Most Recently-Settled Countries

I'm especially surprised regarding Seychelles and Mauritius, considering the Indian Ocean was sailed by merchants from many countries.

Interesting right

As I recall, in the case of Cape Verde, it's very barren and windswept and quite far off the African continent. It was however a useful stopping-place for the Portuguese when they travelled and trafficking slaves to Brazil so grew from there, although I think constantly received resources from these ships as there wasn't much there.

I saw that video too! Definitely helped me on the quiz.

same

Reallifelore +9 Asissts.

Same here!

And here..

I did the same, but after seeing the answer, i realised i allready knew that, well not borneans specifically, but that region, and not settled by africans or europeans

Did you mean Cape Verde? Cabo Verde?

Wasn't Capo Verde part of the Green Mafia?

As far as I know, the Taino were the only ones, at the time, really exploring those waters. Since they came from either South or Central America, the Bahamas would be quite far away.

These are all island countries, and most are pretty remote, most are pretty tiny, so, no, not at all. You think that someone from ancient Sumeria sailed to New Zealand, saw some people there, but just forgot to write it down?

There are still uninhabited islands in the world today.

I actually find it more remarkable that by the 13th century, before the invention of GPS, flight, electricity, internal combustion, refrigeration, the steam engine, modern sailing ships, or the traverse board... and only a short while after the development of magnetic compasses used for maritime navigation... human beings had spread to basically every habitable land mass in the world bigger than 1500 square miles. That's crazy.

In the tens of thousands of years of pre-history, I'm sure that plenty of humans left the African continent and randomly sailed off into the great blue yonder. What are the odds that they'd land on a speck of an island in the middle of a gigantic blue ocean and have enough people to actually survive and develop a community? Maybe some random paleolithic man happened to walk across one of the shores of Mauritius... but then what? Boat technology was pretty bad until the Middle Ages. Even if even a small group of humans randomly found Mauritius or Cape Verde, it's very unlikely that it would become populated even for a generation. They probably couldn't get home because of ocean currents, so it seems probable that there'd be fairly large islands that weren't populated by humans until sailing technology was at least somewhat reliable.

Insofar as I know, of all islands not visible on a clear day from the African mainland, only the Canary Islands and Socotra were settled by Africans. I think a lot of this can be explained by the comparative lack of thessalocratic countries in African history. That's why it was primarily outsiders who discovered and first settled these places. It wasn't just Europeans but Arabs and (famously in the case of Madagascar) Austronesians as well.

Well since nobody has brought it up, the reason why these places are considered uninhabited before the dates mentioned is not only because of written sources, but mainly because of the complete lack of archeological evidence of humans before the dates mentioned. An interesting case is the Falkland Islands, which actually were discovered by native Americans, but were uninhabited by the time Europeans arrived.

Yes, the trade winds helped Polynesians explore the other Pacific islands first. NZ was the last major land mass in the Pacific to be settled by humans.

New Zealand is bigger, but it's also extremely remote. Not only is it further west than most of those countries and much further south, it's also just very isolated with not much around it. If you zoom in closely to countries in Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia you'll see that there are tons of little islands scattered about making hopping from one to the next much more feasible for people without modern sailing ships. New Zealand is just off to one corner by itself...

This, and the fact that prevailing winds don't blow as much toward NZ, make it one of the safest places in the world to flee to in case of a large-scale nuclear war.

I'm no expert, but surely even nomads, permanently living on a given landmass, count as settlers. Why wouldn't they? Out of curiosity, what "areas" did you have in mind?