Mark Steyn: Before the white man came? War

Macleans ^ | 07/18/06 | Mark Steyn

[Elsie]

Read above!

[VadeRetro]

Very tasty and their bones made good building blocks.

[SoCal Pubbie]

Complaining about the modern use of the word decimate is an odd and all too common pastime around here. I'm sure none of the complainers would bat an eyelash at the way the use of words like "logo", short for logotype, or "font" have changed and are now commonly accepted.

[IronJack]

I myself have quibbled about certain words here -- I just got done with an extended conversation over whether "media" was a singular collective or a plural. Oddly, I took the traditionalist view on that one.

But "decimate" is long lost. It hasn't meant (exclusively) "reduce by a tenth" for centuries. I'm all for holding the linguistic line, but Carthago est delendo. Let it go.

[Old Student]

"The Aztecs ate the "sacrifice" victims because they needed protein. Antropologist Marvin Harris writes of this. Aztlan."

One of my professors a few years back said that idea had been discredited, but didn't cite any references, either. Did I mention that he was a lib, or is that redundant?

[Veto!]

Just wonderful. I'm really tired of those "noble" savages who basically savaged members of my family who were among the early settlers.

Steyn probably won't take up the fallacies attached to slavery, but if you read history books published before the pc crowd started revising it, you see very interesting statistics about the health and welfare of most slaves, which was equal and often superior to that of white people in the north doing similar work: farming, shoemaking, butter churning, etc. Also, when mosquito-and-snake ridden swamps had to be cleared, slaves were considered too valuable to take the casualties -- so they called in the Irish. Yes indeed.

(This is not to say that slavery was wonderful, but to point out that few slaveholders tried to render their "property" useless. It just wasn't good business.)

[SunkenCiv]

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[piasa]

Chickens are derived from the jungle fowl of another continent... not North America.

[Vigilanteman]

Chickens did, indeed, originate in Asia from the original jungle fowl gallus gallus. The Mandans were relative newcomers to North Dakota, having moved there from the Ohio River Valley about the 12th century.

There is no telling where they got the chickens. The Bearing land bridge theorists would probably argue from Asia many centuries before. Some of the same theorists will tell you that the camel and horse originated in the American continent tens of thousands of years before, but died out when the climate warmed and dried.

Who knows? And that's not really my point. My point is that there is a lot more genetic diversity in Native American peoples than many so-called scholars like to believe . . . including evidence of transoceanic travel and settlement by people of mainly Caucasian origin. Just google "Kennewick Man" for some interesting reading.