The Ecological Impact of Native Americans in Eastern North America :: American America History

The Ecological Impact of Native Americans in Eastern North America Shetler, in the book Seeds of Change: Five Hundred Years Since Columbus, supports the myth that the new world was an unspoiled paradise by stating that " Native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world†¦was a world of barely perceptible human disturbances"(Shetler 1991). Sale contends that the Indians had a benign effect and refering to them as the "Ecological Indian".(Sale 1990) These are fine examples of the new way of portraying the Native Americans as "Noble Savages". There is no question that the Europeans had a more obvious influence on the landscape than the American Indian, but the notion that the Native Americans were "transparent" or "benign" to the landscape is an absurd over exaggeration. When in fact, "twenty million indigenous people were hunting gathering, burning, tilling, and otherwise managing North America"(Anderson 1991). It is not the intention of this paper to claim the American Indians did more harm to the environment than the European Settlers, but one important notion that must be understood before proceeding is that "even though a landscape may appear green it is not in indicator of natural ecology". It is the intention of this paper to show that the Native Americans had a significant impact on the ecology of the Eastern North American Landscape, which is unknown to many scholars. Fossil records from 12,000 years ago show the appearance of the Large Mammals followed by Paleoindian in Eastern North America. Another piece of the fossil record shows that the appearance of Paleoindian brought about the disappearance of the large mammals. Some people feel that, "there is evidence to suggest that rapacious hunting practice of the paleohunters in North and South America 12,000 years ago may have caused†¦The demise of the very animals they hunted" (Powell 1987). The evidence Powell suggests is that the extinction of a large mammal is usually followed by the appearance of humans in the fossil record. This coincidence is not only seen in the fossil records of North and South America but Europe and Asia as well. Powell shows that as human populations increased local extinctions of large mammals occurred. This was probably due to the fact that there were not many predators that could hunt the large mammals except man. For this reason it is also highly like likely tha t man and large mammals did not co-evolve which ultimately resulted in the extinction of large mammals.