Dixon said: "
Had Europeans never made it to the Americas, they, NAs, would still be living
in the stone age today, chasing buffalo herds on foot, living in *harmony* with
nature, and killing each other over hunting grounds. "
History is written by the victors. The Newcomers NC] maintain massive
simplistic myths about Native Americans civilizations, accomplishments and
cultures.
1941 by Charles Mann is a good start -- though being 8 years old does not have
all of the recent research:
"...what human civilization in the Americas was like before the
Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still
are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused
territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow
before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among
the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose
discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have
been emerging. ... the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and
more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians,
rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the
landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural
features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human
intervention. ... the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories
are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To
many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting
of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an
emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly,
encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but
the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest
epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced
inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept
through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind
for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures
that it had sustained for centuries before. " (Amazon)
A 1491 Timeline
Europe and Asia Dates The Americas 25000-35000 B.C. Time of paleo-Indian
migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups
likely traveled across the Pacific in boats. Wheat and barley grown from wild
ancestors in Sumer. 6000 5000 In what many scientists regard as humankind's
first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico
systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species. First
cities established in Sumer. 4000 3000 The Americas' first urban complex, in
coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large
pyramid-like structures Great Pyramid at Giza 2650 32 First clear evidence of
Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important
mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about
600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not
widely used until the 1700s) 800-840 A.D. Sudden collapse of most central Maya
cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war Vikings briefly establish
first European settlements in North America. 1000 Reconstruction of Cahokia, c.
1250 A.D.*Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north
of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.
Black Death devastates Europe. 1347-1351 1398 Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant
Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire),
which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled
place on Earth. The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
1492 The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. Syphilis
apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew. 1493 Ferdinand
Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage. 1519 Sixteenth-century
Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox**Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán,
capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European
disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the
empire. 1525-1533 The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as
half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by
Spanish forces led by Pizarro. 1617 Huge areas of New England nearly
depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors. English Pilgrims
arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored
Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth. 1620
". "In a riveting and fast-paced history, massing archeological,
anthropological, scientific and literary evidence, Mann debunks much of what we
thought we knew about pre-Columbian America. Reviewing the latest, not widely
reported research in Indian demography, origins and ecology, Mann zestfully
demonstrates that long before any European explorers set foot in the New World,
Native American cultures were flourishing with a high degree of sophistication.
The new researchers have turned received wisdom on its head. For example, it
has long been believed the Inca fell to Pizarro because they had no metallurgy
to produce steel for weapons. In fact, scholars say, the Inca had a highly
refined metallurgy, but valued plasticity over strength. What defeated the Inca
was not steel but smallpox and resulting internecine warfare. Mann also shows
that the Maya constructed huge cities and governed them with a cohesive set of
political ideals. Most notably, according to Mann, the Haudenosaunee, in what
is now the Northeast U.S., constructed a loose confederation of tribes governed
by the principles of individual liberty and social equality. The author also
weighs the evidence that Native populations were far larger than previously
calculated. Mann, a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and Science,
masterfully assembles a diverse body of scholarship into a first-rate history
of Native America and its inhabitants. 56 b&w photos, 15 maps." (Publisher's
Weekly
