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."
Population #s, as we point out in "A Patriot's History of the United States," are all over the map for 1491 North and Central America. NO ONE---and I repeat---NO ONE has any idea how many people were here. Recently, estimates have been lowered by as much as 50%, and increasingly they are finding bone evidence of so-called "European" diseases in the Indians before Columbus ever got here.
You have to remember the Aztecs---by 1540 [!!]---still didn't have the wheel. Jared Diamond tries to excuse this in "Guns, Germs and Steel," by saying, "Well, they really didn't have the kinds of animals that required them to have the wheel." 1) Why not? 2) Why do you have to have animals before a wheel is useful? Indeed, it is reasonable to assume just the opposite is true---that the wheel made certain animals more useful.
The pain of the past is far wider and deeper than just what happened to the native population of the Americas when Columbus arrived. There were so many deaths during various plagues in Europe that I've heard of contemporary accounts that talk about bandits jumping out from behind the piles of bodies. The United States is not unusual in that there are horrible things in it's past. What sets the United States apart is that we've learned to move past most of the sins of our past.
And given that none of my ancestors were even in the United States before 1885 and stayed on the East Coast, I don't feel any personal guilt, not that I think anyone should feel guilty for the crimes of another person, simply because they are related or, even more broadly, are simply members of the same race. If it turns out that the "Native Americans" wiped out an even earlier indiginous population of the Americas (as some recent archaeological finds suggest), all that does is show the absurdity of playing "holier than thou" games with ancestors.
Syphillis shows up in Europe shortly after 1492. The dominant hypothesis is that Columbus and his colleagues brought it back from the New World.
Yes, disease was a major detrimental impact on the Aztecs. Hernando Cortez was another major detrimental impact on the Aztecs.
I made it this far in reading the comments and this seemed like a good place to stop. Interesting post.
Back to work, Bump.
see post 9 and post 33.
The only safe estimate it seems to me is somewhere between 5-50 million. That pins it down, doesn't it?
BTTT
At Chaco canyon in northern NM it seems from studies that they almost made the pinyon extinct in the time that were there.
There are many accounts of whites telling how barren and w/o wildlife the Southwest was as they were first explored. I know that in the portion of the SW I live in there would be very little wildlife w/o farmers and ranchers who provide the only available water much of the year.
Indians ate the horses? What do you mean?
Exactly, the Mimbrenos, the Anasazi, too, many tribes disappeared long before the white man for white man's disease to be the problem. Did they starve? Did they assimilate? Who knows?
I do think there were a lot of them.
That sounds like the theory in "Guns Germs and Steel".
I think 5 million is probably far too small, given the scale of the known cities in Central and South America. There'd have to be a substantial rural/agricultural population to feed the large urban population (Aztec cannibalism notwithstanding. ;-)
If your range is correct, I'd pin it toward the higher end...
Self-ping for later.
I would too.
In the middle east where the wheel was first invented about 3500 BC, it's use was later abandoned. The invention of the camel saddle about 500 BC allowed camels to be used as pack animals. In many ways, a camel with a pack was superior to a cart pulled by another beast of burden, and so the pack animal took the place of the wheel. The wheel did not find popular use in the middle east again until the crusades.
He's from Stargate: SG-1. :)
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