This is science??? This is way beyond just "curve fitting" - this is creating facts and a evidence from scratch to match a ridiculous hypothesis.
Agreed. If 90% had died, it would have made settlement of America VERY easy! I’ve never seen any estimate like that!
“This is science??? This is way beyond just “curve fitting” - this is creating facts and a evidence from scratch to match a ridiculous hypothesis. “
Well spoken and 100% correct. This isn’t science. It belongs in an education major’s grad thesis...and should be treated as such.
“since most estimates suggest that close to 90 percent of the native peoples died or were killed after the Europeans arrived”
That figure was pulled out of a hat, of course. But even if it is true, I might ask, “90 percent of what?” And no one would be able to answer me.
What evidence do these scientists have that the Americas had been deforested before they were reforested only to be deforested again? There were civilizations in South America and varying amounts of agriculture here and there, but weren’t these by and large pastoral/hunter-gatherer people? They weren’t clear cutting to build condos, is what I’m getting at.
Author Charles Mann makes a case for this based on the following;
Early mound builders in the continental US and their like in Central and South America had only stone tools and no draft animals, yet built massive structures in a relatively short period of time (carbon dating.)
For a good read, I’d recommend Mann’s “1491” and “1493” about the Americas before and just after the arrival of Europeans.
There are historic reports of millions of natives dying in the 1500s in Mexico and adjacent areas. I have no doubt that this spread up north and down south. Also, it is believed that one reason the Pilgrims were successful was because many Indians had died in previous decades of smallpox or other illness.
In the 1700s and early 1800s, this trend may have been reversed. There was the phenomonon called the Buffalo Common wherein the Indians kept large areas burned off to create a prairie where eastern buffalo could graze. Warfare was suspended while hunting in these areas. One such area was the Shenendoah Valley in Virginia. However the Indians had pretty much been displaced by the time of the Revolution. Then there was an area called the Barrens around the Green River and in a large area east of Mammoth Cave. That was still used around the beginning of the 1800s. The eastern buffalo is now extinct so far as I know.