I wouldn’t make that assumption. Native populations plummeted in that time span. I expect land usage changed dramatically as well.
If you look at at map of estimated 1630 forest cover of the current US, it’s practically the whole of the country which now has enough rainfall (and terrain, altitude, etc) to have forests. It could only have been significantly more if the climate was a lot different in the 1490’s than 1630’s in the relatively arid regions of the western US believed to be largely treeless in 1630, as they are now and all times in between that Europeans know of.
So, even if one believes minority scientific opinion that the native population of North America was more than a few million people in 1492, tree cover in the present day US is estimated to have been about the natural maximum in 1630, and human intervention was unlikely to have made it greater than that in 1492.
Can we have a cite for this claim that present day tree cover is equivalent to the natural maximium in 1630?
You are looking at it arse backwards. Human intervention made it substantially *less *than the natural maximum in 1492. That is in contrast to your claim that it hadn’t changed much in the intervening ~150 years. We know that it had changed. A lot.
Hard to cover everything you mentioned. BTW, I’m not apt to give citations. This isnt a term paper.
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Yes, indian villages were mostly located along riverbanks or by bodies of water. Read Lewis and Clark. By a river you have fresh water, a source of transportation, and fresh fish.
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Buffalo certainly did follow nomadic patterns moving to where the best grazing was. If a single buffalo could eat say a half acre of grass a day, a 100,000 animal herd had to be constantly moving. Over time they learned where the water sources and best grazing was.
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On meat consumption. Again, I got that number from a book on Lewis and Clark.
Then you will discover that DOpers won’t “be apt” to believe a damn thing you say.
Believing random guys on the internet who can’t provide evidence for what they post isn’t wise. When what they say appears to be nonsense or outright impossible the smart money is that they don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
Someone talking about men eating 10 pounds of meat a day, village Indians not knowing how to farm and a herds of hundreds of thousands of Bison wandering Florida isn’t exactly credible.
The number of trees in the U.S. has been increasing since the 1940’s:
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Don’t used that lazy form of argument, please. Look up the map, familiarize yourself with general climate and land characteristics in what’s now the US, and see if you reach a different conclusion. The 1630 map shows forests pretty completely covering the area where trees naturally grow in large numbers (in the climate of the last several centuries at least), and not in plains and deserts of the West where they don’t. Cite something contradicting that if you can.
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There is no solid evidence that there was a much larger absolute number of native people in the present day US, not the Americas as a whole, in 1492 than 1630. We don’t know that at all. A minority of people who’ve studied it think so. Most think there were never more than a few million people in North America in pre-Columbian times. So it’s double speculation that the minority of much higher estimates are true, or that even if there were more than say 10 million people there any time before Columbus that they’d cut down a lot of forests. Keeping in mind for example that native civilizations (in the present day US) which left the most evidence of relatively advanced settlements, implying relatively more extensive changing of the natural environment in general, were in areas where there aren’t many natural forests in the climate of the last several centuries (the Southwest). So no, we don’t know that there were a lot less forests in 1492 than 1630, and there’s no solid basis to assume so.
And back to the original question about deer, it’s unlikely the original statement ‘more deer at the time of Columbus than now’ is based on assuming there were a lot less forest cover in the present day US in 1492 than the more or less natural max estimated to have existed in 1630.
Clarification of above. I didn’t say present day tree cover approximates that of 1630. Per the US Forest Service it’s now about 70% of what it was in 1630, having been somewhat lower when it bottomed out in the early 20th century. What I said was the 1630 estimate of forest cover can be seen on the map to include almost 100% cover of the regions east and slightly west of the Mississippi as well as Pacific Coast where forests naturally grow (in the climate of the last several centuries) and not much forest cover in the natural grasslands and deserts of the last few centuries, IOW the 1630 estimate seems to be that there were forests everywhere in the present day US where they naturally grow.
Now there’s a substantial area of agricultural land in the US which was forest in 1630, especially in the easterly parts of the Midwest, and to some extent still in the East. But the East is where forest cover has tended to increase in the last century or so as abandoned farm land went back to forest (anyone who knows the landscape of New York state and New England has come across evidence of previous farming, stone walls and such, inside second growth forests). And also some former forest land is developed as suburbs or cities, but that’s a lesser explanation than agriculture.
Then you probably shouldn’t post in GQ.
Not pheasants. Pheasants are a non-native species, introduced to the US in 1881.
There is a strong consensus that populations dramatically decreased after Old World contact began. And that means that lands that were formerly managed reverted to a more natural state.
Native Americans actively managed woodlands by using fire to maintain meadows. They knew that the game they hunted thrived in areas with a mixed patchwork of meadows and woods. So although they did not intensively farm vast acreage like European settlers eventually did, they still had a large impact on the forests. That impact was reversed when their population plummeted.
This point conflicts with the many articles I have read on this subject recently. Maybe you are a world-class expert on such matters but the research that I have read is as follows:
There is widespread consensus that European introduced diseases wiped out over 90% of the population of Native Americans between 1492 and the early 1600’s. That is one big reason European settlers were able to so easily populate the East Coast and other regions. The land wasn’t wild at all in many large areas. It had been carefully cultivated and shaped by the Native Americans, most of whom had only recently been wiped out by plagues in the rather recent past.
The early Spanish settlers introduced the diseases to the South and they propagated like crazy to almost everywhere in North America among trade routes from the late 1400’s to early 1600’s and beyond. The early English settlers didn’t understand what was going on and they were amazed at their fortune of finding massive amounts of pristine land already mostly set up for cultivation mostly free for the taking. In many cases, the actual Native American villages themselves were still there but abandoned.
Some of the largest Native American settlements weren’t in the Southwest. One of the absolute largest was Cahokia near modern day St. Louis. It peaked at over 40,000 people in the city itself and supported countless more along its trade routes. That large mound of dirt in the photo was once a pyramid and is larger than any pyramid in Egypt.
I can give you plenty of more cites but there will be a lot and I am not going to take the time unless people will read them.
Here is one good one for starters:
Excellent cite, Shagnasty. I enjoyed reading that. It’s a great review article; I highly recommend anyone interested in this topic to read the whole thing.
The article on the Cahokia suggest the city “died” a century or two before the advent of western diseases. Perhaps it was climate-related; after all, 1400 is about when the Greenland colony died off too, due to weather and isolation.
If the natives had died in droves of diseases brought by de Soto, then the natives of New France and New England would have tales of this happening in the not-too-distant past. Instead, the inhabitants of these areas seem to have died off about 50% at the arrival of the French, the English, the Dutch, and their diseases. Champlain arrived about 1600, less than 70 years after Cartier in 1534 and there appeared no shortage of locals. Ditto Plymouth Rock in 1620. From what I read of the French accounts, the advent of their diseases appears to have killed maybe half the local population.
When I look at the absolutely massive trees that are found in some urban or park settings, I wonder if there are any pristine forests that can give us an example what the forests on the American north-east would have looked like before the Europeans chopped them down. Supposedly the Iroquois and Hurons used slash-and-burn agriculture and moved every few years, but their villages were rather far apart, many were small, and much of the forest would have been untouched.
“The Pristine Myth” makes several good points. The appearance of a deep forest is heavily influenced by the fauna that we would nowadays have driven off, and the prevalence of underbrush fires that could have cleared the low bushes between the massive trunks without seriously injuring them.
For a population that supposedly experienced a massive collapse, the Iroquois Five nations seemed to be fairly solidly organized by the time European colonies were established.
(By the way, for a comprehensive book on the ecocide committed by the European invaders, particularly in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a good book is Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter”. )