Another leftist myth degraded
Leftists = traitors
over 10,000 years ago [see Kennewick Man] the Oriental-origin natives
who came after) Natives lived in "harmony" with nature? Think again.
Man is man.
-Rich
Research shatters utopian myth, finds Indians decimated bird
"The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface of
every bay ? in flocks of millions?. When disturbed, they arose to
fly. The sound of their wings was like that of distant thunder."
When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early
1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer,
marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered. Since then, people
assumed such faunal wealth represented California's natural condition
? a product of Native Americans' living in harmony with the wildlife
and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern
environmental damage.
That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah
archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years ? from 1997 to 2004
? painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient
Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. He
determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn't possible, at
least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human
bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years.
Broughton concluded that California wasn't always a lush Eden before
settlers arrived. Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native
people hunted some species to local extinction, and wildlife returned
to "fabulous abundances" only after European diseases decimated Indian
populations starting in the 1500s.
Broughton's study of bird bones, published in Ornithological
Monographs, mirrors earlier research in which he found that fish such
as sturgeon, mammals such as elk, and other wildlife also sustained
significant population declines at the hands of ancient Indian hunters.
Biologists long assumed that the abundant wildlife in California some
200 years ago had existed for thousands of years ? an assumption
"that is ultimately used to make decisions about how to manage and
conserve threatened or endangered species," says Broughton, an
associate professor of anthropology.
"Since European discovery, California has been viewed by scholars and
scientists, as well as the general public ? as a kind of utopia or a
land of milk and honey, a super-rich natural environment," he says.
"This perception has long colored anthropological research on the
state's native peoples. The harvesting methods and strategies of native
peoples have been suggested to have promoted the apparent
superabundance of wildlife, and have been proposed as models for the
management of wilderness areas and national parks today."
Broughton says his study challenges "a common perception about ancient
Native Americans as healthy, happy people living in harmony with the
environment. That clearly was not always the case. Depending on when
and where you look back in time, native peoples were either living in
harmony with nature or eating their way through a vast array of
large-sized, attractive prey species."
The study may have broader implications. Broughton speculates that
"utopian perceptions" of a pristine California teeming with wildlife
"probably even influence how Californians view themselves, and how the
world views the Golden State. The dream world of Disneyland, the
glamour and glimmer of Hollywood, the Baywatch fun-in-the-sun culture
? all of this may trace a link to early historic descriptions of the
land that now appear to be worlds apart from pre-European conditions."
Himself a product of sunny California, Broughton grew up in rural
Camarillo in the southern part of the state, "collecting butterflies,
watching birds, and skinning skunks."
While earning bachelor's and master's degrees at California State
University, Chico, he studied bones from archaeological sites in
California's Sacramento Valley and began to recognize that early
natives had a strong impact on elk, deer, and sturgeon ? "anything
big and juicy," he says.
For his doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington,
Broughton analyzed fish and mammal bones taken from the Emeryville
shellmound, an ancient Indian site on the east shore of San Francisco
Bay between Oakland and Berkeley.
About 2,600 years ago, California's native people started living on the
site and using it to dump residential waste such as shellfish remnants,
bones, soil, rocks, ash and charcoal, and artifacts such as stone
tools. The mound slowly grew until it was more than 30 feet tall, as
long as three football fields, and as wide as the length of one
football field. Then, in the 1800s, the top layers were flattened to
make way for a dance pavilion, eliminating debris from recent
centuries. What was left was a record of refuse containing the kinds of
things native Californians hunted and ate from 2,600 to 700 years ago.
Emeryville was the largest of some 425 shellmounds identified along San
Francisco Bay by 1900. It was made up of distinct layers, which allowed
dating of its bones. In 1902, 1906, and 1924, scientists excavated
thousands from the shellmound, recording the layer in which each bone
was found. The shellmound then was destroyed by a steam shovel to make
way for a paint factory, which was razed in the 1990s and replaced by
retail stores. The shellmound bones were stored for decades at the
Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of
California, Berkeley.
After finishing his dissertation on Emeryville mammal and fish bones,
Broughton joined the University of Utah faculty in 1995. Two years
later, he started examining the Hearst Museum's bird bones from the
shellmound, alternating between that project and other research during
the next seven years.
Analyzing 5,736 bones was a labor of love for him. "It's fun and
relaxing," Broughton says. "It's a real challenge when you've got a
broken bird bone and it could be any of 100 species. It may take hours
or a day to identify a single bone. So you can imagine the excitement
when you finally nail it."
To identify the shellmound bones, Broughton painstakingly compared them
with bird bones kept in the University of Utah's Zooarchaeology
Laboratory, which includes specimens from numerous sources, ranging
from road kill to victims of Alaska's Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill.
Broughton found that the Hearst Museum's bones represented 64 species:
45 species of waterbirds, including ducks, geese, cormorants, and
shorebirds; 15 species of raptors such as red-tailed hawks and bald
eagles; and two species each from the groups that include grouse and
quail, and crows and ravens. In terms of the number of specimens,
waterbirds were most abundant, particularly ducks, geese, and
cormorants.
By analyzing the relative abundances of the birds, Broughton showed
that the bird population diminished throughout the entire 1,900-year
period represented by the shellmound. Species with the most significant
population reductions were those most attractive to hunters: large
birds and birds that lived closer to humans. Among waterfowl, large
geese on land and in marshes declined sooner than smaller geese and
ducks, but as the supply of large geese waned, an increasing number of
small geese and ducks from estuaries were hunted and their bones dumped
in the shellmound.
As nearby food sources diminished, native peoples increasingly hunted
birds at greater distances--particularly cormorant chicks on island
breeding colonies--and depleted their populations. The bones also show
increased hunting over time of sea ducks, found only in open water and
on the outer coast, as duck populations lessened on land and in
marshes. After depleting larger shorebirds ? marbled godwits,
long-billed curlews, and whimbrels ? natives then hunted smaller
shorebirds such as sandpipers.
Broughton's conclusion that hunting by native peoples depressed bird
populations came only after he rejected possible alternative causes,
such as changes in prehistoric climate and reductions in bird habitat.
For example, the decline in cormorants might have been caused by the
climate disruption known as El Ni?o. If true, the species most
affected should be Brandt's and pelagic cormorants, which depend on
food in ocean currents altered by El Ni?o. Instead, the population
decline was most pronounced in double-crested cormorants, which lived
closer to Indian hunters.
Broughton believes the Bay Area harbored a prehistoric native
population of 50,000 to 150,000 before Europeans arrived in the 1500s.
He believes that birds and other wildlife rebounded only after early
European explorers came into contact with natives, infecting them with
fatal diseases such as smallpox, malaria, and influenza and killing off
as much as 90 percent of the Indian population.
As a result, hunting pressure diminished, and by the mid-1800s, geese
and ducks "were so abundant you could kill them with a club or stick,"
he says.
Until Broughton's study, "the general consensus was that pre-European
humans living in North America had little or no effect on continental
wildlife populations," says a commentary by John Faaborg, editor of
Ornithological Monographs and a wildlife biology professor at the
University of Missouri-Columbia.
Except for "special cases" of ancient natives decimating bird
populations on islands ? such as Hawaii 1,000 years ago ? many
scientists view "negative effects on bird populations as a modern
phenomenon, one that came along with burgeoning populations virtually
throughout the globe," he adds.
But now, Faaborg writes, "We need to reconsider our impressions about
human impacts on bird populations in the distant past. Jack Broughton
makes an excellent case that native peoples living in the San Francisco
Bay area harvested enough birds to deplete populations and even cause
some local extinction, perhaps as long as 2,000 years ago."
While bird researchers emphasize human-caused environmental damage when
discussing modern loss of birds, they often "do not consider that
similar processes may have been occurring for thousands of years,"
Broughton concludes. Although visitors in the 1700s and early 1800s
"witnessed an astonishing abundance of wildlife, the region had been
characterized by human-induced faunal poverty only decades before and
would nearly return to that condition with the wave of human consumers
that came with the Gold Rush."
Source: University of Utah
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Joe S.
"Leftists = traitors" <rande...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1139872143....@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
You overlooked the part that said ". . . local extinction . . . " Which
means that in one small region, there may be no or few of a certain species,
but, outside that region the species was abundant.
Not only can you not read, you can't comprehend what you read. If you can
read it.
Leftists = traitors
Island.
ZenIsWhen
> Ah, the "noble savage" defender! Read up on what happened at Easter
> Island.
I didn't know American indians lived there!?!?!?!