The language lacuna in North America 

Its really incredible how many natives died from disease. Its like when the pilgrims met the natives they were basically post apocolypse survivors

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth they were met by a local named Samoset, who came into town, said (in English) “Welcome, Englishmen” and then asked them for some beer.

reminds me of how in the early 1500s, a Spanish explorer was riding a boat down the Amazon river and he was amazed at the huge civilizations that he was passing by. it’s said that these kind of cities must have had a million or more at the time then when more Europeans arrived, the cities were already abandoned and covered in trees. only now are they being rediscovered

Timucua was a rather odd case. A language isolate that happened to be pretty well documented before it went extinct in the mid 18th century.

The idea an epidemic could be as devastating to a population that it reverts from a sedentary society to a seminomadic one, as much as unsettling as can be, makes you wonder how many times similar events could have happened in our ancient times, even in the old world. Many early civilisations being almost wiped out by natural events and reverting to a more nomadic lifestyle in touch with nature as to "heal their wounds" until conditions allow for a sedentary urban settlement again. Living such events must feel apocalyptic and could provide an explanation for many ruins of constructions that seem abandoned for no reason

Even more obscure are the tribes of South Texas like the Karankawas and Coahuiltecans which were systemically killed with wars against the Spanish and Lipean Apache. Much of their cities still exist (renamed) in the Rio Grande Valley region.

I think you missed the effect of the de Soto expedition up into the Mississippi valley,they took a large number of sheep,goats cattle,horses and pigs.Between all the animals and de Soto`s habit of riding into town and kidnapping all the leaders seize tribute and leave with the hostages it is likely epidemics were exploding at the same time as everything was in chaos.A stretch of river where a survivor claimed that one town was in sight of the next was so badly hit that a French expedition200 years later hardly found any sign of people.

There is a current theory that the disease that wiped out the native Patuxet villagers was "leptospirosis ". Leptospirosis is native and carried by rodents (includes beavers) and wild animals and dogs. But I watched a documentary where someone traced Ponce de Leon's men across the Southeast US and he left behind a trail of archeological sites where the villagers had died of disease.

I thought part of the reason was that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) conquered most of those regions with European guns in the Beaver wars from 1650 - 1700 pushing the original people west or incorporating them into the tribe, but in either case by the time the Europeans got there, those areas had been Iroquoian territory for 50 years and so it was no longer clear which tribes had been there previously. Is this incorrect?

Another reason for the supposed hole in the Southeastern Woodlands is the inaccuracy of those maps. Based on records from the Library of Congress, we know for a fact that the Cherokee and Mvskoke Nations inhabited the land now claimed by the state of Georgia (among several others). The Mvskoke Nation includes several languages that are mutually intelligible (for the most part) because it represents a Confederacy of different tribes who encompassed a much greater area than what was shown here. Moreover, because Cherokee is the sole southern branch of the Iroquois language family, we can theorize that the abundant network of rivers helped Cherokee to fill any remaining niches in these landscapes as they moved southward thousands of years ago. There is indication of some societal collapse that paved the way for these Nations, but that occurred in the Mississippian Period prior to de Soto's accounts. I live near the Ocmulgee Mounds and study Cherokee language and culture, so I try my best to learn and preserve the true history of Turtle Island. Unfortunately, far too many textbooks give inaccurate and outdated information, which is typical of disinterest in education that doesn't promote Americanized propaganda.

First, the Cherokee originally covered a big part of the blank mountainous section of your map. I do believe that there is no modern academic knowledge of these languages. Jefferson was interested in First Peoples, as was Benjamin Franklin, but everyman/women were not. The settlers pushed the Natives out. I was told as a child (by a teacher) that the Narragansetts of Rhode Island were wiped out in King Philip's war (1675-1676). Their major winter settlement was wiped out but they are still around and are a recognized tribe. Also, the Wampanoag, mostly of Martha's Vineyard, MA are reviving their language with the assistance of colonial era texts and treaties. There is a fellow who sells a pre-contact map.

Except before the Puritans arrive, the explorers were going up and done the coast for a century. That’s the spread of the disease. There were actually in Massachusetts four years before.

The Native Americans that were present were moved or chased out of the area. It wasn't just disease.

As an Amskapipikuni, Great Video. I’d push back that so many were killed by disease since the figure is everchanging and the amount of ndn people at the time of North American Anglo settlement has gone up over the years, but I appreciate you pointing out that there’s really not that much known about many western tribes pre contact. It’s so hard to find good material about my people in the Dog Days and about how far east we used to roam. There is evidence of consistent presence in the Rocky Mountain Front going back 6 thousand years but we also lived just northeast of Thunder Bay for a long time. Sadly we moved our eastern boundary and permanent villages before there could be much record of this time. Once again, great video

Would be fascinating if the Native Americans had had written language in their heyday--SO much information on their societies (and their societies' collapse) would be preserved.

This video was incredibly inspiring in its own way, or intriguing otherwise. To think that there are so many lost times, so many lost people of the past that we have never gotten to learn about. It's a lot to think about when you put your mind to it.

Outstanding Presentation! Happily Subscribed!

the closest historical event to an apocalypse, and so few really understand that. And it isn't necessarily that way by accident.

Basically what the Europeans encountered were the remnants of the post apocalyptic mad max version of the previous indigenous civilization. Just imagine if disease hadn’t ravaged them.

Regarding the Proclamation Line: You know the French weren't limited by this agreement right? (They, in fact, had to stay WEST of that line by treaty). So the French didn't make ANY notes about the people or their language? I learned in a Native American History course in college that the area with no language groups was considered communal hunting/warring grounds for the surrounding peoples. A region of steep mountains, virgin oak forests and flood-prone valleys isn't exactly the ideal area to live. Most of the significant archeological discoveries in the region are paleo era. The Seminole didn't move into the Florida swamps until driven there. Same ecological idea as the woodlands. It's not an ideal place to live.

The Eastern Seaboard of the South is still sparsely populated relative to the rest of the country.

I've seen that map before, but never seen it explained like this!

The two most consequential things Columbus brought back to Spain were Capsicum peppers and Syphilis. So he was pretty much batting .500.

very good. thanks.

Great video! You’ve earned a subscriber!

I believe the specific Disease harbinger was the voyage of Hernan de Soto 😢 matches somewhat the void in the language map

Excellent explanation, and thank you for addressing the racist myth that there were never any complex civilizations in North America or Amazonia. The fact is 16th-century epidemics spreading from the Spanish settlements in Mexico were apocalyptic in their destruction of numerous Indigenous societies.

This is a good video, but it should be pointed out that we do actually have a fairly decent understanding of who inhabited the Ohio Valley prior to colonization, considering there's an entire branch of the Siouan family named after the region. It's just that the maps we use like to play with chronology and portray post-colonial settlement communities as pre-Columbian territories.

On the European side, its possible that many small local languages and dialects were lost due to the Black Plague and the migration of people in the aftermath. Unlike in the Americas though, repopulation is faster so we practically have little idea on what was lost during that time.

The map in not accurate. The Cherokee lived in much of the blank area on the map in and near the Appalachians. The Shawnee also lived in the Ohio region.

A Very good video!

Great video!

*What was the precomlombian name of this super continent. Before 1492 what did the natives call this Place before a 1491.

My personal opinion is that people are just lazy. The white in Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast means that no link was found with other languages. They were isolates or there is/was not a lot of information about these languages. The Ohio area was, later in history, part of the Haudenosaunee "empire" and many local cultures were absorbed or migrated out of the area. That's the main reason why early linguists weren't able to identify the languages spoken there. As you show with your examples about almost every other area in the Americas besides the greater Ohio Valley :) (Mexico, Amazon, Massachusetts, etc), disease affected a lot of areas, also areas that are coloured on this map. On the other hand, most scholarship from linguists in that area indeed seems to be quite old. What I mean with lazy is that, as far as I can see, there isn't any serious linguistic work being done recently. It's about time I would say! We have a similar situation in coastal Ecuador (where I do some of my fieldwork) where there is a lot of super interesting archaeological and ethnographic material, but where, until very recently, no serious recent linguistic work had been done. It is changing though! Hopefully we can say the same about the easteren US soon.

thank you

Imagine if you will, an invisible army that does not sleep, eat or drink. An army of unseeable and unknowable demons that strike down friend and foe alike in painful ways that disgust and terrify. Where if you do beat them, you have only just survived but you could never hope to truly win.

Omg that map of now-South Carolina is just way off. It left out Woccon, Cusabo-speaking tribes, Muskogean speaking tribes, etc… 😩

1:20 When the Europeans settled in Massacutets, they still had to broker a peace with local tribes, so the land wasn't completely empty. 4:50 Some Patuxets were captured by Europeans and sold as slaves, so it wasn't just the epidemics.

5 minute vertical vid is crazy

need to be said 1- in 1492 and until Pasteur, the europeans themselves did not know the cause of the epidemics, and Europe continued to be devastated by cholera and others until XIXe century 2 - american natives did not developped animal breeding, and therefore did not have epidemic pleagues transmitted from animals to humans ( as tuberculosis, etc ... and today covid) 3 - would native americans had native pleagues (similar to asia-european ones) Christoph Colomb would have imported them into Europe, and killed 95% of the European-asian-african population

Perhaps additional knowledge could be collected from French explorers and administration, who arrived there centuries before English and were interested in knowing the tribes, at least as allies against the British threat.(cf. "The Middle Ground" book)

A naive take. First, Euro ships were already traveling the northeast coast when Plymouth was settled - that's why they went there - and earlier crews would have left behind disease when they stopped for food and water - no need for Spanish/Florida involvement. Second, the French were active west of the British, and educated priests would have had access to the locals. And some of the ignorance comes from tribal movements. When naturalist William Bartram traveled through Georgia, he was told by local natives that they had been driven there from their home in the Mississippi valley by a hostile tribe.

Are we sure that the gap in the Ohio Valley isn't an organized attempt to erase eastern Siouan languages?

The First Thanksgiving was in Virginia.

Im surpised I can't find any Vinland Saga comments

I have asked myself this question for years!

This really was an apocalypse event for the natives, but we don't see it that way since we're the ones who brought the apocalypse to them.

Pretty interesting, but the calm music is a little weird playing while you're describing the horrors of colonialism and how entire ethnicities so fast that we don't even know nothing about them or their culture.

How is the gradient going beyond the screen???

Imagine how arriving Europeans took the natives when the natives were several generations removed from their oral histories and traditions other than the traditions needed to survive the wild.

Nice information

To what extent are the American epidemics comparable to the Black Death in Europe/Eurasia? The first sounds way more disastrous than the latter.

Marajo Island (a island in Amazon River about the size of Netherlands) had a developed complex civilization, housing about 100,000 people. But when Europeans started to populate the island in 1600s, there was nobody there. European diseases killed about everyone, the very few (less than 1,000) survivors left for the European colonies in continent. Their culture was lost forever.

If it wasn't for disease, the Inca and Aztec empires would never had fallen.

Canadians have a bit more familiarity with First Nations cultures and languages both before and after contact. French settlers in Canada depended on alliances with local First Nations to sustain their economy and defend their region militarily, and thus learned their languages, married into them, and learned much about their histories. With a huge number of Canadians fluent in indigenous languages, integrating into their societies and documenting them, we have detailed accounts of most First Nations dating from the 17th century. When the British gained control of New France, they were forced by practical necessity to sustain these alliances, as well as to concede considerable autonomy to the Canadiens. Subsequently, Canadian First Nations fought against the American invasion of Canada in 1812, earning both the respect and the approbation of Canadians. Many count among our national heroes. Unfortunately, this respect and familiarity faded away in the twentieth century, only to be replaced by neglect and arrogant paternalism, and ultimately resulted in the atrocities of the Residential School system. Despite this rank injustice, Canadian First Nations continued to serve disproportionately and valiantly in Canada's armed forces, and still do so today. There was much damage done to Canadian First Nations by epidemic diseases (especially smallpox), but in every case we have a good idea who specifically was affected by this, and good documentation of the events. As you can see, there are no linguistic/tribal blanks in the Canadian part of the map.

Examination of several early european farmers burials across the old continent show that this is how the indo european tribes managed to conquer all the land..The carried a plague with them. The signs of the disease are everywhere in the burials.

prior to european contact the missipian civilization and southwest pre navajo civilization had collapsed from the little ice age resulting in famines plagues mass movements and wars when european explores arrived they would set pigs free to forage, they would breed and populate the area providing easy food for future expeditions but this brought disease on the already devastated missipian collapsed civilization. the midwest indians having picked up horse and gun technology took to a very short lived buffalo based lifestyle, its not clear if this was going to prove stable or if they were already over hunting, tribes moved across the plains stole eachothers horses and women engaged in horse and gun warfare with eachother spanish and anglo frontiersmen living much like the plains counterparts of europe and asia hundreds and thousands of years prior. all these very typical of the idea of indians were very recent and had yet to even prove stable, what was there before was entirely different

LOL that is not a correct map for areas inhabited at the "onset" of colonization--that's half the problem! But yakoke (thank you) for addressing this issue & talking about how much was lost due to disease before most Indigenous folx ever heard tell of European colonizers. One of the downsides of discounting how closely interlinked & how large the population of Turtle Island actually was before Columbus is that no-one takes seriously how fast European diseases spread (the theory being that with 'dispersed' populations, disease doesn't move as fast or kill as many). It took about three decades from the conquest of Tenochtitlan at most for the population to drop to 10-20% of what it was. The Plague took out 30-50% of Europe's population in a generation--as bad as that was, imagine losing 80-90% in a single generation. It's hard to map these things out because you need a new map for every decade--Colonization forced a lot of people to move, even before Removal was an official government policy. If any part of Turtle Island was sparsely inhabited at contact--it was the Great Plains. The "Great American Desert" is not really a place that can sustain large numbers of sedentary people too far away from the major river basins. One of the best examples of "who lived in the empty spot" is of the Osage, the Quapaw, & their close linguistic relations. They all lived (originally as one nation) in the Ohio Valley. Sometime around when the site now known as Cahokia began to decline, they moved south and west, eventually splitting into four different nations. Exactly how long it took for the one nation to become four is up for debate, but we do know the Osage hadn't moved into Kansas/Oklahoma around the time the Spaniards took interest in looking for El Dorado--they primarily met Wichita and Caddoan folx. All that info is preserved--but the people who write history books rarely ask us Indigenous folx about our histories. They trust the anthropologists' accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who quite honestly were often deliberately lied to, told only exaggerated stories, or who thought they understood more than what they did and only succeeded in making a mess of things. There's also issues like the French calling the Quapaw the "Arkansas" because they didn't use the Quapaw's own name, but a name a different nation had given them (the Quapaw moved south down the Mississippi instead of west up the Missouri like the Osage, btw, but both nations remember they lived in the Ohio Valley something like 700 years ago!) Some folx also mentioned that much of the region of the "US Interior Highlands" was sparsely inhabited even before colonization--this is kinda true, but only kinda. At "contact" (1630s ish) there were urban centers, and different nations did have exclusive rights to certain areas, but much of it was operated more as a hunting preserve than anything else. Whole swathes of land were forage and hunting territories that were sometimes shared, sometimes fought over, but less directly controlled or clearly delineated than any of the regional nation's agricultural lands. That arrangement is probably a reflection on population collapse due to disease spreading up well before the French began to survey the area, let alone the English. I'd wager many of those valleys were pretty densely populated--most of our pre-maize staple crops seem to have been domesticated in the Missouri-Kentucky-Tennessee area (maize is a relative latecomer to Turtle Island, only in about the last 2000 years has it been a staple crop in climates colder than Mexico. There are other 'grain' crops, and some varieties of squash & beans that can be shown to have been common well before corn was bred to have high yields in Turtle Island, and they all have diversity centers in the Missouri-Ohio-Tennessee valley areas). Some also mention that much of the blank space is Tslagi (Cherokee) land, but that isn't quite true if you're discussing "at contact." The Tslagi mostly (but not all) lived EAST of the 1763 Proclamation Line at "contact." Because of pressures related to English colonization, much of their nation up and moved over the mountains & spread further into modern Tennessee. Western and Central Tennessee would have been Chickasha (Chickasaw) territory pre-DeSoto, but they began consolidating and pushing south as the Tslagi moved northwest from the Carolinas and the non-Haudenosuanee groups from the Ohio moved southeast after the Beaver Wars (quite literally forcibly depopulating the northernmost Chahta (Choctaw) districts, selling the captured inhabitants to the English).

I think the main problem was language was the only communication a lot of the Western Hemisphere had. The writing was almost non-existent and no alphabet arose in the nation-rich areas like it did in the Greek world. A rich history is vital but if it is only oral then, as shown here, it dies with the people. Your observations were interesting though historically all over the world, peoples migrated into areas once occupied by others. If there was no one there with a spear to stop you then you and your family settled down. If there was an infrastructure then so much the better. Great post.

What is a European disease?

So sad 😢😢

it's like god cleared the area for the colonizers to settle

When the only information you have about a society is extremely limited, you build a story around the information that does exist, and this story is inevitably full of mistakes. Nobody is going to make that argument, because the evidence of those mistakes has been lost. It makes no sense to build an academic career around the message that "we know very little, and a huge fraction of what we pretend to know is just wrong". But, for pre-industrial societies, that is far more correct than any other view.

The first Thanksgiving was in Plymouth colony? How about no?! It was in Newfoundland when Martin Frobisher had the first one in 1579. French settles had similar ones from 1609 or so. You're welcome.

Landscape not portrait videos please. Now my screen is largely black.

Not a discovery but fibbing imo. Kentucky annals are the perfect source to find out real story of North America.

Bozhhoo, Sabé Indiginikaaz, Migizi Dodem, Annishinaabé, Lac Du Flambeau Ojibway, 👣🦅🌅 First Nations People, Indiginikaaz Boise Idaho, Migwiich. Hello, I'm Bigfoot Sasquatch, Eagle Clan, Thank you. Bon jour, Je'mapalle Jean Melland, Guten Tag, Ich bin John,

I think its just because the map sucks

700000...? In Florida alone...? Hunter gatherers...? Are you sure that math is right?

I continue to chafe at people insisting on calling most cultures civilizations. First, there is no stigma in not calling a culture a civilization. Civilization has nothing to do with being civil. There are many brutal civilizations throughout history and even today. Second, civilization needs more than cities or settlements. Writing is a defining and necessary characteristic of civilization. This is not just a form of proto-writing that is symbols and pictures but no syntax to record the spoken word. As an example, there were no European civilizations before the Phonecians brought their alphabet, although there are some hints of possible writing in the nation of Georgia before that. Pre-literate civilizations are an oxymoron. It is not a bad thing to call what a group of people practices a culture instead of a civilization. They solve the problems of living sufficiently well and need not be condemned as being uncivilized. Civilization again doesn't equate with civil.

yikes. reminder that the world is, and remains, forever and always, post-apocalyptic.

Keep pronouncing the name of my mountains incorrectly and I'll throw an apple at'cha. Otherwise, great work.

I’m sorry but your map is off by a lot. I don’t know where you got your map but it’s woefully inaccurate. Cherokees for instance controlled/had hunting territory in Georgia,North Carolina,South Carolina,northern Alabama,eastern Tennessee, Kentucky,Virginia and West Virginia, that’s just one example but the way your map depicts other tribal boundaries is also not the most historically accurate either, again sorry everyone hates a keyboard warrior but I’m just sayin…..if you’re gonna make a video about history………accuracy…..

It should be pointed out nearly ALL natives were Nomadic following deer as there was no native vegetables/row crops one could farm so their only true food source was Deer, fish, nuts/seeds, berries(in season), and a few leafy greens which weren't too toxic. North America is a food desert for aboriginal peoples by and large. So, we can say disease, but the truth is, there just was not much food to sustain a population and why things were devoid of people.

It’s not appa-lay-shan it’s appa-latch-ian.

Ya did us a solid, smallpox!

Wrong. That's just a lake of ignorance and you are perpetuating that ignorance. Also, this is NOT a map of time of contact. The map actually shows what colonists THOUGHT was going on at times spanning almost 200 years. Contact in FLA was much earlier than in NE. Anyway, we DO know what languages were there because there are Red Nations who today are established in those places telling our histories. Yuchi, Saponi, Tupelo, Tsalagi, Sawanoki, Kansa, Oto, Osage, Caddo, Mvskoki, Tekesta, Catawba, Chicora, Yamassee, Conagree, Cusabo, Tunica, Mobile, Guale Ittiwan, Miami, Peoria, Illinoi, etc. are the names and languages of the nations in your little white zone there, Skippy. Get some education. This is offensive.

While I do agree that what happened to the Indians was sad we should not forget that progress often requires creative destruction. Colonization wasn’t about ending a culture it was about creating a new one

Sometimes it might be best to leave historical analyses of colonialism and its associated phenomena to scholars who, you know, actually have expertise in these areas. As you rightfully describe, a host of diseases brought by the European colonizers obviously wiped out a significant portion of Indigenous peoples throughout what is now North and South America- this is common knowledge typically taught in grade school here in the US- but your gloss of this history, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not, ultimately serves as a pernicious whitewashing of the intentional brutality of EuroAmerican colonialism. Colonization was not simply some unhappy accident wherein Indigenous peoples simply vanished in the wake of the arrival of Europeans as you frame it to be and neither was the continent wide genocide these predominantly white settlers inflicted on Native peoples. To claim otherwise is not only inaccurate, but a heinous denial of history itself. To reiterate, yes “European diseases” killed many, but this was not some unfortunate happening between the colonizers and the colonized, but rather part and parcel of a much grander colonial enterprise. I’ll stop here, but with as many inaccuracies and inconsistencies as this admittedly short video contains, I truly hope that viewers look elsewhere for their “educational” entertainment on this topic in particular.

More like wiped out by European guns and not diseases

Kween - pleez . Get a hobby. You don't know squat about us. Go tell your OWN history. This story is not yours.

I think it's nice that you made an attempt to understand this, but does it not seem a bit strange to you that only Indigenous people would be disproportionately affected by so-called Old World diseases? There's a factor you're not considering here, and that factor is violence.

While this is an interesting topic which lead me to click, I just couldn't stand to watch this video. 1. the portrait orientation (yuck) 2. why is this guy constantly on screen? He's not the subject of discussion. He must really like seeing himself. 3. that annoying lisp. hire a narrator. or even use AI. *please*.