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."
There are many stories of "white man" human bones found to be over 10,000 years old found here. Wonder how all that fits in the mix.
There was an article in the Atlantic Monthly (I think) about 3 years ago about the same sort of ideas. It seems that there is evidence that not only were there plenty of people here, but that they dramatically effected the environment. This whole "pristine wilderness" and "noble savage" living "in accordance with nature" idea is just bunk.
This part, at least, is not even remotely new knowledge. I seem to recall a passage from the diary of some early explorer (I think it was Lewis or Clark), wherein he more than once casually remarked on Indians "lighting the prairie on fire" as a kind of signal.
Oh, and all the human sacrifice that went on? The Europeans were just too dumb to grasp that sophisticated surgical procedures were actually being practiced.
Yep. America was literally heaven on Earth before those nasty Euros arrived (sarcasm off).
Pre-Olmec for sure. Probably came through the NorthWest passage and got into a tangle with Asians on a summer trip over from Korea.
Save for Nov.
An old family story (from the 1840s) told of my G-g-g-g-grandparents traveling through an a large Indian village in California. All of the inhabitants had died of measles, and the village was full of feasting bears. (Yuck.) It would be very difficult to underestimate the effect on Indians of "white man diseases," especially pox diseases. The Chinooks (my ancestors) were reduced by disease from a population of tens of thousands at the time of Lewis and Clark, to a few hundred in the 1850s.
bump
bump
Hmmmm? I was taught the Greeks were the pioneers.... ooops, the Mideast Muslims claim it ... ooops, the Chinese ... ooops, Africans ... hell, I'm confused due to every civilization claims credit. So which one is it?
All I need to know about the old west I learned in "Little Big Man." Especially the part about US Army soildiers eating Indian women and children. /sarcasm
They arrived before the Earth was even formed. They were clever.
One intersting theory is the "Prince Madoc" legend.
Supposedly Madoc left Wales(?) in 1170, and made 2 trips to the new world, and never returned from the second one. The theory is that his people bred in with the Indians, and brought diseases with them that crept from tribe to tribe and started the killing way back then.
Some say that what was left of the Welshmen became the Mandan Tribe in the dakotas - noted by Lewis and Clark and early explorers and trappers for their blue eyes, fair complexions, and some having blonde hair.
Lots of interesting reading on Madoc out there, check out www.madoc1170.com/ for starters.
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.
That's an interesting twist.
"30,000 years, 112 million people? If so, they were underachievers of historic proportions."
I tend to agree. That would be 112 million skeletons, too.
We barely find any and when we do its hailed as a major event.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.