narratively, too, since they're also associated with the Golden Age of Piracy (it's where Black Bart Roberts was eventually killed, or else very close to it)
Islands that lacked indigenous populations?
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Actually, the Galapagos Islands were not initially discovered by Europeans:
en.wikipedia.org
Galápagos Islands - Wikipedia
Also, Mauritius, Rodrigues Island (part of the nation of Mauritius), the Cape Verde Islands, Saint Helena, the Juan Fernandez Islands (off the coast of Chile, includes "Robinson Crusoe" island), Tristan da Cunha, Ascension Island, Seychelles, Lord Howe Island, Fernando de Noronha
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Uninhabited Iceland was settled by Europeans long before the age of Exploration. They already were producing a world class literature by the time period stipulated here.
that one might not count--iirc one theory as to how the Falklands fox (aka warrah and a few other names) got there is that they were actually the re-feralized descendants of (semi-)domesticated foxes that an indigenous people brought with them but then they died out, leaving the foxes to become apex predators on the islands only to be wiped out after the Europeans showed up.
The Cayman islands are surprising because my understanding is that Jamaica was discovered by people who got there from mainland South America directly (as opposed to the much closer greater Antilles). As such, it is interesting that nobody seems to have stumbled upon the Caymans or if they did, did not manage to get back and settle it.
Maybe anybody who did find them back then decided that they weren't large enough to be worth settling?
Keep in mind Madagascar was also settled pretty recently, so while they're close to Madagascar, that wasn't gonna lead to a path to settlement for much of history.
We had some speculation years back about pushing the Late Dorset people ahead a bit earlier and have them reach Iceland before the Norse and finding the few Irish monks that was living there. They would find Iceland rich, coming form a much harsher environment. Eventually a hybrid culture would result. The primary attraction of Iceland for the Norse was that it was empty land. Once it has people, is dirt poor and has a poor climate they'll lose interest and raid Ireland or the UK again.
Cuts on bones are apparently real easy to misread. Given the complete lack of the normal biosphere response to human presence, I'll hold off on this until they have more. Remains of firepits, tools, artifacts, human remains or something more conclusive.I used to think so too, but it turns out it's "amazing" because it isn't true. Madagascar has had people living there for a long time, just as we would expect for a mini-continent close to Africa.
The potato could make its way down the Andes and end up on the Falklands. Thats do a lot of the carrying capacity.
I doubt Iceland would be that densely populated in this scenario, IMO t he most likely scenario is that they would displace and/or assimilate the locals like they did in the Faroes or Hebrides. The Norse settled in the thousands as far as Greenland after all.
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We speculated on a minor local aristocratic class merging with the natives quite quickly. While small, an Iceland that utilized Inuit arctic survival strategies would be much larger than the Faroes. But to the Norse it would not be iteresting enough for the efforts. Poor climate, long journey, lack of empty land, dirt poor. Going south would be better use of energy in all particulars.
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Larger as a whole but not any individual settlement or region, also I doubt the difference would be that massive, even under the Norse the difference between the Faroes and Icelandic population was around or less than 5 times and this difference would be even smaller here.
I also see no reason to believe there would be such a quick merging, it didn't happen in the Hebrides where the Norse pretty much assimilated the locals and had a huge demographic impact in the region and that was with agricultural Celts that lived in the region for at least 2 millennia, not recent and isolated non-agricultural settlers.
Obviously you could construct such a scenario but it's extremely unlikely at every step.
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Well, first off, an Iceland that had access to Inuit survival skills would have an improved carrying capacity. So I'd expect a larger population difference here. Second, I am pretty sure the Norse wouldn't be interested. We originally settled Iceland because "Hey, free land!" not because of some historic inevitability or anything. That was the draw. We went to Ireland and the UK because they had more pleasant climates and were opportunities for plunder. That was their draws. We never went for Bjarmland much because they had an equally cold climate and were not rich, furs notwithstanding. There was just some trading done.
I am a bit unsure what you see the draws of Iceland TTL wold be for the Norse. Why take the longer voyage to the poorer, colder land?
Do you think an Inuit settled Iceland would have more people than a Norse settled one? I doubt they could even support 10k people there in the long term, Greenland barely had 10k people historically.
For all intents and purposes the colonization of a Iceland not settled by agricultural or pastoral people was as inevitable as it gets if they find the island especially if the locals are divided(which they would be), the Norse demonstrated in far less favourable scenarios the ability to settle far away land and even militarily conquer them if native populations are present.
The draw would be that there is a miniscule and relatively weak native population that can be (frankly very easily) conquered and even enslaved just like it happened in other places to the south to a lesser extent. The idea that a small native population would automatically dissuade all desire to conquer and settle the islands is quite wishful. If it's not the early Norse to settle then it's the Norwegian kingdom in the 11th century CE or even the Scottish kingdom later on at the very least.
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I certainly do. The Inuits ability to exploit even far more marginal environments exceeded the Norse by far. They were the ones who survived in a deteriorating environment in Greenland as it as it went into the little Ice Age after all. Maybe the Irish would add some marginal agriculture to it as well.
I'd be interested in examples. In my experience the Norse generally showed little to zero interest in poor and marginal lands unless they were empty. There was no real attempt to conquer or push out the Saami here, nor did they show interest in the lands further east. And these are better lands by quite a bit than Iceland.
I strongly disagree. In general history shows that the Norse would fight for rich and fertile lands and ignore poor and marginal ones unless they were empty. I also believe an Iceland with a Inuit/Irish hybrid culture could support a greater population than it did OTL. You'd also need at least some numbers, while having butterflied Olav Haraldsson away.
In terms of Norse presence, I'd expect more in the way of the occasional settler family drifting in and settling in a likly looking fjord.
Disregarding the fact the Dorset are not the Inuit, and also disregarding the sheer improbability of the Dorset crossing so much open sea (even in the depths of winter, the sea ice won't reach that far), the Inuit and their predecessors were by and large a coastal culture. They relied on hunting marine mammals rather than going after game inland--this is why there are few inland Inuit cultures, and why the Athabaskans displaced Inuit-affiliated groups like the former residents of the Anchorage area.
So Iceland might not be as bountiful as you think, especially since unlike Alaska, it has no large inland animals like moose or reindeer.
And yes, while some evidence suggests that the Dorset are related to the Athabaskans (DNA I believe, but they could just as easily be another Yeniseian branch in the Americas), they also weren't Athabaskan in that the Dorset of Greenland were incredibly far removed from their distant Alaskan kin.
Iceland is not as marginal as Greenland and even in Greenland the later Inuit population at most was 2-2.5 times the Norse one before the 20th century(and the Norse didn't even settle everything as they co-existed with the Dorset over the island), in no other place inhabited by the Inuits from Nunavut to Labrador do we see higher population figures over far larger regions.
They might be as competitive in colder regions insofar as fishing is concerned but the Norse still can fill pastoral and agricultural niches in the south and some of the hinterland.
If Dorset Iceland somehow reached 100k people it would have more people that Greenland, Labrador, Nord Quebec and Nunavut had together until the 20th century. That's just hard to believe.
The south-western coast of Iceland has a climate hardly different from the Faroes or even most of Western and Northern Norway.
Insofar as the Saami are concerned the Norwegians certainly heavily outnumbered them in Trondheim county if not even in the modern Nordland county, places like Lofoten were continuously settled by Norse people and never even had had a local Saami majority as far as I know.
The existence of small fishing, hunter-gatherer and later reindeer herding Saami communities was not at odds with the presence of Norse people on the coast and the Saami were themselves never so numerous has to be the main or sole reason why the Norse didn't settle the hinterland or other places, even if there were no Saami it's questionable whether the Norse people would have been interested in adopting the lifestyle needed to live there, in fact the Saami were the ones to migrate in peripheral regions farther south(very south in Norway) themselves.
While I can't find exact figures for the overall regions what I find suggests the existence of Saami population of the order of few thousands to few dozens thousands in any given country, whether or not norse people settled a region seem to have more to do with the local environment rather than the existence of some large insurmountable Saami population, in fact the attempt at colonizing inner northern Sweden seem to have failed at times just because no one migrated there from the rest of Sweden before any actual issue over land happened.
About other Eastern lands, they certainly colonized parts Finland and places like Estonia and Russia themselves had large local populations that simply couldn't be out-competed or easily conquered, in fact we know that Estonian pirates themselves raided Sweden.
They didn't ignore the Faroes, Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland for that matter, anything that wasn't under a strong state such as the post-Carolingian kingdoms saw some amounts of raids and settlement, even if it was less settling depopulated or thinly populated lands and more creating coastal strongholds in places such as Britanny and Ireland.
Eventually the island would be conquered by an actual unified kingdom though, the Icelanders were able to coalesce under one decentralized entity for centuries but it's questionable if Dorset people could repeat the process(especially if one believes they would have lower populations)
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You are right on the Dorset. It was the suggestion in the original thread, but I see now that we would need Thule getting there a bit ahead of OTL schedule. Their skill package and seafaring were far, far in excess of the Late Dorset. The Inuit were noted to do longer sea voyages now and then, during the little Ice Age they reached Scotland on a number of occasions (A. Trynkina (2014), ‘Kayakers near Scotland’s Northern Shores at the Turn of the 17th -18th Centuries: Main Theories of Origin’, Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia, Vol.42)
Last I read, the Dorset were genetically seriously bottlenecked to the point of a single mtDNA line. They seem to have been genetically isolated for several thousand years. They do not show any more relation to the Athabaskans than to other native American populations and seem to represent a small migration of their own, not being part of the three main ones.
There can be some room for individual Norse settlers, which is not the same as a Norse takeover. Also presumably the monks would have some sustenance strategies of their own.
100k seems extreme. The entirety of Newfoundland had 500 -1500 people at the time of Norse contact. Western Greenland in the depths of the little Ice Age were estimated at 10 000 -30 000 and the Norse never managed mor ethan 5 000 in the same area during a time when it had much better climate.
Not so, and I live here. Its been a bit more complicated here. The Norse survival strategy was hitting its limits, and settled areas would expand when the climate warmed. When it cooled, the Saami pastoral strategy was advantaged and Saami areas would expand. Sort of like a slow timeshare on the lands. The Saami who lived on the islands and coast were known as the "Sjøsame", sea saami. They/we (that far back the ancestral lines almost certainly blend) were more settled than the pastoralists and more involved in trade. They spoke dialects of the north Saami language.
What didn't happen was the Norse invading and dominating the area. (More like an one-the-average slow population expansion over centuries up to the present day.) But even with them being on the trade routes to Russia and a short hop away, they were not that interesting. They were not empty lands, but poor ones for the Norse sustenance strategy and further north.
There was the occasional settler family squeezing into a likely-looking fjord if it was not settled. TTL Iceland would have had much the same pattern except being further away, and not on any trade routes. OTL Iceland was deforested in short order, after which it was obviously poorer land, treeless and open without wood for tools or ships.
Many areas that were not under a strong state got mostly ignored. The aforementioned North of Norway, Kola and everything north of Ottar. Siberia, the White Sea. Newfoundland explicitly because while it was better land it had natives. The Faroes, Hebrides, Orkeny, Shetland etc were actually on the way to richer areas, and part of the Kingdom of the Isles.
It didn't OTL, so I doubt it was inevitable. It joined up with Norway by agreement (the Gissurarsáttmáli) in 1262. There has never been a suggestion TTL Iceland would remain independent up to the 20th century though, just that it would be of insufficient interest to the Norse to attract more than individual settlers. Nor were we speaking of a Inuit polity but a hybrid one. It is possible that some Norse settlers could add items to the climate coping package .