While the Portuguese didn’t rule over an immense landmass, their strategic holdings of islands and coastal ports gave them almost unrivaled control of nautical trade routes and a global empire of trading posts during the 1400s.
What would happen to the native people who were on these small islands? Were they captured and killed? Or were they forced to change to their culture to please the Portuguese people?
another decisive factor was a change in global climate. In the middle of the fourteenth century, a four hundred-year period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age began.
This is very interesting because we are also experiencing the same thing in the modern era right now.
The scarcity of additional Norse sites and the fact that we’re not all speaking Norwegian remind us that the Vikings failed to sustain a permanent settlement in Vinland.
I'm very curious on how the community who communicated to those who didn't understand the language.
Norse legends say that in addition to trading with the natives the Vinland colonists were regularly attacked by vicious warriors the Vikings called Skraelings, suggesting the native Newfoundland population resisted the newcomers fairly effectively, at least some of the time.
I found this very interesting because I always thought the only groups in the Americas at the time were just the native americans this changed my point of view.
Though Mesoamerica had no overarching, imperial political structure, trade over long distances helped spread a widely-shared culture.
It's so interesting to me on how over in Europe around this time they were always arguing over power and land which caused a lot of politics and monarchy to be a key factor in Europe. While in the Americas the main fight was over trade and land.
Mesoamericans were polytheistic; their gods possessed both male and female traits and many demanded blood sacrifices of enemies taken in battle or even sometimes from the people themselves through ritual bloodletting.
It's a very disturbing and interesting fact to me on how religion was carried out then and how it might still be carried out by many cultures. I also found that in almost every native American tribe they often sacrificed their people if there was no enemy to sacrifice.
Travelers reached a site called Monte Verde in what is now southern Chile over 14,800 years ago, for example, long before there was an ice-free overland route, suggesting that at least some of the new Native Americans already knew how to make canoes or kayaks.
I found this interesting because of how well crafted the Native Americans were during this time period. Because of how diverse and complex their kayaks and canoes were, it must've taken them long to perfect the boat floating with people inside and with all the cargo they had to carry.
The first inhabitants of the two continents that would be much later named the Americas lived in Beringia for thousands of years during the ice age
This is very interesting to me because I thought that humans were around during this time period. I've always wondered why they were all over the place and now reading it's because of the food they needed was constantly moving around.