[muawiyah]

What? Bison and elk hardly kept the vast forests in the Southland (now called MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, TN, AR, LA) cleared! The local starving populations of human would have exterminated those animals in a few days ~ Desoto's diary is pretty clear regarding the lay of the land and the number of people he ran into.

West of the Hundred Degree Line the general incidence of rainfall is ALWAYS far less than East of that same line. True, that's a result of a geographic koinkydink, but it was that way for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans and it's still that way.

The Great Droughts regularly dry out the East and destroy the West. There are drifting sand dunes in Oklahoma for example ~ they get to drift only a few years every century, but they do drift ~ that particular process was set in motion with the melt down at the end of the last glacial period ~ I noticed sources place it at 11,000 years ago, but it would actually have to be far older since that area was a subarctic desert for many tens of thousands of years earlier.

[fso301]

What? Bison and elk hardly kept the vast forests in the Southland (now called MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, TN, AR, LA) cleared!

I didn't say they were entirely responsible, just that they are believed to have helped maintain open areas such as the southern Appalachian balds.