Comment by monktastic1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monktastic1 | Hacker News Reader

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Reminds me of a quote from Charles Eisenstein. He cites The Once and Future World and then channels Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found:

"Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."

(I posted the MacKinnon section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787)

I'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading.

Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife.

When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By the time they explored the continent, the population was mainly gone, far in advance.

So there's a strong theory that the incredible over-abundance of wildlife the Europeans saw was actually a huge ecological imbalance, as many animals had lost their natural (human) predators.

And that phenomena such as millions of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun overhead weren't "natural" at all, but actually severe ecological imbalance.

(This isn't to say, of course, that now we haven't swung way too far in the other direction. But just that the tales of abundance aren't necessarily a naturally balanced state either.)

Native Americans arrived less than 80,000 years ago. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. They were not the natural predators.

I think the phrase natural predator just means the predator in the environment that keeps some other species in check.

80,000 years may be a blink in an eye in evolutionary terms but it does not take that long for a predator to come into an environment and become entrenched as the natural check on some other species.

I would say https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1111 for example of introduction of species

something like this https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/285705 for how dominance of predator works.

However not sure how well the Native Americans were actually keeping animals in check given the many species they have been shown to have helped bring to extinction.

That said not sure how long it would take from being a natural predator to being a keystone species.

@nroets, Humans (the Europeans in this case) made the Dodo bird extinct quite fast, closer to 80 years than 80 000.

One doesn't need to be someone's long time natural predator to have an impact

I believe the accepted period is around 15,000 years ago, possibly slightly earlier.

Those dates are in flux recently. As is the pattern in discoveries of our very ancient history... the story gets more complicated as we go.

The fallacy that, IMO, we are falling into is (ironically) caused by scientific reductionism... the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. This doesn't work as well for the evidence types paleoanthropology has to work with.

With the advent of ancient DNA, we now have a second, relatively precise type of evidence also pointing at, IIRC, 15-20k years ago as when the initial peopling of the Americas took place.

Initial peopling, or oldest known genetic ancestors of current individuals.

Take Israel or Morocco as a comparative example. There were sapiens there before Neanderthals, but they are not thought to be ancestral to any modern people. The majority are not. This makes intuitive sense when thinking of species or subspecies (eg Neanderthals), but it works the same with populations.

Also, it's easy to think of ourselves in permanent "infinite growth" mide, where we colonise and dominate. But, recent years aside, humans bloomed and receded just like other species. Range expanding and contracting.

Just because a population is in the same place does not mean that it's ancestral. The first, second or eighteenth population may have no current ancestors... or none in that area.

As Dawkins puts it "descendants are common, ancestors are rare."

perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but humans are believed to have hunted many, many animals to extinction on the American content millennia before the Europeans got here. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010608081621.h...

> the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife

Native Americans weren't a monolithic group, and the balance with wildlife is just a part of the noble savage myth, for most of the groups. Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

>noble savage myth

Closet racism. There is far more evidence that Europeans destroyed these cultures and ignored their advances, than there is proving this so-called myth.

See for example, the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

We are STILL uncovering major advances in these cultures today.

> … the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

Other thank some claims about land management and herbal medicine, what were that not only more advanced in but FAR more advanced?

Ship building, metallurgy, literature, maths, chemistry, conflict management, law?

I am genuinely curious.

Surely its easier to tell us all what the advancements were than downvote me?

I am genuinely curious. [after all propagandists have prevented me from imagining, let alone knowing.]

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. Flamewar dross and empty complaints about downvoting are both off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oldest continually running mining operation of mankind. Longest running school. A Hippocratic oath before Europeans genocided them. Forms of agriculture which literally guaranteed a well-fed populace. An understanding of antiseptic materials, and even micro-biology, in an age of European miasma theory and blood-letting.

There is much to learn about oneself once you drop the prejudice.

I'm not suggesting we haven't "advanced" beyond them now, but I am suggesting that we may have overlooked something in our race to the moon, and their 40,000 year old tradition of unbroken oral tradition ..

I'm sure Europeans would have adopted any advances of great value to them, just like they adopted a lot of crops from the new world.

In fact, Europeans did - eventually - catch up with the Australian FNP's innate knowledge of healing. They had a form of resilient Hippocratic oath for literally thousands of years before us, for example. An understanding of antiseptics in a European age of miasma theory. And so on ..

> Aztec

> before collapsing (and before Columbus)

In the alternate universe you come from, who was fighting Cortez?

Unsure why this is downvoted. Toltec empire ended around 1200 AD. Mayans... hard to define, like the Rome technically even still around. The Aztec Empire was right there when the conquistadors showed up.

They weren't saying the Aztecs weren't there. They were saying the Aztecs had massively deforested areas prior to the arrival of Europeans.

They weren't referring to Columbus as the person who conquered South/Central America (there were quite a few conquistadors involved there... not just Cortez).

They were referring to the arrival of Columbus as the watershed moment that signal the arrival of Europeans en masse to the Americas.

I'm not saying they were referring to Columbus as the person who conquered Central America. I was amused by GP's insinuation that the Aztecs had somehow collapsed before Columbus.

> Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

On a second reading it seems that GP had most likely meant that they were deforesting before Columbus, not that they had collpased before Columbus, but it's still strange to refer to getting conquered as a "collapse".

It might be seen as self serving for western industrialists to promote the noble savage idea as 'myth.'

Notice that there isn't a 'noble industrialist' meme? I wonder why?

It's possible that there was a temporary bloom in bison and/or a few other species during the formative period of American inland exploration. The populations were hunted out so quick after this that it's hard to know how temporary this was.. if it happened at all.

But those quotes are about a lot more than one iconic species. Overall, the picture is accurate.

   Native Americans who lived in an 
   ecological balance with wildlife.

One of the competing explanations for the disappearance of the woolly mammoth in North America about 10k years ago is that they were hunted to extinction. Other explanations make hunting a co-factor.

I find the state of the environment so shockingly depressing, it's incredible. What would I give to see the world like that?

Well, you’d have to give billions of lives.

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