A fascinating new look at America before Columbus

The Charlotte Observer ^ | Aug. 14, 2005 | CHARLES MATTHEWS

[Unassuaged]

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?

[hispanarepublicana]

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.

[okie01]

Some of the early explorers commented on a much more widespread and sophisticated civilization than was subsequently found by the European settlers.

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.

[okie01]

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.

Wheeled toys have been found in the pre-Columbian ruins of New Mexico, as well.

[Texas Songwriter]

I agree. The author reports the huge number of people who died prior to White Eurotrash showing up, and then expound upon smallpox and hepatitis. What did the 100 million die of? The white contagion application seems to be an arrow the antieuropean extract adherents pull from their quiver when they need to attack Columbus.

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.

[blam]

"Check this out."

Thanks.

Posted here on FR on 4-2-2002

1491

[blam]

"I'd really love to know what global populations were as far back as can be correctly calculated and what the dispersal of populations actually has been over time. "

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."

[SMARTY]

That's interesting and I have read about it. I really am interested in the numbers and movements of populations once culturally distinct types could be discernible. 70 thousand plus years back doesn't say anything to me. Humans are only interesting to me once they began to socialize and develop, culturally. Unfortunately, valid information about populations far back enough to be culturally distinct is not plentiful. And then of course, I am primarily interested in organized warfare between people. I don't know how I got interested in Military History, but there it is.

[John Valentine]

Didn't the arrival of Europeans signal the beginning of European development of the new world? How could it be that their arrival wiped the natives out, then everything just grew over wild? Especially when you consider how much whining goes on about how the "white man" moved in and destroyed everything. Can't have it both ways.

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.

[John Valentine]

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?

[SunkenCiv]

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[ccc_jr]

archeology never got in the way of the revisionists in the past ... why should it start now?

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Years ago, there was a wheeled toy on display at Mesa Verde. They also didn't appear to use wheeled vehicles for any practical use.

I have also read where there were coal outcrops, there is no evidence that it was used for fuel.

[Tokra]

Oh, and all the human sacrifice that went on?

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.

[Tokra]

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???

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.

[blam]

"There was an article in the Atlantic Monthly (I think) about 3 years ago about the same sort of ideas. "

Posted On Free Republic exactly (to the day) 4 years ago.

1491

[Tokra]

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.

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.

[Cheburashka]

Didn't the arrival of Europeans signal the beginning of European development of the new world? How could it be that their arrival wiped the natives out, then everything just grew over wild? Especially when you consider how much whining goes on about how the "white man" moved in and destroyed everything. Can't have it both ways.
---
Ponce de Leon - Florida, 1513
Coronado - Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, 1540-42.
De Soto - Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, 1539-42.
Each of these men had explored the present-day U.S., but they made no settlements there. But they and the men with them could have spread diseases into the inhabitants of North America above the Rio Grande. Once the diseases were started they would spread along trade routes. There are always trade routes. It might have taken decades for diseases to work its way into every village in North America, but it would have eventually.
And the three explorers I noted are only the ones we know about. No doubt some conquistador bands set out into the unknown, met misfortune and never returned. But they could carry diseases into the unknown as well.
Then by the 1600's when French, Dutch and English colonist start to arrive new epidemics among the Indians are set off and travel far beyond the areas reached by the settlers along the eastern coast. By the time the English settlers are ready to cross the Appalachians in the mid-late 1700's the Indian populations are greatly reduced, and Indian culture is what we are familiar with in the history books about the French and Indian War and the Revolution. And we imagine that Indians lived like that for about 10,000 years, since crossing the Bering Straits.
That's the theory. We'll have to see if they can find more evidence to prove it.

[SunkenCiv]

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