Posted on 08/17/2005 11:43:12 AM PDT by Between the Lines
1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus
By Charles C. Mann. Knopf. 480 pages. $30.
Charles C. Mann's engagingly written, utterly absorbing "1491" tells us what scientists have recently learned about the American civilizations that vanished with the arrival of Columbus. Most of what we were taught about them may be wrong.
For example, I thought of North America before Columbus as sparsely settled by people who had little impact on their environment: a place with great herds of buffalo like the ones that rumble through movies like "Dances With Wolves," where migrating flocks of passenger pigeons darkened the skies for days, and where there were vast stands of ancient trees -- Longfellow's "forest primeval." An Edenic land of unimaginable abundance -- until the white settlers slaughtered the buffalo, hunted the passenger pigeon to extinction and felled the forests.
But what we think of as environmental abundance may have been the product of environmental catastrophe, the loss of a key element in the pre-Columbian ecosystem: human beings. When the Europeans arrived, they brought diseases that radically reduced the Indian population. With fewer people hunting for food and clearing the land, animal and plant life ran riot.
Mann tells us that some scientists think the buffalo and passenger pigeon populations didn't explode until after Europeans arrived. Even the "primeval" forest may have been a latecomer.
The Indians, we now know, used fire to clear the wilderness and make it easier to hunt game. Because the European settlers "did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker," Mann writes. "The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya."
We don't know how many people died from the diseases the Europeans brought; one very controversial estimate puts the death rate as high as 95 percent. Mann points to evidence that in coastal New England, an epidemic -- "probably of viral hepatitis" -- that began in 1616 killed perhaps 90 percent of the population; a smallpox epidemic in 1633 eliminated from a third to a half of the survivors.
Whatever its true extent, the calamity that befell the pre-Columbian Americans makes reconstructing the world they lived in so hard that controversy dogs almost every assertion about it.
How long, for example, have humans inhabited the Americas? Did they arrive about 12,000 years ago, as scientific consensus once held? Or did they come as early as 30,000 years ago, as some archaeologists and scientists now think?
"Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago," Mann comments, this would mean that "people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works."
What was the population of the Americas just before the arrival of Columbus' ships? Could these continents have held, as some assert, as many as 112 million people? If so, Mann observes, "when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe."
In some respects, this lost world put the culture that Europeans prided themselves on to shame.
The Olmec and the Maya, Mann writes, "were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy" -- the Olmec had a more accurate 365-day calendar than their European contemporaries, and the Maya invented the zero at least 12 centuries before it appeared in Europe.
Before disease ravaged the Indians, the Europeans were astonished at how handsome and healthy the people they encountered were. One reason was diet, the result of the agricultural wizardry of the Americans: "One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica," Mann writes.
And the development of maize, for which no wild ancestor has ever been found, has been called by geneticist Nina Federoff "arguably man's first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
I'm not sure the wheel was ever a universal instrument until the great democratic experiment came along. Certainly coaches were available for hire or for passenger transit in 17th-18th century Europe, and the UK rail system brought it to more and more people, but it was the Americans who truly made it universal -- and imperative, first with the railroad and next as personal transportation.
I've seen stats on cart/carriage building c. 1900's, and if I remember correctly it was some 5 million a year. This, of course, fed the dreams of the budding automobilists, who finally made good on it once the motorcar was freed of the demagogues.
There seems to have been built in limits. Cahokia seems to have "flammed out" because their technology could not support so large a concentration of people in their society. They never learned to domestic any meat animals, for instance, Easy to forget what the cow has meant for our civilization.
Unlikely. An earlier estimate is 50 million, which seems more likely.
(Rolls eyes)
It's more complicated than that. Apparently there were two strains floating around, a European one and an American one. Here's more information:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_syphilis/index.html
Tomatoes came to North America from the Spanish.
One theory I've read is that, for whatever reason, metals in the Americas are more difficult to mine, whether due to geology or geography or whatever. So, the native populations were unable to make the step from stone tools to metal tools.
I don't know how accurate that is, to tell you the truth.
It was not that they didn't have technology, it was that their technology was inadequate to support a large urban population for more than a century or so. Maybe it ws because their political structure did not allow for a good organization of a work force.
fascinating-thread-placeholder-mark
The Anasazi didn't really disappear. War and famine (or, more likely, war brought on by famine) forced them out of their original cities, like Chaco Canyon, and up the canyons and up into the cliffs. Later, when things calmed down, they left the cliffs and moved to better locations, becoming the modern Pueblo tribes.
The Mayan concept of zero is an interesting insight into how the Mayans thought about things. Their "Zero" was a set that was "full", therefore you could put nothing more into it, hence it was a ZERO item. Most of us, probably due to cultural and linquistic shaping of our thought processes, would think of zero as an EMPTY set. Perhaps the Mayans thought of the zero as blocking the input of anything else, and hence that "Place" was full of nothing...?
I understand, vis-a-vis animals. But the wheel has vast uses (gears, for ex.) beyond transportation.
Indians, ate horse meat. Ate them to extinction.
The facts are that no horses lived until the spanish returned them. It was then that indians used them to hunt and ride them as is so often shown.
BTW, my family came to these shores in 1933 and walked to what is now called Michigan.
Your family WALKED to Michigan? Why walked? (I'm fascinated by people's family histories and stories).
You mean the Spanish brought them over from Spain? So you're saying that Spain already had tomatoes? Sorry guess again.
I thought I read that in Food & Wine or something.....that tomatoes were not indigenous to N. America and were brought over from Europe.....where did they come from?
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