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Posted on 10/17/2011 6:43:48 AM PDT by Red Badger
It is well known that physorg.com (along with arstechnica.com) has both its feet firmly planted in the anthropogenic global warming side of the fence. They love to push this crap “science”.
The CO2 connection with the Little Ice Age is a bit of a stretch, but reforestation of North America, Central America, and the Amazon might have affected world climate in many ways.
As the books you mentioned point out, there is considerable evidence that the population of the Americas was much larger in the early part of the 15th Century.
When the “pilgrims” arrived in Massachusetts, they were given land formerly occupied by a subordinate tribe that had been wiped out by smallpox.
There is also now considerable evidence that a large Chinese world-exploring fleet, accompanied by sailing ships from India and elsewhere, reached both coast of the New World including North America early in the 15th Century during the late Ming Dynasty. They may first have introduced smallpox and influenza-type diseases to the New World instead of, or earlier than the Europeans.
Nope. Suggest you read "1491," as another poster mentioned.
Before steel tools 'slash and burn" just isn't feasible. The amount of labor required to clear heavy forest with stone tools just isn't justified for a few years crops. The Indians cleared land intending to farm it on a permanent basis.
The 40M to 80M is probably a pretty accurate, even conservative, range. It is, of course, for all of the New World, many areas of which definitely supported pre-Columbian populations similar to or even higher than those of today. Yucatan, the Amazon and the Sage Plain of the Four Corners area, for instance.
Their conclusions about the effect of this on the climate is of course nonsense. The "90%" fall-off in population took pretty much a century, and the regrowth of forests took considerably longer than that. The Little Ice Age was well underway before these slight changes in CO2 could have taken place.
But that there was a huge die-off among Indians is pretty well accepted.
They had to clear the land somehow. They had all the time in the world. They weren’t going anywhere.........
Yes, I know. It’s a fault of theirs, not mine.........
Two massive guesses in this story: 1. Total population and 2. The number killed by evil white guys...
Some perspective: That many killed is more than died in World War II. I say BS.
1 is to some extent a guess. However, allocating 10 to 15 million each for the MesoAmerican and Andean civilizations, which doesn't seem at all unreasonable given their accomplishments, you only need another 10M to 20M in the entire western hemisphere to hit the lower end of the range.
Only morons like Ward Churchill blame the die-off on "evil white guys." The vast majority of those who died never saw a white man, or possibly even heard stories of them.
They died because the two disease ecologies of the American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres merged. Primarily because the native Americans had little in the way of domestic animals, the pathogens went almost entirely east to west. (Syphillis is probably the only major disease that traveled the other way.)
The dozens of diseases to which Eurasians had gradually and painfully acquired some resistance over a period of 10,000 years were suddenly dumped on the Americans all at the same time.
Exactly the same thing would have happened had the Aztecs sailed up the Thames and started a conquest of Eurasia using their superior technology.
No blame intended :)
That provides some context. Thanks, especially for the mental image of the Aztecs sailing up the Thames. :-)
I find it hard to believe that’s china came here and didn’t colonize american. Everything ive ever learned said that’s china never had the courage for deep ocean sailing. Nor did the have the advanced navigation knowledge for such exploration. Remember that’s the pacific is huge.
Do you have any sources to look at, other than chinese claims?
The Europeans had no knowledge of what caused these diseases. That didn’t come along till the late 19th century.
If they had such knowledge, they would have had no tools with which to fight the epidemics. Those weren’t developed for the most part till well into the 20th century.
The only way to have prevented a massive die-off of native Americans would have been to keep the two hemispheres sealed off from each other till the mid to late 20th century.
Which fairly obviously wan’t going to happen once people started sailing all over the world.
Today, the total developed land on earth amounts to 5%-6% of all land.
Today, in the US there are more acres of trees than there were when the pilgrims landed.
I fail to see how something as insignificant as the land needed for subsistence farming by a few million people returning to it’s undeveloped state could have a global, multi-century impact.
You heard wrong.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/ming.html
The Chinese ships of the time were much more advanced and seaworthy than their European equivalents. The Chinese invented the compass and had no problem sailing all over the Indian Ocean and the Indonesia area.
I've never seen anything resembling genuine evidence they ever rounded Africa or crossed the Pacific or even got to Polynesia. Just sweaty-palmed enthusiasts.
It is probable the occasional Chinese, Korean or Japanese fisherman wound up tossed ashore on the Pacific NW coast, but never an organized expedition of colonization.
That’s because you don’t have an agenda, a gullible audience and a need for more government largesse in the form of grants to earn praise from your fellow libwhackjobs.......
I think Mann might be on to something when he asks how they could have built the many temples and pyramids (and mounds in North America) without massive numbers of workers.
By 1600 it is probable the Chinese were all over the Phillipines/Malay/Indonesia area and had been for centuries, quite possible a thousand years or more. It just wasn’t for the most part a government or colonial enterprise, with the exception of the Ming effort.
The Chinese government just wasn’t normally interested in overseas trade. They had a truly incredible case of “not invented here.” They couldn’t conceive of anything important outside the Middle Kingdom.
Chinese merchants of the south coast, OTOH, were always interested in a buck, and were highly skilled at tracking them down. But they almost always operated without government support and often on a criminal or smuggling basis. Not that this was unusual for them, as merchants and businessmen in China were the bottom rung of the social ladder and were by definition viewed as semi-criminals.
At various times in its history, China, like Korea and Japan, sealed its borders and had the death penalty for returning after traveling overseas.
It is probable the reforestation of the Americas was preceded by a truly massive reforestation of Europe when the Western Empire collapsed and the population declined drastically.
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