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

The Ecological Impact of Native the Statesns in Eastern North AmericaShetler, in the book Seeds of Change Five Hundred Years Since Columbus, supports the fiction that the new-made world was an unspoiled paradise by stating that Native peck were transparent in the adorn, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their worldwas a world of barely perceptible human disturbances(Shetler 1991). Sale contends that the Indians had a merciful 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 nonion that the Native Americans were transparent or propitious to the landscape is an absurd over exaggeration. When in fact, twenty million innate people were hunting gathering, burning, tilling, and otherwise managing North America(Anderson 1991). It is not the design ing 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 mute before proceeding is that even though a landscape whitethorn appear green it is not in indicator of natural bionomics. It is the intention of this paper to show that the Native Americans had a significant rival on the ecology of the Eastern North American Landscape, which is unknown to many an(prenominal) scholars. Fossil al-Qurans 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 galactic mammals. Some people palpate that, there is evidence to suggest that rapacious hunting practice of the paleohunters in North and siemens America 12,000 years ago may suck up causedThe demise of the very animals they hunted (Powell 1987). The evidence Powell suggest s 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 change magnitude 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 passing like likely that man and large mammals did not co-evolve which ultimately resulted in the extinction of large mammals.