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	May 11th, 2009 - 07:42 pm

Well, de Soto met the Mound Builders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_builder_(people)) himself. Then, the next time someone went though, they were gone. Hidden megacities aren't the argument. The argument is that existing large village sites and their fields were historically underpopulated, undercultivated, and sometimes abandoned when settlers arrived.

There are some primary sources in there - the abandoned villages the Pilgrims found that they cheerfully assumed God killed for them, early colonial records of how bad the epidemics were, recorded death rates in central America, the de Soto expedition, early Pacific Northwest sea explorers finding the area decimated by smallpox...and smallpox did become endemic in the Americas. If smallpox comes along and wipes out 60% of the population every forty years or so, leaves the survivors disfigured/blind/somewhat infertile, and there's another couple of epidemics in the meantime with 10% mortality, not to mention the psychological toll from all that, yes that level of population crash over 130 years is plausible. The particular percentage claimed may be on the high end, but population crash happened.

Civilized people don't starve their children when they have the capacity for more intensive food production on their existing land (and they did). The Native Americans expanded to fill two continents. They didn't suddenly say "okay, that's enough kids" and start practicing draconian birth control. The way European settlers found the New World wasn't the way it had Always Been Since Time Immemorial (tm), and assuming that is ridiculous. Central American empires rose and fell. New crops were developed. Tribes and cultures split, merged, killed each other and displaced each other. The Navajo colonized the Southwest from northern Canada only a couple centuries before whites arrived. Etc.

Europeans were not any -less- obnoxious, murderous, etc to settled populations in Africa, India, or Asia. The reason they were able to displace Native Americans and smaller island populations as opposed to people on Old World continents is generally considered to be the vast and disproportionate impact of disease.

As for lactase deficiency in adults of some populations, this isn't a "white" hypothesis, it's something that can be directly measured by scientists of all races. It doesn't always translate into severe intolerance of smaller amounts of milk, but it's not something people made up for giggles either.

-Yrf