CompuServe Messages

Given the same levels of agriculture and technology, the AmerInd civilizations did about the same damage here as Europeans did during comparable periods. It was only from the 1500s on that Europeans learned and showed how to REALLY rape a landscape. However, virtually all modern American archaeology is coming to the conclusions that I stated in my previous message. The Anasazi were particularly brutal with the land and most of it never did recover to this day. The Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas also considered the land something given to them by the gods to use and use up. Short of the Sahara, which was mostly man-made and man-caused, you do not see this strip and leech the land, build a city until you do, then leave and do the same thing again pattern anywhere else that I know of. We have also now found strong evidence that the flood of AmerInds from Asia caused massive extinctions of native creatures up to and including the North American mammoth, possibly in a scale unmatched until this century. Totally romanticizing early AmerInd civilizations is as wrong as painting them as ignorant savages was. What they did was most impressive, but this concept of them as loving caretakers of the land is nonsense. Sure, you can always find a nation that you can point to as good guys; remember, what we call "tribes" were really COUNTRIES of America, as distinct in languages, cultures, and all that goes with it and most of them didn't like each other any more than ancient European, Asian, and African civilizations did. Their patterns are quite similar to cultural nations of the rest of the world. The main reason that so many educated people are so down on political correctness is that pcs believe that if the evidence contradicts the ideals, ignore or trash the evidence. The only people who MIGHT–MIGHT–be indigineous to North America are the Eskimos. Otherwise we are talking about the first waves of New World immigration.