This is not The BBQ Pit.
'Nuff said?
Evidently you missed my earlier post about corn.
Strawberries, though, are Old World fruits – they had them before the European discovery of America (although there are evidently New World varieties, and they’ve been bred with Old World forms)
I was in the wrong to conflate the Arthurian characterization of Percival as a Fool with our Guest.
But his answer left out the more offensive part of his previous post (the part others had called him on):
Several of those seems to be usable in their wild versions, thus 1500 Europeans *may *well have found them, used them in their wild state, then cultivated them. Strawberries, chiles, potatoes, vanilla, etc. But yes, certainly not corn, europeans already had plenty of grains and the wild progenitor of maize is hardly recognizable.
This is something of great debate. First we don’t know exactly when the extinctions came about. Nor do we know exactly when humans arrived- there are some sparse indications it might well have been much earlier.
Wiki "The major objections to the theory are as follows:
In predator-prey models it is unlikely that predators could over-hunt their prey since predators need their prey as food to sustain life and reproduce.[23]. …
There is no archeological evidence that megafauna other than mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres and bison were hunted. …
A small number of animals that were hunted, such as a single species of bison, did not go extinct. This cannot be explained by proposing that surviving bison in North America were recent Eurasian immigrants that were familiar with human hunting practices, since Bison first appeared in North America approximately 240,000 years ago [5][6][7] and then evolved into living bison[8][25]. Bison at the end of the Pleistocene were thus likely to have been almost as naive as their native North American megafaunal companions…
Eurasian Pleistocene megafauna went extinct in roughly same time period despite having a much longer time to adapt to hunting pressure by humans…
Eugene S. Hunn, President of the Society of Ethnobiology, offers a dissenting view. He points out that the birthrate in hunter-gatherer societies is generally too low, that too much effort is involved in the bringing down of a large animal by a hunting party, and that in order for hunter-gatherers to have brought about the extinction of megafauna simply by hunting them to death, an extraordinary amount of meat would have had to have been wasted.[26] It is possible that those who advocate the overkill hypothesis simply have not considered the differences in outlook between typical forager (hunter-gatherer) cultures and the present-day industrial cultures which exist in modernized human societies; waste may be tolerated and even encouraged in the latter, but is not so much in the former. It may be noted that in relatively recent human history, for instance, the Lakota of North America were known to take only as much bison as they could use, and they used virtually the whole animal—this despite having access to herds numbering in the millions.[27]…
The hypothesis that the Clovis culture represented the first humans to arrive in the New World has been disputed recently. "
I did a lot of cutting there.
"*Climate change hypothesis
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when scientists first realized that there had been glacial and interglacial ages, and that they were somehow associated with the prevalence or disappearance of certain animals, they surmised that the termination of the Pleistocene ice age might be an explanation for the extinctions.
Critics object that since there were multiple glacial advances and withdrawals in the evolutionary history of many of the megafauna, it is rather implausible that only after the last glacial would there be such extinctions. However, this criticism is rejected by a recent study indicating that terminal Pleistocene megafaunal community composition may have differed markedly from faunas present during earlier interglacials, particularly with respect to the great abundance and geographic extent of Pleistocene Bison at the end of the epoch[30]. This suggests that the survival of megafaunal populations during earlier interglacials is essentially irrelevant to the terminal Pleistocene extinction event, because bison were not present in similar abundance during any of the earlier interglacials."*
Another few arguments against the “overkill hypothesis”:
In Europe, there are many Mammoth kill sites, even in two cases with hundreds of mammoths butchered and the bones laid out in sorted piles. In North America, there are maybe a dozen kill sites, most with 1 or 2 animals. Even the originator of the Overkill Hypothesis agreed there was *no archealogical evidence *for his hypothesis. In other words, other than a mere coincidence in timing- a coincidence that might not be factual- there is NO evidence at all of the Overkill hypothesis.
Next- even with guns and 10000X the population, modern humans have not succeeded in actually making extinct more than couple of large, successful large mammal species. So, since 1500, the number of large, successful land mammal species we have eliminated can be counted on the fingers of one hand, whereas the Megafauna kill wiped out more than 12 GENERA.
It is also to be noted that the same climate change that might have caused the extinctions is likely the same climate change that allowed humans to arrive, so of course the time periods seem close together.
Of course it was smoked in the Old World. Specifically, Indians called it “Drinking smoke”(dhumrapana ), and it was passed down to Eastern Africa by the 13th C.
I suspect that the ecology of N. America would be totally different-New England would have been covered by dense forests-not the park-like land that the Pilgrims found. The Great Plains would have been forested, instead of grasslands.
The reason was of course the activity of the Native Americans-they burned large sections of forest, to open up the land and provide foraging places for game animals.
The huge herds of buffalo were the result of land modification …no big herds of bison could live in dense forests.
So, we owe a lot to the Native Americans.
No, it’s my dogs name you idiot! Everyone on SD knows my dogs name is Percy and Perciful is his nickname.
So put that in your peace pipe and smoke it. 
Darn, I didn’t know! Ignorance fought.
Cleveland baseball team? The Sparrows.
I doubt the nearly treeless Great Plains were man made. Naturally occurring fires met with almost no natural barriers like rivers and mountain ranges.
As far as the mass extinction of the the megafauna, Jared Diamond estutely pointed out that those species had thrived though at least a dozen periods of climate change just as severe.
Without the tribes of the Old West, I think sodbusters would have thrived much more so than cattle outfits. As soon as the steel plow was invented, land grabs would have been massive. Though with those vast stretches of the world’s greatest farmland unoccupied, who knows if the Louisiana Purchase would have ever taken place.
Steamers, clearly.
What if: Total absence of Native Americans?
Think of all the geographical places that would have to be named.
From Alaska and Canada to Chile.
From Tuktoyaktuk to Ushuaia.
The Lone Ranger and Bob.
Maybe people of Norse descent would have been the North American locals by the time the continental Europeans got there.
- hurk *
The colonial American notion of liberty differed from the European notion of it because of their observation of Indians and their lifestyle. The American Revolution either wouldn’t have happened, or it would have had a very different character. The Crown’s taxation on the colonies was in large part justified by the need for British troops to protect frontiersmen from Indians, especially in light of the French and Indian War; the French, with no Indians to ally with, might have focused their manpower on the other side of the Atlantic for the Seven Years’ War.