Ancient DNA sheds light on what happened to the Taino, the native Caribbeans | Hacker News Reader

Ancient DNA sheds light on what happened to the Taino, the native Caribbeans

arstechnica.com

53 pointsrbanffy48 comments

> What would the Americas -- the world -- look like today if the Europeans never came here? Or at least, came and engaged respectfully

One historical scene in particular plays out this idea. It occurred as Cortes marched across today's Mexico towards the city and ruler he had heard so much about. At one point — not yet at the city — Moctezuma sent some emissaries to greet him. They brought two others with them, who were sacrificed in front of the Spaniards.

You can find accounts of this story from both sides: from the chronicles of Cortes and his conquistadors (Bernal Diaz, for example) and from native accounts (as told in The Broken Spears, as another example). And the differing reactions to this event tell you everything. The Spaniards were appalled, some even cried. But the emissaries were totally baffled by their reaction to the gift.

What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened. As others have pointed out, even basic biology (immunity) was different enough to make an enormous difference without people consciously having to do anything.

Peter Watson's "The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New" is a pretty fascinating examination of the overall contrasts between Eurasian and New World cultures. It's a story that's hard to tell, and there is a lot of speculation and ambiguity. What is clear, above all else, is that the whole ordeal ended tragically, insomuch as it ever ended at all.

> The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened. As others have pointed out, even basic biology (immunity) was different enough to make an enormous difference without people consciously having to do anything.

In the 16th to 19th centuries, I suppose it would have been an insurmountable medical problem. But what if they were separated until today? Perhaps in an alternate universe, instead of a wooden sailing ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, toxic gas bubbled up from the mid-Atlantic ridge (and a similar barrier in the Pacific), requiring pressurized aircraft to fly over. Or the two groups were on separate planets, requiring space travel to meet.

Would we be able to deal with the medical problems today?

Or, in a less unlikely scenario, there were plagues in the Americas that decimated European settlers more than the reverse, allowing the Native Americans to co-opt European shipbuilding and colonize Africa and Eurasia. Interesting to think about!

There is a Bande Desinee with a plot just like that: https://www.bdgest.com/preview-1673-BD-nous-les-morts-les-en...

I just wanted to add to this that it's not as if the Spaniards were appalled by violence itself, just by the cultural difference in how it was applied. As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts. Admittedly Montaigne is writing here about Tupis from Brazil rather than Aztecs, but his point applies in both cases I think:

"After having treated their prisoners well for a long time, giving them all the provisions that they could one, he who is the chief calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner and on the other end, several feet away, out of harm's way, and gives to his best friend the arm to hold; and the two of them, in the presence of the assembled group, slash him to death with their swords. That done, they roast him and eat him together, sending portions to their absent friends. They do this, not as is supposed, for nourishment as did the ancient Scythians; it represents instead an extreme form of vengeance. The proof of this is that when they saw that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, executed their captives differently, burying them up to the waist and firing numerous arrows into the remainder of the body, hanging them afterward, [the Tupi] viewed these people from another world, who had spread the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors, and who were much more masterly than they in every sort of evil, must have chosen this sort of revenge for a reason. Thinking that it must be more bitter than their own, they abandoned their ancient way to imitate this one.

I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own."

http://www2.fiu.edu/~harveyb/oncannibal.htm

>As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts.

Yes, this was my instant thought. What a naive Eurocentric way to think of history to insinuate that everyone except the Europeans were just barbaric savages who killed and devalued life. As if the Europeans weren't fresh off their own multi-year killing sprees for this and that reason that equally would have baffled Native Americans.

I don't think the poster was insinuating that - if he's read Bernal Diaz, he no doubt has few illusions about medieval europeans. They literally did stuff like murdering fat people so they could use their fat to treat the wounds of their horses. Nobody could read 'The Conquest of New Spain' and come away with the impression that Cortez was anything but an absolutely awful, atrociously evil person.

Then why would he say things like:

>What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened.

Because surely there was more they had in common than that made them different.

I don't know. Bernal Diaz definitely saw a lot of commonalities between the Aztecs and the Spanish. I think the two differences that stuck out for me were the Spanish were way more fanatical, and also way more likely to go back on agreements if it would benefit them. I don't know what was going on in Spanish politics at the time - but if Cortez is typical, it must have been an absolute nest of vipers.

I was not insinuating anything in particular, merely pointing out the vast differences in the cultures and, to an important extent, their inability to reason about each other in a constructive way.

As I said, the clash would have been hard to prevent. The biological consequences of foreign diseases are an important way things wouldn't have been other than tragic.

> I just wanted to add to this that it's not as if the Spaniards were appalled by violence itself, just by the cultural difference in how it was applied

Yes exactly. Here we have two cultures still heavily under the influence of their own general religions, and the ways that each allowed or dealt with applying violence. Each reflected the cultural view of what "reality" was. In Europe, shamanism had been replaced with Christianity, which had its own concept of the real world — one that was a prelude to an afterlife, in which one would be judged. For the Aztecs (and for other New World peoples too) reality was in no insignificant part determined by the knowledge of priestly shamans, their experiences, and the experiences that people had during rituals. All three of those were heavily influenced (according to Watson and others) by the natural presence of the world's strongest hallucinogens that were unknown in Europe. Add to that much more extreme weather, and you have the recipe for understanding the world as a potentially violent, terrifying place. If blood sacrifice or even human sacrifice seems to appease the capricious gods of that reality, then of course it makes perfect sense to do it.

Cortez did treat the first nation he encountered respectfully, agreeing to help them in their war with a far more powerful nation. (Similar dynamic in North America, before King Philip's War, which happened because the mutual respect didn't last.) If the Europeans had decided to treat everyone with respect - "Just looking!", they would have been the only group there with any interest in doing that.

I have heard this reframed as "Cortez was actually a better politician than he was a general, unifying enough Aztec-hating factions to take down the Aztecs and then maneuver politically to the top once those factions succeeded".

Are there any examples in history where a people were “Just Looking” and left another group alone. Makes you think aliens have probably never visited our solar system.

There are some isolated incidents. One of my favorites is the English expedition to New England in 1602 led by Bartholomew Gosnold. Upon reaching the vicinity, the English were surprised to find Native Americans hailing them in a Basque fishing vessel wearing European clothes. The Indians boarded the English ship and the two groups made themselves understood through the language barrier. It turns out, the Native Americans had been trading and fishing with Europeans for years. The whole affair ended amicably with the parties going their separate ways. Primary sources exist, but here is a quick summary [1]

[1] http://www.woodsholemuseum.org/oldpages/sprtsl/v16n2-Gosnold... (page 11)

Arguably Abel Tasman discovering New Zeaaland fits this criteria.

He sailed to NZ, and tried to go ashore to collect water, but the local Maori attacked and killed 4 of his men before they even got ashore, so he left. It was another 100 years before Captain Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to set foot on New Zealand.

it's true that culture shock was at play, that said was it hard to just back off and accept that people whoever they are should keep their land ?

methinks that it gave one big and convenient argument to the takeover for material and spices. they're inhuman, we shall have no shame in wiping them.

I read recently about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Ginés_de_Sepúlveda and his nemesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas (who lived in South America and could see through the cultural barrier)

Their was a movie about the meeting with the pope also.

You're right that a lot of these stories are retold as propaganda to justify conquest but:

> was it hard to just back off and accept that people whoever they are should keep their land ?

It was only "theirs" by the same process of brutal conquest that the Spaniards later turned on them.

unless they came on virgin land which is probable

> that said was it hard to just back off and accept that people whoever they are should keep their land ?

Yes? Consider Australia's situation where the natives had 0 concept of land ownership and sovereignty. Were the british colonists looking for more land just to assume that the aboriginals own the whole entire continent? Even though they used barely any of it at one time?

Mah that's ridiculous; even if they use only 10% most colonies ended up abusing and keeping natives at lower than they needed to enjoy their lives as they always did.

Plus it's easy to come and negotiate friendly, especially in Australia where it's not like it's crowded .

> Moctezuma sent some emissaries to greet him. They brought two others with them, who were sacrificed in front of the Spaniards.

The Aztecs were not the only people living in the 1500s Mesoamerica. I don't know much, but Wikipedia mentions peoples like Purepechas, Talaxcaltecs, Matlazincas, Tecos, Mazahuas, Otomies and Chontales. And not even all Nahuas were Aztecs.

Was ritualistic human sacrifice a common practice among all these peoples, or was it something that mostly only Aztecs did?

Sacrifice, up to and including human sacrifice, is a common practice of most world traditional religions. Mesoamericans had a large dose of various forms of self-sacrifice and ritualized human sacrifice. That said, the Aztecs did ramp it up to 11 as a form of political propaganda ("look at how powerful we are, by how many people who captured"). This makes it difficult to estimate how much sacrifice they actually did, since most of the accounts are probably exaggerated to an unknown degree.

Ritual human sacrifice, across history, is universal. However, in the Old World it became less common (and animal sacrifice more common — a possible explanation for animal domestication). Watson and others argue that Shamanism was different in the New World, as it relied on naturally occurring high powered hallucinogens (most of which are endemic to the new world) which produced horrifying visions, thereby affecting the broader culture. I find this a compelling thesis.

It's sad to me how little is known about the native Caribbean peoples. When I read stories about a thriving island population, the Maya and Mexica empires, and the new discoveries being made with Lidar in the jungles, I just feel a sense of loss.

What would the Americas -- the world -- look like today if the Europeans never came here? Or at least, came and engaged respectfully.

Think about it, much of what is considered traditional european food actually came from the Americas: potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. Italian cuisine wouldn't exist without the Americas.

And now that the whole world has benefited, where are the people who gave it all to the rest of us? Eradicated from existence.

Respectfully would have eliminated a massive amount of atrocities, but the end result would have been similar: most of the native popularion dead in the first 150 years of contact. The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.

>The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.

Disease which was quite forcefully spread by Europeans as an act of warfare....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

As atrocious as it was, it was pretty late. The largest pandemics were probably hundreds of years prior. Some believe the herds of buffalo etc was a sign of an ecosystem in great change, where the change was extinction of societies that previously tended the land.

For a while, years ago, I was on an "alternative history" fiction kick. Most of it is dreck, but one diamond in that rough was Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus[1]. Without giving too much away, it's about a group of future historians that use time-travel to study past cultures, and discover that they can not only view past events, but influence them as well. It's got a couple of interesting semi-plausible what-ifs of different ways the Columbian Exchange might have worked out, under different parameters.

[1] http://amzn.to/2CvPY10

Keep in mind that native American groups were conquering, enslaving, and destroying other cultures as well - but they rarely kept records of it. It is not as if there was universal peace in the pre-Columbus Americas.

No one's suggesting otherwise. Every culture has blood in their past, "civilization" is the slow process of collectively maturing to avoid those conflicts.

OP was lamenting genocide, and then wondered what the world would be like if the Europeans never came. That seems to me to imply that OP believes Europeans are solely responsible for Indian genocides, which is what I was responding to

Indian? You mean native Americans? Europeans are solely responsible for bringing new diseases to South America - that wiped out most of the population, far more than swords and guns.

Britain also killed a lot of people in India, but they didn't commit genocide.

Of course the actual Indians had their own genocidal maniacs, like Ashoka the Great

I never said Europeans weren't responsible for genocide.

And "Indian" is an accepted, defined way to reference Native Americans. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Indian

You are confused.

Honestly if Europeans never came to the Americas there would not be losses of up to 98% of the indigenous population (depending on location). Even if disease "accidentally" killed 80%, the rest were murdered due to greed and evil.

Those events have been well documented, unlike the "rarely kept records" in your previous comment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...

After the Europeans could not find enough surviving Native Americans to enslave, they went to Africa next to start another round of cruelty. There is no honest comparison to be made between warring tribes and European conquest.

> After the Europeans could not find enough surviving Native Americans to enslave, they went to Africa next to start another round of cruelty.

This is off. The problem wasn't that there weren't enough natives, but that they tended to die quickly when enslaved.

So, does that mean that cultures currently engaged in war are less civilized than cultures currently disengaged from war?

I would argue that cultures engaged in war as a means to resolve tension are less civilized, and those engaged in war without tension are even worse...

Similarly, totalitarianism is a less civilized form of organization than, say, successful democracies.

This is a popular talking point for folks who don’t want to talk about the effects of European colonization. It’s so absurd that it’s kind of hard to unpack; which makes it kind of effective.

Nobody ever in any circumstances is stating or implying that native peoples did not engage in war, murder, etc before and during the arrival and colonization by Europeans. But that’s not the point. Native peoples died of natural causes while diseases Europeans introduced wiped them out en masse. The natural causes are not the point of the discussion.

The reality is there is a history of European empires colonizing and wiping out native peoples. If we refuse to look at this critically and learn from it then we have not improved beyond our ancestors. when this topic gets brought up, don’t bring up straw men based distractions. Engage in the discussion meaningfully with an open mind.

> Nobody ever in any circumstances is stating or implying that native peoples did not engage in war, murder, etc before and during the arrival and colonization by Europeans

This is just demonstrably false (see, for one artistically valuable but hilariously naive example, the song "Cortez the Killer" by Neil Young), but will certainly be met by goalpost-moving of "nobody serious is saying that..."

It was a stupid way to phrase what I meant which is that when this silly response (“Native people killed each other you know!”) it’s almost never in response to someone saying “Native people never killed each other.” It’s in response to someone saying “European colonization of the Americas had disastrous effects on native peoples.” My point being when people are saying that, they aren’t saying or implying that native people didn’t kill each other. One does not follow the other.

I could have worded it better, but like I said original this particular silly talking point is hard to unpack and respond to since it’s such a non-sequitur.

You're conveniently implying that Europeans intentionally brought smallpox and other diseases to North and South America, as if it was a choice, which is ridiculous. That's like blaming the rats or the residents sanitary practices for spreading the black death which devistated European populations as well.

“The spread of disease from European contact was not always accidental. Europeans arriving in the Americas had long been exposed to the diseases, attaining a measure of immunity, and thus were not as severely affected by them. Therefore, disease could be an effective biological weapon.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

The quote is from the section Disease as a weapon against Native Americans

The second two sentences in that quote do nothing to support the first. It's a total non sequitur.

Just because it was used on a few isolated occasions, but even then it was already well advancing on it's own. It was already a natural phenomenon.

The westerns saw the absolute devastation by their mere presences was causing unintentionally and occasionally decided to use it to their advantage purposefully...but I highly doubt that absent those occasions that we would have seen much different outcomes.

Absent total non-contact for the next two centuries...

1. I am implying no such thing. I didn’t bring up what was deliberate vs what wasn’t or anything of the sort. I said we should look at the results of colonization and learn from it. That’s it.

2. As already mentioned in the other response to your comment there are multiple documented cases of deliberate infection, if that’s where you want to go.

"Multiple documented cases" != the devastation of populations on every single island, and north and south America regions,

95-99% of the time they just had to show up for it to happen

> But in Puerto Rico, most people have about 10 to 15 percent Native American DNA.

In one sense the original native american population of the Caribbean is gone, but in another sense they're not.

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