Posted on 08/17/2005 11:43:12 AM PDT by Between the Lines
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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