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There's no evidence Native Americans managed the land to this degree. In fact it's clear there weren't enough of them to do so. The population in all of the Am

There's no evidence Native Americans managed the land to this degree. In fact it's clear there weren't enough of them to do so. The population in all of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, was somewhere around 50 million. All of Canada had about 500,000 people. Do you know how much forest there is in Canada? There's a theory that early man had widespread effects on the environment using purposeful burning, but even if that's true (it's hard to tell the difference between lightning strikes and purposeful burns), it hardly amounts to "manicured and well cared for woods". Unless you are willing to give beavers an equal designation.

justinator 10y ago
There's a lot of compelling theories in the book, 1491 [0] about how forests were modified in ways in which I elude to, and how the population of the Americas was much, much higher than just 50 million, and how the were civilization much earlier than what we had first thought. If we just take east coast of Maryland, where the author grew up, the first explorers talk about villages that interconnected across the coastline, Chestnut and walnut trees everywhere, and established hunting grounds. Burning was an immensely useful tool to do this. Everyone had a fire starter. Later on, early settlers saw something drastically different - a dying off population from diseases brought by Europeans that they had no defense towards. And that is why our estimates on the population of the Americas, and the level of which they modified the land could be really off. [0] https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...
- solipsism 10y ago
  "much, much higher"? In that book Mann argues that the higher counts are more likely to be right. 50 million is among the higher counts. The highest count reasonably argued for being just double that, so we're not talking about orders of magnitude difference. The Americas were a vast, mostly empty (of humans) land. Except near the coasts.

justinator 10y ago

There's a lot of compelling theories in the book, 1491 [0] about how forests were modified in ways in which I elude to, and how the population of the Americas was much, much higher than just 50 million, and how the were civilization much earlier than what we had first thought. If we just take east coast of Maryland, where the author grew up, the first explorers talk about villages that interconnected across the coastline, Chestnut and walnut trees everywhere, and established hunting grounds. Burning was an immensely useful tool to do this. Everyone had a fire starter. Later on, early settlers saw something drastically different - a dying off population from diseases brought by Europeans that they had no defense towards. And that is why our estimates on the population of the Americas, and the level of which they modified the land could be really off. [0] https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...

solipsism 10y ago
"much, much higher"? In that book Mann argues that the higher counts are more likely to be right. 50 million is among the higher counts. The highest count reasonably argued for being just double that, so we're not talking about orders of magnitude difference. The Americas were a vast, mostly empty (of humans) land. Except near the coasts.