirst, catch other diseases because they're lying in their own filth, are so weakened by lack of food and water that their immune systems break down, etc.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I did have that in the back of my mind, that there were not enough uninfected by smallpox to care for the sick. Terrible, such virgin field epidemics!
Ad astra! Sean
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