The sociologist Gerhard Lenski wrote about the "great natural experiment" that occurred when the first Americans entered this land mass, perhaps via a route that closed only a few hundred years later. This allowed for the separate evolution of two sets of human civilizations across thousands of years. The migration to the "New World" occurred before the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution.
The peoples of the two land masses were at about the same evolutionary stage, except that the first Americans had no horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, camels, donkeys, buffaloes, or other beasts of burden or food with which to exchange diseases. The New World's bison could not be tamed, and llamas and their smaller relatives could not carry human weight.
In
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann speculates on what might have been had the philosophical, religious, artistic, and technological traditions of the peoples of the two land masses been allowed to cross-fertilize each other. Just the Inka skill with textiles would have been an amazing technological contribution. Their woven armor was just a step below our early "bullet-proof" vests. I recommend this book as an eye-opener even if Mann goes a bit overboard (as some of his critics content).
Quote:
Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!
Here and there we see clues to what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European languages. British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn’t wash off in the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expanding them and in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague. European surrealists came across this colorful new art in the first years of the twentieth century. As artists will, they stole everything they could, transfiguring the images further. Their interest helped a new generation of indigenous artists to explore new themes.
Now envision this kind of fertile back-and-forth happening in a hundred ways with a hundred cultures—the gifts from four centuries of intellectual exchange. One can hardly imagine anything more valuable. Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.
Edit: Alfred W. Crosby, author of
Ecological Imperialism and
The Columbian Exchange, Professor Emeritus of Geography, American Studies and History, University of Texas:
Quote:
If you accept that there were tens of millions of people in the Americas in 1492, the common belief among the experts today, then you cannot reject what Charles Mann has to say. We all have been taught what the human species gained by the European invasion of the Americas. Now we have to consider what we, all of us, lost.
Mann also tells the
story of how in 1824 King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu of Hawaii went to London and died of the measles, a disease that was to become epidemic in Hawaii in 1848. The more that I read about it, the more inclined I am to think that Europe conquered much of the world not principally by guns and steel but by germs. Diamond is partly right.
Mann, Charles C. (2006-10-10).
1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Kindle Locations 2588-2615). Random House, Inc. Kindle Edition.
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I, for one, have no problem being led by a 3500 year old Pharaoh who was trained by space aliens on a distant star.
