![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
In which the History Wars go cross-continental
So, one of the things that keeps being brought up in the discussion around Racefail09, Racefail the Thirteenth Child II is this:
The justification given for the deletion of the entire native populations of the Americas is this: in order for magic megafauna to survive, the natives need not to have moved in, because, it is claimed, "archaeology" says that the megafauna were rendered extinct by the hunting of humans.
As I quoted in my last post on this topic:
This, then, is the actual current mainstream view. Now, orthodoxy is not automatically accuracy, but where the bulk of research is in agreement, a radically opposed view must bring the weight of evidence to bear in its favour.
The book that keeps getting cited on this is 1491, by Charles C. Mann. Allegedly a really convincing source; certainly, as it's the one that they all bring up, I'm going to treat it as a sufficient source for this argument, as far as pointing out why this is wrong goes.
First of all: Yes, it's a book. A published one. That doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean it's not in fact purest excrement. David Irving writes books. Keith Windschuttle writes books. Not-even-slightly coincidentally, they're both racist revisionists.
One paragraph summary of Mann:
Setting aside Mann's political aim - which is, as I understand it, more about better land management than about writing the native populations out of existence, so don't judge him by the people who cite him - we have, as the central relevant claim, the idea that the various native American populations were vast and numerous before 1492 and European invasion. His contention is that up to 95% of the population were wiped out by European diseases, factional warfare, and overexploitation of available resources; the wild lands into which the colonists moved were much wilder than they had been.
Right.
1) There were tens of millions of native folk, but they all died around the 16th century of European plagues.
This argument? It is not clever.
a) If this were the case, the oral histories of the relevant peoples, which are not extinct and which record other instances of plague, would include it.
b) If diseases like smallpox (the one specifically cited) had ravaged the populace previously, subsequent generations, being descended from the survivors, would have an inherited resistance to it - they would not have been as susceptible to it the way they were when smallpox was being used as a biological weapon a few generations later.
c) Smallpox would have been extant on the continent. Diseases don't disappear. Even smallpox, the only disease now nominally eradicated by humanity, occasionally recurs in isolated areas, but it's not endemic, so it's kept in check. Without serious and advanced vaccination-based medical intervention, these diseases persist. Consider that, despite modern medical technology and the widespread availability of preventive vaccines, a landmass as isolated as Australia still only recently eradicated endemic measles. It wasn't. Nor were other European diseases.
d) Plagues just don't hit that hard. Consider that worse diseases than smallpox have not had anywhere near that kind of kill rate. The Black Death killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe - which, at the time, was living in conditions pretty much perfectly designed to maximise its impact. The 1918 flu pandemic didn't get anywhere near those kinds of kill rates. Nor did the plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Zaire Ebola Virus, pretty much the deadliest disease in existence, doesn't get that high.
If your argument requires something to be deadlier than Ebola Zaire, you damn well better have some evidence. There is none - not historical, not epidemiological, nothing.
2) Those millions of native folk cultivated the land and modified the environment for their own benefit.
Okay. Assume they did. Why does this mean they exterminate useful animals? Remember, we are talking about the extinction of the megafauna - dragging in wider considerations of prehistoric living in the Americas is purest derailment.
:crickets:
The animals humans exterminate when we modify the environment to our own benefit are predators. Wolves, lions, tigers - they kill livestock and they kill people. The actual evidence is that native populations of the Americas hunted and ate large meaty beasts. This means that they have an active disincentive not to hunt them to extinction. The actual evidence is that they killed them if and when they wanted to - buffalo jumps aren't exactly the least wasteful way to bring down your dinner - but, as the actual evidence shows, this didn't cause buffalo extinction. Millions of buffalo were still wandering around North America after millennia of human habitation.
Please stop bringing Charles C. Mann into this.
The justification given for the deletion of the entire native populations of the Americas is this: in order for magic megafauna to survive, the natives need not to have moved in, because, it is claimed, "archaeology" says that the megafauna were rendered extinct by the hunting of humans.
As I quoted in my last post on this topic:
The extinction of megafauna around the world was probably due to environmental and ecological factors. It was almost completed by the end of the last ice age. It is believed that megafauna initially came into existence in response to glacial conditions and became extinct with the onset of warmer climates.Source: The Australian Museum, factsheet on megafauna extinction.
In temperate Eurasia and North America, megafauna extinction concluded simultaneously with the replacement of the vast periglacial tundra by an immense area of forest. Glacial species, such as mammoths and woolly rhinocerous, were replaced by animals better adapted to forests, such as elk, deer and pigs. Reindeers (caribou) retreated north, while horses moved south to the central Asian steppe. This all happened about 10 000 years ago, despite the fact that humans colonised North America less than 15 000 years ago and non-tropical Eurasia nearly 1 million years ago.
This, then, is the actual current mainstream view. Now, orthodoxy is not automatically accuracy, but where the bulk of research is in agreement, a radically opposed view must bring the weight of evidence to bear in its favour.
The book that keeps getting cited on this is 1491, by Charles C. Mann. Allegedly a really convincing source; certainly, as it's the one that they all bring up, I'm going to treat it as a sufficient source for this argument, as far as pointing out why this is wrong goes.
First of all: Yes, it's a book. A published one. That doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean it's not in fact purest excrement. David Irving writes books. Keith Windschuttle writes books. Not-even-slightly coincidentally, they're both racist revisionists.
One paragraph summary of Mann:
Setting aside Mann's political aim - which is, as I understand it, more about better land management than about writing the native populations out of existence, so don't judge him by the people who cite him - we have, as the central relevant claim, the idea that the various native American populations were vast and numerous before 1492 and European invasion. His contention is that up to 95% of the population were wiped out by European diseases, factional warfare, and overexploitation of available resources; the wild lands into which the colonists moved were much wilder than they had been.
Right.
1) There were tens of millions of native folk, but they all died around the 16th century of European plagues.
This argument? It is not clever.
a) If this were the case, the oral histories of the relevant peoples, which are not extinct and which record other instances of plague, would include it.
b) If diseases like smallpox (the one specifically cited) had ravaged the populace previously, subsequent generations, being descended from the survivors, would have an inherited resistance to it - they would not have been as susceptible to it the way they were when smallpox was being used as a biological weapon a few generations later.
c) Smallpox would have been extant on the continent. Diseases don't disappear. Even smallpox, the only disease now nominally eradicated by humanity, occasionally recurs in isolated areas, but it's not endemic, so it's kept in check. Without serious and advanced vaccination-based medical intervention, these diseases persist. Consider that, despite modern medical technology and the widespread availability of preventive vaccines, a landmass as isolated as Australia still only recently eradicated endemic measles. It wasn't. Nor were other European diseases.
d) Plagues just don't hit that hard. Consider that worse diseases than smallpox have not had anywhere near that kind of kill rate. The Black Death killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe - which, at the time, was living in conditions pretty much perfectly designed to maximise its impact. The 1918 flu pandemic didn't get anywhere near those kinds of kill rates. Nor did the plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Zaire Ebola Virus, pretty much the deadliest disease in existence, doesn't get that high.
If your argument requires something to be deadlier than Ebola Zaire, you damn well better have some evidence. There is none - not historical, not epidemiological, nothing.
2) Those millions of native folk cultivated the land and modified the environment for their own benefit.
Okay. Assume they did. Why does this mean they exterminate useful animals? Remember, we are talking about the extinction of the megafauna - dragging in wider considerations of prehistoric living in the Americas is purest derailment.
:crickets:
The animals humans exterminate when we modify the environment to our own benefit are predators. Wolves, lions, tigers - they kill livestock and they kill people. The actual evidence is that native populations of the Americas hunted and ate large meaty beasts. This means that they have an active disincentive not to hunt them to extinction. The actual evidence is that they killed them if and when they wanted to - buffalo jumps aren't exactly the least wasteful way to bring down your dinner - but, as the actual evidence shows, this didn't cause buffalo extinction. Millions of buffalo were still wandering around North America after millennia of human habitation.
Please stop bringing Charles C. Mann into this.
no subject
I actually explained things a little badly in my last comment. (We're outside my medicated hours, I'm afraid.) The idea is that the explorers who came around the same time Columbus himself did, like, say, Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors, visited huuuuuge civilisations etc, and *they* left diseases behind that killed everybody over the course of the 16th century; when 17th-century settlement started taking place (and, you know, started killing everybody) they were actually dealing with only a tiny remnant of the initial civilisation.
His argument is sort of that "real" natives were much more "civilised" than the ones found later - because, you know, they lived in large, dirty cities just like
real peopleEuropeans. (Which implies that the way of living they had was of course vastly inferior.) But it's seriously unsupportable.no subject
I see. I hate that idea that civilised people live in giant dirty cities. Hell, if that was the case they would have had a couple of diseases to hand over themselves.
And just where is the remanents of these vast cities I'd like to know? Or were they movable cities? damn. THem Indians, so sneaky, hiding it all. >.<
No wonder the Native Americans don't trust the white scientists. I don't trust a lot of white scientist hypotheses (like 95% of East Asians are lactose intolerant! Where did they get THAT from?)
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-05-11 07:42 pm (UTC)(link)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
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-05-11 08:23 pm (UTC)(link)The problem with this theory isn't the hypothetical virulence of smallpox, the problem is that it's demonstrably idiotic. Huge settlements don't vanish without a trace- no trace means no huge settlements.
But the lactose intolerance thing is true. Different populations have different alleles, and most people in the world who aren't of Northern European, Middle Eastern, Mongolian, Fulani or Masai descent decrease their lactase production in adulthood to the point where it becomes difficult to metabolize large quantities of milk. This isn't a racist idea any more than the idea that there's a higher prevalence of sickle cell anemia in people of East African descent.
~ Another Mouse
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-05-11 09:42 pm (UTC)(link)-Yrf
forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ...
Sami, your logic here is good and 1491 sounds almost Jared Diamond-esque in its dopiness. However, it is widely accepted among scholars of colonial and pre-colonial Latin American history (not my field - I'm a 20th-c specialist myself - but some of my best friends ...) that the Americas as a whole did indeed suffer what's delicately known as a "demographic collapse" after coming into sustained contact with Europeans, so, somewhere around 1500. This was mostly caused by diseases, though social chaos (from invasion, or more often as a consequence of the breakdown of complex systems of food production and distribution, etc., due to epidemic disease) played a part too. There were islands in the Caribbean that were entirely depopulated between the first and second trip Columbus made, perhaps because the breeding pairs of pigs Columbus left behind carried flu. Outside of islands, and very densely populated areas, the catastrophe was milder and happened more slowly. But yes, there certainly were large parts of the Americas which lost 95% of their populations.
I tell the undergraduates in Intro to Latin American History that the earliest dates of settlement in the Americas keep getting revised backward - I heard recently of settlements excavated in northern coastal Brazil that can be dated back 20,000 years - while estimates of the total population figure for the Americas before 1492 keep rising. So we can't say for sure how terrible the devastation over both continents was, between say 1500-1750. But 75-80% seems more or less plausible to me.
The best fast guide to most of this for English language users remains Alfred Crosby, The Colombian Exchange. It's quite outdated by now (I think he's been proved completely wrong about tuberculosis, for example) but nice and clear, anyway.
Re: forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ...
I have noticed there's a strong assumption apparent that South America would be just like, say, Virginia. Which: no.
Re: forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ...
(Anonymous) 2009-05-12 03:24 am (UTC)(link)My main point is that all four of the counterarguments in the above post about Native Americans and plague are at least slightly wrong, and for a lot of the pre-colonization dieoffs there is certainly evidence. The one in Massachusetts before the Pilgrims landed is very well attested.
As for megafauna, etc. - It's like the Neanderthals in Europe, or the hobbits in SE Asia. Sure, it's possible humans had nothing to do with all that, but it doesn't seem very plausible for animals that had survived a multitude of prior ice age cycles. Mammoths indeed survived many thousands of years past mainland extinction on an island north of Russia that was devoid of human habitation - until humans showed up. Much of the surviving non-domesticated megafauna in the world is in Africa, where it evolved alongside humanity. To blame overhunting specifically and exclusively seems invalid, but humans change their environment in other ways than mere hunting.
-Yrf