Earlier Americans - Living in Harmony With Nature?

Technocrat

Earlier Americans - Living in Harmony With Nature?

zogger

Sat Feb 18 16:10:11 -0800 2006

Science.

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The common conception that humans living in North America prior to the European conquest were living in a "balanced harmony with nature" has come under academic criticism. New research from fossil remains and midden mounds is showing that, just like any other humans in other past times, or now for that matter, they used and abused their environment right up to the limit of their population and levels of technology available and it was getting worse as time went on. The vast flocks of birds and teeming herds of game animals seen and marveled at by the explorers in the 1700s and 1800s were apparently only due to earlier exposure to the Spanish conquistadores and missionairies, during the 1500s, who introduced diseases the native populations had no defenses for, greatly reducing their numbers. Because of this severe and fast human population reduction, by the time the second wave of European explorers came through,the birds and animals had regained their huge numbers potential, while prior to the disease epidemics the first tier game animals like larger fowl and ungulates had been near hunted to extinction, and they had been forced to switch to the second tier game animals for the most part.

" When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early 1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer, marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered. Since then, people assumed such faunal wealth represented California’s natural condition – a product of Native Americans’ living in harmony with the wildlife and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern environmental damage.
That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years – from 1997 to 2004 – painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay."...more new age myth busting there

Earlier Americans - Living in Harmony With Nature?

Technocrat.net Editor

Sun Feb 19 21:41:25 -0800 2006
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The Emeryville Shellmound, explored by UC Berkeley's archaeology department in the early 1900's. I'm having dinner on top of it tonight. It got bulldozed in 1924 to build a paint factory. Then, in the 1990s when the paint factory got torn down, one native american descendant (who registered under California law to make such decisions and was chosen randomly) got to decide that the shellmound would stay buried because it apparently incorporates one or more human burials. So, they built a mall on top of it. Maybe in 75 years they'll tear down the mall and the homes on top of it, and science will get another chance. But it's been stirred around a whole lot.

A lot of us knew that picture of native americans living in harmony with the environment was not entirely accurate simply because there isn't much big game here, but big game exists in recent fossils. Camels, etc. existed in California and appear to have been hunted to extinction. And when the europeans came, with their equestrian society, the native americans appear to have not had horses because they had been hunted for food, to extinction. And isn't that a warning for us all.

Bruce