Posted on 10/11/2010 3:55:41 PM PDT by Libloather
Not doubting you, but could you save me a lot of google time and point to a source?
Yes, and you'd think that with their custom of "wiping" with the left hand and eating with the right, they'd have very little immunity. Or might it be that they get confused about right and left from time to time.
The voyage of Saint Brendan sometime around 525 BC is looked at as a legend with a possible basis in fact. Some believe the “isle of the blessed” may be the Americas.
“the vast majority of transatlantic migrants (more than 80 percent up to 1820) came from Africa labor to replace the disease-defeated Amerindians”
It’s moreso the fact that a lot of the native americans were less like the settled Aztecs and more like hunter-gatherers. Governments conquer and regularize kleptocracy over agrarian and later city-dwelling peoples, not mobile peoples. You can’t make slaves out of people that can run for the hills.
Sure, we gave them smallpox, but they gave us syphillis, so I’d say we’re about even.
Now the gay African monkeyphile that gave us AIDS still has some explaining to do...
Same process and same methodology by which they predicted "global warming"...
Probably the same method they used to find that 100,000 (or whatever it was) Iraqis were killed in the war.
If there's anything you can count on in leftist agitprop, it's good, credible numbers.
ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/story?id=4136401&page=1
PBS http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_syphilis/index.html
Archaeology.org(?) http://www.archaeology.org/9701/newsbriefs/syphilis.html
ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/story?id=4136401&page=1
PBS http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_syphilis/index.html
Archaeology.org(?) http://www.archaeology.org/9701/newsbriefs/syphilis.html
I've become convinced over the years that this is just a bunch of hogwash. I don't understand why anyone would want to propagate such an idea. Perhaps it's some sort of self-loathing on the part of some European descendants who want to lay a guilt trip on everyone else.
In exchange, in addition to viruses, the native peoples of America received, to take another bitter example, horses, which served mainly as military machines in contests they lost.
Well, no. They also served as one of the central features of Plains Indian cultures, notably the ability of horsemen to hunt bison. One senses a rather condescending view of those cultures on the part of Mr. Carroll while he is upbraiding us for the identical sin.
It is, as well, another tired entry in the repackaging of history in a wrapper of guilt. Carroll tips his hand in the last sentence. It isn't actually about history at all, it's about semiotics.
Christopher Columbus represents the knot into which all these threads are tied. A past in which the threads were woven ultimately into lynching rope cannot be undone, but how it is remembered can and must be changed.
Changed, presumably, by right-thinkers on the topic, although it is highly doubtful if Carroll numbers among them. One hopes that one day historical revisionism through ideology will be viewed in the same shameful lens in which Carroll tries to cast the history he's attempting to revise.
wow. This is all pretty interesting in an esoteric way.
PS- What does esoteric mean?
:p
WAG is probably true
You can bet if they had anything to transmit I would have caught it. Several weeks in a small ship on a storm tossed sea with a bunch of sweaty limeys and I would have probably cozied up with a coconut.
James Carroll, A smug fellow with a political agenda to cast a pall over all of European civilization and its history - one of the reasons I haven’t read the Boston Globe in twenty five years or tuned into PBS before Masterpiece Theater.
What an ass.
In the late Pleistocene, this continent wasn't exactly an Edenic landscape, particularly the upper Midwest. Humans exerted a profound influence, particularly after introducing the Asian bison.
The animals had not enough time to evolve defenses.
You underestimate the humans. Canis dyerus was no puppy. Neither were mammoths or the bison that was here. It is a simple fact that the humans that came here were simply voracious and extremely capable hunters not interested in developing domestic livestock, much less a settled lifestyle.
There were stock here that were suitable for development. Shrub oxen, a small camel, and a small horse, but they were good to eat and were soon gone. Certainly some of the sloths were good potential meat animals.
The animals had not enough time to evolve defenses.
LOL, grizzlies did OK. We disagree. IMO what happened was because of the cultural attributes of those who first arrived. In my opinion, entire continents take the shape pursuant to the values of the people in charge. We are that influential.
I am simply unwilling to look at humans in a strictly biological fashion. There is no other species on earth that even remotely approaches such a profound effect on every level of the food pyramid as humans, for good or ill. Evolutionary models are simply not that accurate beyond closed systems, and for the most part, do not include people as an integral component. It is either an egregious mistake or wishful thinking on the part of a misanthropic few.
Can't say; I didn't know any of them. Before my time.
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