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 recognize that guy from the Leonard Nimoy documentary.
Not the first time I've been called twisted.
You remind me of this: Chief: White man stupid White: how so chief Chief: in old days woman keep house clean, do all the cooking, clean all the game, gather all the wood for fire take care of kids. Men hunt and fish, have get together in the sweat house. White man tries to "improve" on this???? Stupid.
Why not? In a world of isolated populations there are bound to be different levels of development.
In earlier years the Chinese were centuries advanced over Europeans.
Even as Cortez arrived in Teotehuacan, the city out-shone any city in Europe, in size, public utilties, wealth, cleanliness, and beauty.
Too bad that they were not genetically diverse enough to be able to deal with the diseases that came with the Europeans, or that they had not developed sea-faring first. History is full of accident.
One has to accept that contact between the new and old world would have taken place at some point between 1492 and, say 1850. It matters not when it happened; what is important to realize is that whenever it happened the result was preordained. Disease would wipe out the Indian populations with no intent to do so by the Europeans. This would have happened even if the Americans had first gone to Europe, as they would have taken the diseases back with them.
That's how the diseases were spread through out the Americas in the years after first contact, to populations that had no idea of the existence of Europe, 'white" men, or ships.
Like this takes away all the harm and pain of the past in their minds.
Well, if calling something "claptrap" is venom, then there's a lot of poison flying around FR.
I may be sensitive about this issue because there are a lot of Ward Churchill style hate-the-white-man revisionists out here and I can see some of their standard myths in this piece. These people are not harmless, they want to re-write American history and enforce their own political correctness code. Some have resorted to violence and intimidation to achieve their goals.
Not true. Wheeled toys have been discovered in Mayan ruins dating to the B.C. era. It does appear they never used wheels on a larger scale for vehicular travel for some as yet unknown cultural reason. Maybe the Mayan Kings preferred being carried on the shoulders of slaves on wooden platforms. Why they apparently didn't use wheeled vehicles to carry loads over their PAVED highways is indeed a mystery.
They're not gone, you just don't see them. There is a difference. Come on down to the Casino and bring lots of cash and I will show you a few.
One might profitably aske the same question about the Africans. There were a lot of them, and they were very far behind the Europeans, too. There doesn't seem to be any reason to assume that technological progress has to go hand in hand with health and cultivation.
No agriculture? the next time you eat a tomato, potato, any kind of bean, any kind of corn, pineapples, papaya, squash and pumpkins or smoke tobacco (there are way more than this but this makes the point) remember it came from the Indians.
I haven't read Diamond's book, but isn't that part of his assertion, that people who could cultivate crops and had domesticated animals-- oh maybe that's it. But aren't buffalo domesticated now? So he says, I think, that such people would have time to smelt metal and develop stuff.
The essential development in the West and Asia, as opposed to the pre-columbian western hemisphere and Africa, by which western societies and Asian societies excelled and eventually dominated, was the development and widespread use of written languages.
Through written languages and their widespread use, knowledge and experience could be transmitted to multitudes in the younger generations, without those younger generations having to engage in the personal experiences, or demonstrations of personal experience (apprenticeship), by which such knowledge was originally acquired. Because of written languages, and their widespread use, knowledge itself could grow, diversify and expand faster than the simple rate of the human life cycle. Traditional cultures have some examples of high knowledge achievments. But it is written langauge and its widespread use that facilitates the broad application of higher knowledge, creating greater knowledge expansion and use.
There was no ability for African or Western Hemisphere traditional cultures to compete with those who had widespread use of written languages - no matter what else happened.
See I told you so. See post 33.
There was some speculation that it was a member of the Ainu. This is a group of more Caucasian-looking people who are currently found in northern Japan. The analysis of the bones was stopped while the ownership was decided in the courts.
Interesting that they would not use them for transport. Maybe the existence of large numbers of slaves was the answer as you hint. There was so much "slave power" available, making their jobs easier through use of machines (like wheels) never occurred.
Of course, if they had used machines the results might have been relics more impressive than the Mayan ruins discovered to date. Slave labor in Egypt/Greece/Rome accomplished a lot with machine assistance.
An interesting theory I read some time ago stated that geography made the difference. The Eurasian land mass offered a East-West belt of temperate climate that stretched nearly unbroken 12,00 miles from the Atlantic coast of Western Europe to the Yellow river basin in China. The climate similarities over such great distances allowed very dissimilar cultures to trade and pick the 'best' of other cultures, even very distant ones.
The Western hemisphere, OTOH, is orientated North-South over a similar distance, but with very drastic climate changes as one moves further along, making for less trade and interaction between cultures.
Makes some sense to me.
Since they had slaves, I wonder if they ended up having to pay reparations, then the resulting bankruptcy and starvation killed 'em off. /sarc.
Although it's not spelled out in detail in this article, there is in fact a fair bit of serious scholarship that points to a much more robust and sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization than has been heretofore believed.
This is interesting stuff, if you can take off your political blinders for a while.
I agree with your statement. There's a lot of interesting work going on. I'm on the GGG ping list and have read a lot of it. Perhaps because I have been reading in this area is the reason I find the notion of a 100,000,000 strong Native American population that had cleared most of the forest for agriculture preposterous. On the other hand, if you're aware of archaeological evidence in support of that thesis, I'll gladly retract my criticism.
To be fair, the statement was Could these continents have held, as some assert, as many as 112 million people?
IOW, the estimate is that there may have been as many as 112 million people spread across both North and South America.
Given what we know about the very large scale civilizations in Central and South America, the number doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.
I'd agree with you that it's not believable when applied to North America only.
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