These are the Azores, an absolutely stunning chain of volcanic islands belonging to Portugal.
Really isolated and adrift in the middle of the atlantic.
1400 kilometers from Europe, 1700 from Africa, 2000-ish from North America,
they're about as close to the middle of the atlantic as you can possibly get.
When the Portuguese arrived in the year 1427 these islands were deserted. It was quite literally
free real estate for a Portuguese kingdom that was on the verge of their great age of exploration.
Because the islands are so isolated and because there was no one there when the Portuguese
arrived, people had basically just assumed that
no one had ever lived on the Azores, the Portuguese were the first to get there.
Contradictory to this though, the Azores seemingly appear on earlier maps from the
14th century. You can clearly see them here on page four of the Corbitis atlas
and here on the absolutely fantastic Catalan atlas from 1375,
which is just an absolutely beautiful map i mean what a fantastic medieval map i i love that stuff.
"How lovely"
In an attempt to explain this contradiction between the historical record from Portugal
and the presence of the Azores on these earlier medieval maps, archaeologists and researchers and
biologists have been scouring the Azores trying to find evidence of earlier human habitation.
In the past few years, several papers have come out that seemingly have
pushed the habitation of the Azores way back in time, way beyond the 14th and 15th centuries,
back to a much earlier age of discovery.
Quirk numero uno. In 2015 a paper was published on the genetic history of mice, the humble house
mouse, that live on the Azores. House mice are really common stowaway on boats and because of the
Azores isolation could have only been brought to the island by humans, whether deliberately or not.
So in the absence of archaeological or historical evidence their genetic relationships to other
house mice around the world make a fantastic proxy to study human migration. Of the nine
islands of the Azores, the majority of the house mice had the exact genetic history that you would
expect. They were close relatives of mice in Iberia, no surprise, but on two of the islands,
Santa Maria and Terceira, the house mice, the majority of the house mice belonged to clade
f. Mice belonging to clade f were also found on two other islands but in smaller quantities.
Why is this significant?
Well, clade f belongs to a group of mice that typically live in Norway, Northern Scotland,
Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands. They're closely associated with the expansion of the
medieval norse. From archaeological studies in Greenland and Iceland we know mice belonging to
clade f were traveling as stowaways on viking boats, on norse boats. It is perhaps entirely
possible that a boat arriving much later in history, you know, in the 15th or the 16th
century from one of those regions carried mice belonging to clade f to the Azores, but it is
an odd quirk in the dna of mice on an island that was supposedly first occupied by the Portuguese.
Quirk numero 2. For the past 10 years biologists and ecologists from the university of the Azores
have been taking cores from around five lakes, spread around the islands, to try and find a
disturbance in the environmental record that could have been caused by humans.
Humans can't help but alter the landscape everywhere we go it's just what we do,
so again it's a fantastic tool for trying to find evidence of human occupation.
Naturally they expected to find evidence of human occupation from the 15th century onwards and
of course that is exactly what they found but that's not all they found. From Peixinho lake
on Pico island, from a sample dated to between 700 and 850 CE, scientists detected a sudden increase
in five beta stigmastanol. That's a big word. An organic compound commonly found in the poo
of ruminants like cows and pigs and sheep, animals like that. This compound was found continuously
in all layers from the year 950 onwards. Again the Azores are absolutely terrifically
isolated. There are no sheep on the Azores that were not carried there by humans, it's just
not possible. Not only that but they also found an increase in charcoal in those sediments and a
decrease in native tree pollen. So they naturally wondered, was someone practicing slash and burn
agriculture on these islands? This is exactly what you expect to see if, if that was the case.
From the year 1150 onwards they also found seeds of rye and the spores
of mushrooms that again grow in the poo of these ruminants like sheep and cattle. How
could these seeds and these spores have have arrived there if humans weren't bringing them
there? It's a simple equation, no humans equals no sheep equals no poo mushrooms.
That's just how, that's just how it had to have been. How do we explain these two quirks? I mean,
you've seen the title of the video, there must be one prime candidate, the vikings,
the medieval norse. Their arrival on the island could easily explain both of those discoveries.
It's really important to note that without any unambiguously norse artifacts, we just can't
say for sure that it was them. It could have been people from Iberia, it could have been people from
north Africa uh we don't know. If it wasn't for those genetics of those mice, we might not assume
it was the norse at all. So we do have to wait for some confirmation from artifacts. However,
to further test their theory the authors of that paper on the lake sediments took a look
at the climatic record of the early medieval period in the north atlantic. That time period
was warmer than the later medieval period and that warmth resulted in a reduction in westerly
winds and an increase in southerly winds. So we could say that's another tentative tick in the
viking box. Uh you know there could have been some hypothetical situation where some norse sailing
around Ireland, Britain maybe even Iceland, got caught in a storm, blown south ended up at the
Azores. That's a possibility, as I said we just need some, some evidence that it was the norse,
like uh like L'anse aux meadows in Canada. Is there a norse village, a viking village
buried somewhere in the Azores, just waiting to be discovered? Who knows, the people who
were farming there had to have lived somewhere. There must be some archaeological trace of them.
Whoever it was, whether it was vikings or Iberians or north Africans, whoever was there, this
does raise a really interesting question, why did they leave by 1427? There's no reason to doubt
the Portuguese accounts that they found the islands deserted. It's not like medieval
europeans were shy about saying like "we conquered them and we took their land" they wouldn't have
been shy about that so there's no reason to think that it wasn't deserted. So what happened to all
these farmers? It's a nice climate, it's very uh easy to live on the Azores especially compared to
Iceland and Greenland and other areas where the norse were living in. Uh why did they leave by
the 15th century? I don't know. Maybe it was just too isolated and that population that was really
out there on their own just became too vulnerable to natural disasters or or disease or something
like that. I have no idea if that's true, that's just my personal speculation. I do love it though,
i do love a little archaeology mystery like that. This is just the perfect example of uh you answer
one question and it just reveals 10 more. Why were the azores appearing on maps earlier than
the portuguese arrival? Oh because someone else was farming there and now it's like so who were
they? where were they from? where did they live? where are their artefacts? why did they leave?
It's uh, that's just how it goes, that's just how it goes. Ragnar in paradise. See ya!