Posted on 07/11/2005 11:48:33 AM PDT by jazzo
Guess I don't agree that it's a private conversation. My responses were to public posts with my thoughts related thereto.
Yeah, happy you are against the liberals.
It's still a private conversation, although the public can look in if they wish. Last time I looked the Government didn't own this site.
I can sort of imagine your perspective.
Doesn't happen to be mine.
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Same posts have talked of civilizations and complex societies before 'we' came and everyone got sick.
Other than the Anasazi (SP?) and the known centers in more latin America....how did this vast population manage without leaving large numbers of cities, engineering, or records other than burial mounds and oral history?
It simply does not appear to me, not greatly immersed in it, that civilization of any sort extended beyond a few - most gone before the white man came - centers. That does not indicate (to me) a huge population.
Mexico and Yucatan are filled to the brim with stone cities.
The Ohio Valley and the central part of the Mississippi Valley have immense pyramids built of earth.
South America now appears to have some of the oldest cities on Earth ~ older than those in Egypt or Mesopotamia in fact.
BTW, ancient Old World civilizations have only come to light in recent years. The Sumerians, for instance, who invented civilization, were unknown 200 years ago outside of the Bible, and then we didn't really recognize them (See the parts about Noah for example).
They are just now figuring out how many millions of people the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic could support in late neolithic conditions, but it's in the millions.
Remember, when the Europeans began exploring the interior of what is now the United States in the mid 1500s (See: DeSoto) it was not heavily forested. The Indians kept the trees burned out to foster deer, other game, and agriculture. After they died from Old World diseases (circa 1648+) the forests returned in 50 years, and had yet another 120 years to grow!
Although the earliest pioneers thougth they were dealing primaeval forest, it was just overgrown farmland and pasture for nearly domesticated deer and wild buffalo.
My sense of meso (south) american history is one of a series of ascendant & descendant cultures, rarely close in proximity in time and geography, seldom peaceful, and generally disappearing without clear cause (to us).
Yes there was trade but in North America it appears mostly between separated groups or by way of pillage and ritualized theft.
I doubt that burning off land was intended to 'foster deer...". Rather to allow short term planting/residence and to drive game. It's also my understanding that those who practiced clearing by burning did not stay in that place too many years before they'd used up the ground or game or both.
Note that until quite recently, forest fires were a bad thing in our own culture and only recently have they been seen as beneficial by the masses OR government.
Next question, what caused the disappearance of the Anasazi, Olmec, Toltec, and various other pyramid or citadel builders that I believe went away before "our"diseases could touch them?
They could also determine his "place of origin" by analysis of the oxygen isotopes in the teeth.
Now, concerning dirt mounds ~ such structures are indicative of a high degree of social cooperation which, in turn, is always suggestive of religion and governmental forms far in advance of what you might find in the Paleolithic.
The various "figures" created in large mound structures are equal to the best of similar structures built in what is now the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and the Middle East, and far superior to anything similar built in Subsaharan Africa.
As far as "pullies" and "wheels" are concerned, the block and tackle had been known since the early Paleolithic. All you need are chunks of wood and rope ~ which can be made from various kinds of vines, natural wood fibers, cotton, and so forth.
As you know the advantage is gained through what amounts to a flexible lever, and not simply as a consequence of having a wheel.
Now, speaking of high technology, just about everything you eat today had its origins in the science of agronomy as applied in the Americas. Whether you are talking about giant strawberries and popcorn (both attributed to the Iriquois), squash, corn, beans, chocolate, tomatoes, potatoes or hundreds of other farm products, the American Indians made people in the Old World look like they had been stuck in early Paleolithic times.
BTW, you should bother sometime to learn Plains Indians sign language. It's closest congnate is the Chinese written language found in the Shang Dynasty materials. Most likely it is Chinese, and probably brought here by people who settled along the Mississippi. The Plains Indians are, of course, descendants of the tribes living roughly in the vicinity of Cahokia from roughly 1000 BCE to the 1500s when DeSoto visited them.
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