Ever run across a fact or an idea and know that it has some kind of Alternate History potential but you’re not quite sure what to do with it? Here are a few facts or ideas that I’m going to do something with, but I haven’t figured out quite what yet.

1. While Romans apparently never conquered Ireland, there is some evidence from archeology and legend that a Romanized warrior and his followers established a heavily Roman-influenced colony there. I wonder what would have happened if that colony had survived as a kind of remnant of Roman culture in Ireland.

2. Indians along the coast of Ecuador had large ocean-going balsa rafts capable or carrying 60 to 70 tons of cargo by the time Europeans arrived. They got as far out in the ocean as the Galapagos islands and as far north as Western Mexico. The contacts with Western Mexico go back well over a thousand years and probably brought copper and gold metallurgy from Peru to MesoAmerica. Trade was sporadic between 400 BC and 400 AD. There were peaks around 800, 1200, 1300, and apparently sometime not long before 1600. That last date would have been after the Spaniards had occupied the bulk of Ecuador and quite a bit of Western Mexico. I did the Chimu MesoAmerican divergence a while back, but I also wonder what might have happened if the contacts had been more extensive in the earlier going. Llamas in Western Mexico starting around 400 BC would have led to unimaginable changes, probably including nomadic llama herders ranging as far as the American southwest and maybe even California and the Great Plains. It’s also more likely than my Llamas in Appalachia scenario, which does some of the same things in a different way.

3. France was on the verge of putting a hollow charge anti-tank rifle grenade into production when it fell in 1940. They actually did secretly produce several tens of thousands of them under Vichy. A couple of possibilities: First, they get them into production in time for the big show in May 1940. Second, they get caught producing them under Vichy sometime around late October 1942, which precipitates a German invasion and a Vichy call for Allied help. Neither of those is all that likely, but I’ll keep working the ideas around.

4. Around a hundred million years ago, India and possibly Madagascar broke loose from the other southern continents. India eventually headed north and crashed into Asia sometime after 60 million years ago. The huge Indian volcanic eruptions of around 66 million years ago, plus the impact that killed the dinosaurs presumably killed off any dinosaurs and/or primitive mammals on the Indian subcontinent (if that would still be the proper name before it crashed into Asia). However, that would mean that for at least 35 million years India’s dinosaurs and primitive mammals would have developed independently, sort of like Australia’s marsupials. Does anyone know of any mammal or dinosaur fossils from that 35 million year period? It would be fascinating to find out how dinosaurs and very primitive mammals developed on an isolated large island or small continent. There is also considerable AH potential here. If India hadn’t headed north, or had done so more slowly it might still be kind of a more primitive version of Australia, or with the right placement it might even have surviving dinosaurs. Of course there probably wouldn’t be people around to observe those animals, unless they came over from an alternate time-line.

5. From looking at simulations of future continental drift, it looks like most of Antarctica will eventually head north. After several tens of millions of years it will crash into the rest of the continents, which will apparently have formed another super-continent by then. Okay. Antarctica moves north. The icecaps melt. The few surviving plants (either two or four species of flowering plants if I recall correctly) gradually spread across the landscape, joined by other plants brought in by birds. You’ve got four or five million square miles of land mass with almost no native land animals, and no way for land animals to get there for tens of millions of years. Nature will fill that vacuum, but with what?

6. If the simulations I’ve seen are accurate, the connection between North and South America came about as a result of North America pivoting counter-clockwise so that Central America moved in a southeastern direction. What is now Panama was apparently an island or group of islands that ran into the two continents from the Pacific side to form the last part of the bridge between the continents. I wonder what changing the timing of the pivot or of the island passing through the area might have done. Another West Indies island and no land connection between the continents? An earlier land connection between the continents? The land connection probably triggered or played a role in the ice ages by moving ocean circulation to the poles. Either no connection or an earlier connection would have almost certainly meant no humans as we know them. If the connection between the two continents happened in the Miocene rather than several million years earlier, would it trigger ice ages then too? Would anything like humans emerge?

7. Not a fact, just a kind of random thought: AH challenge--what would it take in the way of a POD to put something like Piltdown man in England at the time it was supposedly there? That’s a tough one because whoever put the fraud together took a human skull and added an orangutan jaw with some teeth filed down. So the bottom line is: what would it take to get a side-branch of humanity with a close-to-modern brain and ape-like teeth into England a few hundred thousand years ago?

8. What would the implications be if the Straits of Gibraltar were shallow enough that they became dry land during ice ages, then went back underwater as sea levels rose after the ice ages? Presumably the Mediterranean Sea would start to dry up when the ocean connection was cut. I’m not sure if the coldest parts of the ice ages would have been long enough for it to have dried up completely. I’m visualizing two smaller, extremely salty lakes remaining by the end of a typical ice age, with an area of dry land connecting Europe and Africa below the toe of the Italian peninsula.. That would allow animals and early men to get back and forth between those continents a littler more easily. If the corridors included forested areas, you might find European primates simply moving south during ice ages and moving back as far north as parts of Italy and Spain during the interglacials, assuming that the corridor opened and closed at the same time. At the end of each cold part of the ice age, the ocean would rise enough to overflow into the Mediterranean again. Animals and early men would be trapped on the Mediterranean Islands until the next glacial maximum, developing in isolation and going their own way genetically and culturally.

9. That brings up another interesting point: Presumably various islands of the Mediterranean became attached to the mainland during glacial maximums and then became islands again during the interglacials. Humans were apparently in Europe for at least 800,000 years. That would have given them time to be isolated on the various Mediterranean islands such a Sicily multiple times, probably for tens of thousands of years at a time. I wonder what happened to them during that time of isolation. Have any Neanderthal fossils turned up from Sicily during the last couple of interglacials? That would be very interesting in terms of discovering how isolated groups of men diverge over periods of tens of thousands of years, assuming that any of the interglacials lasted that long. The same sort of thing would easily have happened groups of early humans trapped in what is now Indonesia, or islands like Taiwan or the southern Japanese islands.

10. What if the Czech army had fought when the Germans went in to take over the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939? Hitler wins, but he doesn’t get the entire Czech arsenal virtually intact. Part of the army might even retreat into Poland to be interned, which would mean that a part of the Czech arsenal ended up in Polish hands. The Czech tanks and airplanes wouldn’t be of much use for long without spare parts, but Czech cannons and small arms would help out the Poles quite nicely. Just as importantly, they wouldn’t be available to the Germans, which would slow down the growth of the German military considerably. From possibly faulty memory, the Czechs had something like 30 well-equipped divisions, with around 5000 artillery pieces. Most of that Czech material went to equip German divisions, including several hundred tanks. If the Poles ended up with a couple thousand of those cannon and much of the small arms, they would have presumably have been in much better position to fight the Germans in September 1939. They probably would have still lost, but it would have been a harder fought battle.