The initial peopling of the Americas, when, by whom, and how, has been controversial (to put it mildly) for many years, starting back in the 1920s with the discovery of the first association of human artifacts, Folsom points, with extinct Pleistocene bison, at Folsom, NM. The notion that Clovis has a European origin is a minority opinion in an area of research that is rife with dissenting concepts and theories. There is mounting evidence, including DNA work, that Clovis was not the first and that the first humans probably entered North America through the Bering land bridge. Wikipedia has a good summary that doesn't take sides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture

We do know from the records of the first English colonists that the Americas resembled a vast abandoned park. Millions of acres of forest had been burned to create grasslands and there was evidence of a lot denser population in the past. We know too that in the lower portion of N America and in Central/South America there were cities whos size rivalled or surpassed any city in Europe.

It seems that the aboriginals of the Americas were ill equipped to deal with foreign diseases. Remember that Europeans had a much more diverse ethnic population and had contact with Africa, Asia and Asia Minor. Even so plagues of the day killed half their population. The native Americans suffered far worse mortality once their "virginal" immune systems were faced with new bacteria.

Not sure how we got to Clovis Culture… But do you think Pacal the Great was an ancient pilot of alien rockets?

Man! Talk about thread drift! Pacal has steered us far off course.....

Hikermor - I did see an article some time in the last couple of years giving a theory that at one time in ancient America the population of Native Americans was substantially higher than previously thought. I do not know whether this idea is widely accepted, and I also don't know if it was predominantly in the East, or some other part of the country. But the article seemed to imply a much larger Indian population, and then for some reason many people died. I wish I'd had the time to read it in more detail.

Montanero points out an interesting fact - that we do know there were Indian populations much earlier in time who were wiped out, and some of their societies were quite sophisticated. so it does seem to be true that we don't know everything about the centuries before europeans arrived on the continent.

as for Pacal the Great - he's not on my radar (or rocketship). don't know the guy. i'll look him up some time.

Pete2

That is absolutely true. Due to a lot of work,and a lot of good fortune, we know much more than we did, but basically we are just perceiving how much we don't know.

Absolutely Hikermor. The more we learn, the more we learn that we don't know. All theories are controversial at first, and they all need good hard evidence to prove them.

It is not clear that there ever was a course involved. The initial post was ambiguous in terminology and theme, and subsequent attempts at clarification, including my own contributions, resulted in pyramiding obfuscation. All good fun fun, of course, and confirmation of Wittgenstein's assertion that many important question cannot be answered, and moreover cannot be asked due to semantic confusion.

OTOH, the baseline assumption of this site is that civilization is an unreliable provider of survival needs in the short term, and in the longer term, and that individuals should equip themselves to cope with that fact. Artificiality is not the issue, reliability is, and civilization lacks reliability.

Yes, if not artificial, certainly unreliable.

A great introduction to the evidence of widespread pre-Columbian civilizations in North Central and South America is 1491 by Charles C. Mann.

You can also Google/Bing 1491 and read up on the general topic, as a popular science author Mann has been published everywhere including Science and The Atlantic Monthly. Its not Mann's theory at stake, he reports in an accessible way on the findings of numerous archaeologists anthropologists and other scientific types. Most of the science has been distilled down to what they can agree to, which is fascinating. 1491 is full of revelations and insights, which like most good science is bound and intended to be revised by additional good science to come. Check it out, you'll love it.

I think the current theory on the diseases that decimated most of the American societies at first contact with Euros was that it was mostly smallpox, although it included almost anything the early Euros brought along even those they didn't understand - diphtheria, typhus, influenza and smallpox and other pox were all detected at epidemic levels in early 1500s Hispaniola and elsewhere in the Americas. Records documented extreme fatalities among natives, wiping them out. Remember also, the Euros brought new animal species that carried diseases with little if any resistance among natives. They didn't have any immune resistance, so they were wiped out by things the Euros were mostly immune to and lived with for generations. Diseases spread far in advance of the march of the De Soto and the explorations of others. This accounts for the largely vacant park-like atmosphere early North American settlers and explorers observed in the early 1600s but which was quite grown over by the time of greater settlement.

The debate of how many natives and civilizations occupied the Americas goes on, last I heard as many as 90 to 115 million, which would out pace Europe by a bit, although this number continues to be revised and debated. At least 25-30 million in the Mexican highlands, that's a lock. In general though, with additional discoveries of advanced societies in South and Central America, the range of estimates goes up, not down. Fascinating stuff!

Related to this is the whole theory, when were the Americas first settled. Most scientists feel that it was by the Clovis people about ~12,000 years ago. Recent discoveries in caves in Oregon however have pushed that back to at least 13,000 (and additional archaeological evidence in Chile etc), an important difference as it would point to a source other than the land bridge that wasn't there for entry across what's now Canada. So natives came from someplace else, TBD. As is its function, science resists new evidence and supports the Clovis findings until they are superseded. There should be no holy cows in science, although predictably there will be scientists who can't keep from protecting a lifetime of theory and work - their life's work. I think we'll see a whole new theory of American population in 20 years or so, created by folks looking for evidence in places we never thought of.

1491 is one of the better books of I've ever read - its right up there with revelations about plate tectonics in the 1970-80s (who knew) and hot blooded dinosaurs around the same time. It goes to show you never knew everything about what went on before or what goes on around you.