http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann

I grew up being taught that the Americas before European contact were sparsely populated by people who didn't affect the environment in any deliberate way outside of the major empires. I'm sure most people received the same impression. This article shows some alternate theories, including one where the population was greater than Europe. I've always had a soft spot for radical views of history, provided they're race-based or ludicrous like the Old Europe Culture. Pre-Columbian American history is especially interesting because there is in general very little evidence, which allows a lot of extreme conjectures like the Solutrean theory.

do you mean who didn't affect the environment?

Did you know there was no grass in America before it was 'discovered'?

my bad. it was pretty late when i finished reading the article.

I really want to read it, but the page doesn't seem to want to load.

Very interesting, saying that the ancient Native Americans created the Amazon rainforest by terraforming and sculpting entire landscapes, as well as developing a bacteria that develops self-sustaining nutrient-rich soil. Apparently they used these agricultural techniques to support a huge population larger and more prosperous than that of Europe.

It is stated in the article that the popular belief that the western hemisphere has always been sparsely populated comes from the estimated 95% death rate when European diseases were introduced. The very early Spanish explorers like DeSoto saw huge Native cities, but when the Mayflower came, they all had died from disease and the land was mostly empty. They also say that the huge buffalo herds were not usually that big -- they had grown large just because the Indians had died from disease and weren't there to eat them anymore.

The Mayflower and DeSoto and the Buffalo are all in different places. What DeSoto saw would have had little in common with what the people on the Mayflower saw when the arrived in what is not New England.

wut

well, it still is true that previous visitors to NA brought diseases that killed many thousands of natives on the east coast.

The mayflower was certainly not the first visitor to the NA coast.

True, but the accounts of early New England settlers of sparse forests points towards there being a sizable population in that area.

If you want a truly radical history of the Americas, read The Book of Mormon.

lul

It seems like if the Native Americans were unprepared for European diseases, Europeans wold be equally unprepared for Native American diseases.

Not necessarily. Europeans are dirty.

Yeah, but wouldn't the same be true for any culture that was advanced enough to have high density population centers?

European diseases were mostly transferred with livestock. The Native Americans did not keep many domestic animals other than dogs and the lama and guinea pig in the Andes. They had some diseases, but none of the big ones that come from constant contact with livestock.



No, why would it? They found baths and sanitation systems in Mohenjo Daro, which was built around 2500 BCE. It's a matter of culture. Europeans didn't care about their hygiene.

Europe was pretty much a continent-sized cesspool of human and animal disease. The people who populated the Americas are generally believed to have lost many diseases they may have had during the long period of sparse populations and few vectors as they crossed from northern Asia. In the battle of the pathogens, Europe brought a machine gun to a knife fight.

The Americas were not completely unarmed, however. Syphilis was native to the Americas, and there were some pretty nasty outbreaks in Europe in the late 1400s. In those first decades, it was much more severe than it is today.

did you know there was no america before it was discovered




..



hurrrrrrrrrr

The article itself is a bit iffy for me. The idea that the Americas lost enormous numbers of people to disease is pretty well accepted, even if it isn't taught in many or most history classes. There's pretty good coverage of the debate on pre-Columbian populations and the difficulty of resolving it. I personally take a middle view; clearly there were large population centers that collapsed due to disease, but the methods described for the highest estimates seem like they would vastly overestimate the total. There were large areas where the population was sparse and not likely to support epidemics with that kind of death rate, and some areas could have increased. For instance, very few people lived out on the plains until the horse made the classic "Indian" lifestyle possible. Even on the eastern prairies, where farming settlements along rivers hunted bison in the summer, waves of abandonment and resettlement, probably drought-related, took place before Europeans arrived.

The latter portion of the article reaches too far. The fact that humans intentionally favored the fire-dependent parts of an ecosystem does not mean that they created that fire dependence. Fire has been regulating ecosystems since long before humans existed. The "Native Americans created the Amazon" contention is unsupported even by the very preliminary work the author bases it on. The fact that there are a few parts of the Amazon where the soil is not terrible does not change the fact that the system as a whole is built on poor soils. Nor does it rule out the possibility that the native people settled preferentially in these areas rather than creating them.

TL;DR: The article uses a mixture of accepted but not widely known fact and too new be discredited conjecture to vastly overstate its conclusion.

Sparse forests can also point to a more natural system where nature takes its course. Not saying it would have been the same on the East Coast, but the forests were sparse in the west 200 years ago because fire was more prevalent than it is now and 100 years of suppression has led to dense forests.

Management by native populations could also have been a reason for sparser forests to allow for better hunting grounds and provide habitat for specific animals or plants that they gathered. Native populations on the East Coast also took part in agriculture, which would have required more open space to grow crops.

There are quite a few records that the Native Americans used fire to manage forests, making it easier to grow crops and keep easy hunting land. In a sense, they eased nature along its course. Without a large Native presence in the area the forests quickly overgrew. I haven't found any evidence for or against, but it would be my guess that the Colonists didn't attempt to suppress forest fires, since they were most interested in clearing out the forests to make farmland. It wasn't until the 19th and 20th centuries that forest fire control became one of the (misguided) goals of ecology.