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If America had not been "discovered"
RubusRoo
Posts: 10,262 Forum Member
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& raped/destroyed/ethnically cleansed of its native population...
What it have become now?
What it have become now?
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RubusRoo
Posts: 10,262 RubusRoo
Posts: 10,262
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Of course, vinegar is better, but I wouldn't fancy fish and parsnips.
Your quite right, but I do always wonder how Japan China etc managed not to find Australia.
Chips were invented by the French apparently.
It was on TV the other day
The Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Malaysian indigenous people were all sea faring yet they managed to miss a land mass the size of Australia.
We had better ships than they did until they got a chance to study Western ship designs. Japan built up a very impressive fleet for WW2 after all. Besides, there are plenty of places between Australia and Japan which would have been much more interesting at the time, but many were controlled by European powers.
Did China and Japan have any great explorers? You hear a lot about European and US ones, but I can't recall hearing about any from that part of the world. India either. I'm sure they did have explorers at some point otherwise there would be no people there at all. There were also established trade routes between China and the Mediterranean region going back further than recorded history, and someone must have started those, though I guess it wouldn't have been recorded
Sailing south east is more difficult than sailing west I guess. Probably harder to navigate.
You could be right, perhaps ancient seafarers simply sailed the way the sun either rose or set.
It would have been raped/destroyed/ethnically cleansed of its native population by your choice of other possible empires who have come and gone
- Chinese
- Arab
- Central and South american (presumably your axe grinding is restricted to USA/Canada)
- Russian - They did afterall own alaska for years
Perhaps downlaod the full set of Podcasts to date of the BBC's fantastic A History of the World in 100 Objects
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow
and you might realise how shitty people have been to each other all over the world to each other since population's started to accumulate in larger settlements after mankind turned from Hunter/Gatherers to farmers, and a administrative/leadership function started to live of the backs of the masses below them - inventing bureaucracy and religion to shore up their positions.
The Malaysians were trading with Australia well before the Europeans arrived.
Yes, it is hard to imagine what the world would be like without 'basics' like tomato, potato, chilli, sweetcorn (?) etc No **** either :-)
No peanuts, pumpkin, Turkey, Chocolate :eek:, cranberries, blueberries, beans (parp!)
On the flip side, the ethnic Indian's would still be walking everywhere, due to no indiginous Horses in the America's.
And when we discovered it we decided it would make an excellent place to send criminals. I guess we weren't too impressed with the place to start with! Perhaps that's why no one else apart from the Aborigines settled there? We do after all seem to have had a disproportionate number of thieving gits, whether they were poor (and sent to prison) or rich (and given knighthoods) throughout our history.
We'd all be slimmer too
I have no axe as such to grind sir. However, I appreciate your insights. I hate all humans equally & without prejudice.
We'd also still have red squirrels
The chinese admiral Zheng He (died 1430's) is possibly the greatest naval explorer.
Of course the Americas (or at least Greenland and parts of Canada) had been 'discovered' by Europeans during the 11th century.
Thanks for that, looked him up on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He
He wasn't messing about was he?
It's not quite that simple. A lot of that culture comes from Europe and other parts of the world. The US provided a safe haven and land of opportunity for these people. The UK has also provided the same (though we shout about it less), and benefited from it.