1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by
We need to make this required reading for all college students, or at least all those in natural sciences. And we really need to rewrite our grade school text books. Because...
When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, the Western Hemisphere was not a sparsely inhabited wilderness. It was neither sparsely inhabited nor a wilderness. There were a lot of Indians here--we know this, both from early explorers' accounts and from archaeological records--and they were managing the plants and animals to suit their needs. In some cases, managing them a lot.
The book goes in a lot of directions and tackles a lot of topics, all fascinating. Why have we not known about the Indians' influence on their environment? What were their civilizations like, and what happened to them? How many were there, and why did they die? In what ways did they change the environment? and the last and most scary of all, what happened to the plants, animals and peoples of the world during the Columbian exchange?
One chapter deals with a classic example of the mistake we make when we assume that what we see is what has always been. It's known as Holmberg's mistake. Allan R. Holmberg was an anthropologist who studied a tribe in Bolivia called the Siriono. He wrote that they were "among the most culturally backward peoples of the world." They suffered constant want and hunger, had no clothes, no domestical animals, no music and little religion. They couldn't make fire or even adequate shelters for themselves. For millennia, he thought, they had existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their presense.
He was wrong. Both about the people and about the land in which they lived.
...smallpox and influenza laid waste to their villages in the 1920s. Before the epidemics at least three thousand Sirionó, and probably many more, lived in eastern Bolivia. By Holmberg’s time fewer than 150 remained--a loss of more than 95 percent in less than a generation. So catastrophic was the decline that the Sirionó passed through a genetic bottleneck. (A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.)
In addition to the population crash, the Bolivian military was rounding up the Sirionó and putting them in prison camps or working them as slaves on cattle ranches. The people that Holmberg found in the forest were fugitives, escapees hiding from their captors.
He also failed to realize that they were recent migrants to the area, and that area had once supported a large, sophisticated peoples who built an extensive and complicated array of causeways, mounds, and fish weir. These massive earthworks were all around, but no one guessed they were of human origin.
Above information from https://erenow.com/modern/newrevelations/3.html
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