Columbus's "Letter to Luis Sant'Angel": Questioning a First Contact Scenario

    Christopher Columbus first spotted land in the New World on October 12, 1492. The subsequent report of his findings that he wrote to the Spanish Crown, in today's historical records, is titled "Letter to Luis Sant'Angel". While it's details might be objective at face value, the Genoese explorer might not might have written as reliable a report as he tries to make it come off as.

Bronze Age: The Collapse

    Ever since individuals dispersed the seed of wild grasses along the banks of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean region built a world that seemed to be becoming smaller and easier to control. With agriculture, their populations grew, cities developed, and more individuals were free from the task of feeding themselves and their families. With this spare time and labor, they looked beyond their immediate homes to their neighbors, as well as to the world around them. These cities sought to acquire more resources in order to become political overlords, trade hubs, cultural centers, havens of science and technology, and places of heaven on Earth. They cooperated and competed with one another-sharing ideas and innovations, fighting wars, intermarrying, and trading goods-forming and strengthening bonds found within what we could imagine as a large web. This web developed to become more interconnected and more complex as time marched on, until it gradually emerged as what we might call a "civilization", as we might with the West, the Islamic world, or East Asia. However, this came at a cost of the entire system becoming more and more vulnerable to disaster-disaster that would come in the form of what we today call the Late Bronze Age Collapse.