Indigenous Americans
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Indigenous Americans
To this day, social scientists have not been able to agree on how populous or culturally advanced the Americas had been before Europeans began to exert their influence in the region. This controversy, Mann points out to us in "1491," has been the source of fierce debate "since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496." In my personal experience, the conventional consensus has generally been that Indians, who migrated to the Americas thousands of years ago, lived in relatively small, primitive, tribes; and even though they had inhabited their environment for a long time, they had neither distorted or manipulated it in any way: It had been preserved in its 'wild' or natural state. Mann, on the other hand, discusses new evidence on the subject that - if accurate - would disprove many things traditionally believed to be true about Indian culture. Mann underscores the idea that there had been a much greater number of indigenous Americans than originally estimated; and they had probably lived in highly sophisticated cultures whose inhabitants manipulated the landscape and environment in ways that are complex beyond comprehension. Mann asserts that these new findings will have a profound effect on the world both environmentally and politically, affecting the way our watersheds, forests and endangered species are dealt with in the future.
This new way of viewing the Americas, asserts Mann, was greatly influenced by Henry Dobyn's research. In fact, the theories put forth in one of Dobyn's early publications, "Estimating Aboriginal ..." started the "culture wars" that are still going on today...