The World According to the 1580s

Damn.

I wonder whether all those details from so much of North America implies that Europeans visited all those places. And left their diseases. Or maybe they relied a lot on native informants. But that was also a disease pathway.

This does support the hypothesis of mass die-offs before substantive visits. As discussed in Mann’s 1491.

I've seen a lot of different hypotheses arguing settlers reached Americas earlier and more-often than has been recorded. A couple days ago some were talking about one idea, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674298

Unrelated (sorry), but here’s what I see when I open that Medium link in Safari. It’s quite a challenge to find the article between the pop-ups. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/XbYLs5c.png

But they haven’t improved that in years, so I suspect it must actually be working for them and convert well!

In 500 years, somewhere, there will be an article like this about how people pictured space in 2019, and how off the mark they were.