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."
What is your source for the eating part?
Wikpedia for example says:
The first horse was domesticated around 4000BCE (in Central Asia)
The little horses that lived in NA went extinct (maybe due to humans or in combonation with climate changes that allowed the humans to go there) around 13000BCE along with most other human+ sized animals.
Another Wikpedia fun fact:
January 26, 1837 Michigan became the 26th US State.
Are you just F-ing with me or what?
pinging you to 121
I'm beginning to think they're poisonous, by the way......at least the tons and tons of them coming out of our garden are about to bury me.
De Soto, in particular, is my recollection. He recorded many well-organized, highly structured villages in the lower Mississippi valley, c. 1540. But as this area was more extensively explored just a hundred years later, there was virtually no sign of this society.
Wheeled toys have been found in the pre-Columbian ruins of New Mexico, as well.
This guy is making it up as he goes along and calls it research and gets a government grant to print copies with a barrel of ink.
The Toba Volcano 74,000 years ago, reduced the worldwide human population to less than 10,000...many say 2,000. This event is still detectable in our DNA.
""He also suspects that Toba's super-eruption was responsible for the population crash of 70,000 years ago, when the number of people fell to no more than 10,000", the magazine added."
Sure you can.
First of all, you need to make a serious, sincere attempt to bone up on your history before continuing to spout.
The period of western exploration went on for years. Large scale colonization of North America did not take place until at least 100 years after contact with the exxplorers. That happened to be more than enough time for the virulent diseases to wipe out native populations to a point where they could no longer sustain agriculture.
This same process took place in South America, where the populations that were wiped out were probably many times larger than the populations in North America, and wee located far from any place where direct contact with Europeans could have taken place.
This decimation of American native populations would have taken place whenever contact occurred, and contact would have inevitably taken place, or do you imagine otherwise? The problem was that the population of the Americas was genetically far less diverse that European populations, and thus far less able to absorb and defeat an outbreak of lethal infectious disease.
There is no reason for Europeans to feel guilty over this inevitable consequence of global development, nor is there any reason to disparage the civilizations that were lost.
Learn how to read, then pratice what you have learned. The appalling ignorance that has been evident on this thread is most unlike Free Republic, and stands in stark contrast to the many threads that have dealt intelligently with this subject over the past year or so.
There is no reason to feel guilty about whathappened. It was the naural and inevitable consequence of contact, and was preordained to happen. That is unless Europe and Asia were to be forever quarantined from the Americas.
Native Americans were simply too genetically uniform to be able to survive a widespread and lethal contagion.
Was that Columbus' fault?
If it hadn't have been Columbus, it would have been someone else, or do you think that America might have remained undiscovered right up to the present day?
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archeology never got in the way of the revisionists in the past ... why should it start now?
The Aztec pyramids had channels running down the edge for all the blood - at their peak they were sacrificing hundreds a day - ripping out the bloody hearts to offer to the gods.
Noble savage indeed.
A lot more so that what the liberals think - that the Spainards came here and "slaughtered" the Indians by the hundreds of thousands because they were pagans. And the British and French settlers who "slaughtered" the Indians to steal their land.
Liberals hate to hear that the Indians might have died from diseases.
Posted On Free Republic exactly (to the day) 4 years ago.
Many of the American tribes put their dead in treetops for the birds to eat. The bones would just fall to the ground and deteriorate - there wouldn't be much left to find.
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