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."
Interesting. I'm watching a multi-volume documentary about Lewis and Clark. I did not notice anything about diseases, except it was noted that several of Lewis and Clark's men got VD from friendly Indian (Mandoc) women.
They didn't have cures, but they did have far better immunity/much lower sensitivity to pox diseases. The difference was apparently due to the fact that Europeans raised livestock, whereas the Indians did not.
> Particularly in North America, no cities, no agriculture, no animal or plant domestication.
That's incorrect. There is evidence of some considerable sophistication in the realm of agriculture and city building with such groups as the Mound Builders (Cahokia, Illinois) and the Anasazi (southwest). But these guys seem to have been wiped out before 1492, either by war, famine or disease.
I presume the author will demonstrate the scientific evidence, methods, for his conclusions.
This book review reads more like a politically correct hypothesis.
Other sources inform the largest population of north America's earlier immigrants (Indians) was in southern California. Why? Easy living.
Also, when Europeans arrived at the Socal coast (San Pedro bay) the Indians' campfires kept the LA basin in constant smoky haze, later named smog.
I therefore propose that the EPA fine the Indians, confiscating their Gambling Profits, to compensate later immigrants.
Finally, history reveals Indians killed other Indians, mostly tribe against tribe. This is contrary to the popular mythology of the gentle corn farming Indians.
Wrong. The left HATES this stuff. It destroys their abilty to cast Wsern Civilization as the "bad guy". Believe me, the folks trying to debunk the new research on pre-Columbian conditions in the Americas are universally leftist.
The American Indian, or "Native American" were a stone age people when discovered by the Europeans. They had not domesticated animals, they had no written language and they had not even invented the wheel.
However, their lack of technology did not prevent them warring among themselves, practicing genocide (Iroquois, Mahegan), slavery (Choctaws, Chickasaws) and cannibalism (Navajo, Anasazi).
If the white man is responsible for "wiping out" the various extinct tribes, who made the Mound Builders extinct, since they vanished long before any white man set foot in the Americas (officially)? Who wiped out the Anazasi, the Fremont, and on and on and on?
Answer: Other Indians wiped those tribes out.
It also did not stop most native Americans tribes to side with the British during the American Revolution.
I wonder, will the Iroquois and Anasazi descendants pay the Erie and Pueblo descendants for their "guilt" from their ancestors actions? Will they pay for the massacre of "rebel" settlements during the War of Independence? Will they give up the wheel once they get their reparations?
Let's look at the history from a broader scope:
1675 - 1676 -- King Philip's War -- a larger percentage of the American population was lost in this war than in any other American war. The indians burned down whole villages and slaughter the inhabitants, but they lost the war.
1750's -- French-Indian War -- Indians sided with the French against the British. They committed atrocities and they lost the war.
1770's -- American Revolution -- Indians sided with the Britsh. They lost the war.
1812 -- The Indians again sided with the British. And again they lost.
You have to realize that a century or more passed between first contact, when the diseases arrived, and the mass migrations when the Americas were settled.
That's why there were such striking differences in the descriptions written by the first exploerers and the those written by the much later settlers.
Also, once the diseases were introduced they spread through indian populations like wildfire. Most indians that died had never heard of these strangers from Europe. Entire populations were wiped from the face of the Earth, including some very interesting ones in the pantanal area of South America. This region has not recovered its population to this day.
I'm not sure that's meaningful. We generally find skeletons in graves. The descriptions of how diseases traveled through Indian tribes are mostly of the "rapid spread, quick death, and dead people lying unburied" variety. Bodies lying in the open, exposed to animals and weather, would tend to completely disappear within a hundred years.
Huh? You think the propaganda that North America was thickly populated to the tune of 100,000,000 people, with a widespread, prosperous agriculture, 95% of which was wiped out in a holocaust of diseases brought by the white man, whose devastation returned most of the continent to wilderness is a conservative theory??? If so, Ward Churchill is a Republican.
Correct me but if I remember correctly the sailors that went back to Europe took a lot of Indian sexual diseases with them then did not exist in europe before.
Check this out.
Another aspect is that the European immunity had been built up over many centuries. The degree of "ravaging" by epidemics goes down (the microbes won't proliferate if they kill their hosts before they can multiply), and the resistance of the population increases with time (those with immunity survive and pass on the immunity to their descendants).
The Europeans had come to terms with these diseases over many centuries so that the diseases had lost their virulence for Europeans. The Indians lacked this immunity and quickly succumbed.
McNeil's Plagues and Peoples is rather old (published in the 1970s) but is recommended for a more lucid explication.
A book Ward Churchill would love.
The main reason that the Indians died off after contact is that the population of North America had far less genetic variability than the populations of Europe. A disease which in Europe might be serious, but without the potential to be universally lethal, could, and did, decimate the vulnerable populations of the Americas.
This contact and its result was in fact inevitable and would have occurred whenever contact was made, and as we moved into the modern age, contact WOULD be made.
Early explorers could (and probably did) spread disease, long before large-scale European settlement. We could hypothesize, also, that diseases were brought and spread by Viking explorers in the 11th or 12th Century.
There was an interesting thread on this topic a couple of years ago. Some of the early explorers commented on a much more widespread and sophisticated civilization than was subsequently found by the European settlers.
I really don't understand why you're approaching this thread with such venom.
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