About Doug Hoff's Empty America

[james_davis_nicoll]

I can't seem to find the first entry. What prevented anyone from migrating to the New World before the Vikings?

[Answered in comments: It's not specified in the initial post]

If you prevent anyone from coming over the top of the world it won't prevent the Polynesians from colonizing the Americas (Sweet potatoes got to Polynesia from the New World Somehow). Well, it won't unless you have extremely well aimed butterflies, able to use the secondary and tertiary effects of whatever the barrier to colonization is up north to prevent anyone from using the trans-Pacific route.

Comments

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

well, they may well have developed something like that. Terror birds came in many shapes and sizes. The Pleistocene Ice Age is what probably did them in. They were migrating north to NorAm in the Great InterAmericas Faunal Exchange.

I did a WI on shwi where the native americans domesticated terror birds. That would have been...amusing...for European contact. ;)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Terror birds were obligate carnivores, right? So they'd be a lot rarer than horses. A lot more scary than horses, too.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

They were rarer. And scarier. Maybe we can get some that start following people around for their midden heaps?