Book Review

1491, by Charles C. Mann

The subtitle is 'New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus', which covers it. Lots of information I'd never seen before; some fairly newly discovered, some old but either ignored or covered over in the past.

Short version,
1. The populations of the various tribes and nations were a lot higher than previously accepted,
2. They messed with arranging the land a lot more than some thought possible and some(read 'enviroweenies') want to believe/admit,
3. They were a lot more advanced in some ways that previously known/accepted; in modifying territory to suit them, in textiles and pottery among others.

It covers too much to try and excerpt the whole thing, I'd leave too much out. I will cover some things, though. Such as:

1. The fact that Indian populations were hammered incredibly hard by diseases brought over by Europeans has been known; generally I don't think the full extent over all the Americas was realized. In some areas they're looking at death rates, from disease and follow-on problems, of as much as 90%. So high not just because of no acquired immunity by the people hit, but by a recently discovered immune system liability. Human Leukocyte Antigens are a big part of the immune system, allowing cells to 'recognize' an intruder and take action. Believed to be because they developed from a relatively restricted gene pool, Indians studied show a much lower number of types, no more than about 17 main classes compared to European populations having at least thirty-five main classes. So not only did they not have any previous immunity to the diseases, their systems were not as able to recognize and fight a new disease organism(no, this is not an in-depth analysis, I'm skimming it).

2. In the case of the Spanish in particular, one of the biggest problems was pigs. Their expeditions took them along not only on shipboard, but on land expeditions as walking meat supplies. And what's the species we still have lots of problems with because diseases often go from animal/bird, through this species, to us? Pigs. So while in the original situation a disease might have burned through the expedition and them been noninfectious when they came in contact with a new people, the pigs may still have been carrying it in infectious form. And some went wild, adding both a new species and new disease organisms to the environment.
As a side note, apparently zoonotic diseases were fairly rare in the Americas, the Indians having few domesticated animals. Mann brings up the scary thought, what if they had been more common in the Americas? The Indians would have had a somewhat better immune system, probably, and a much wider range of infectious diseases, which the Europeans would have been exposed to and taken back to Europe. What if some of those organisms had hit Europe like smallpox and such hit the Americas?

3. Much of what was written of as 'virgin forest' and such was no such thing; the various tribes and nations had been modifying the earth to suit them for thousands of years. By burning to clear land, by planting crops that suited them, by diverting streams and rivers and so on. To quote: "Planting their orchards for millenia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings... In Ka'apor-managed forests, according to Balee's plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balee cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the non-flooded Amazon forest was "anthropogenic"- directly or indirectly created by humans.
Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. "I basically think it's all human created" Clement told me. (page 305)

Lots of information, well worth reading. He also notes that the laws and attitudes of the tribes had a definate effect on the settlers, especially in North America, quoting many comments of admiration by our founders. And I'll throw in a couple of things he notes from, let's say, 'less impressed' sorts:
"The savage does not know what it is to obey," complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670's. Indians "think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted," the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty year later.
"There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America," another Jesuit unhappily observed. "All the barbarians have the law of wild asses- they are born, live and die in a liberty without restrain; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit."(page 334)

Ah, America; the natives have been pissing off the French from the very beginning.