"Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."

(I posted the MacKinnon section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787)

Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife.

When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By the time they explored the continent, the population was mainly gone, far in advance.

So there's a strong theory that the incredible over-abundance of wildlife the Europeans saw was actually a huge ecological imbalance, as many animals had lost their natural (human) predators.

And that phenomena such as millions of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun overhead weren't "natural" at all, but actually severe ecological imbalance.

(This isn't to say, of course, that now we haven't swung way too far in the other direction. But just that the tales of abundance aren't necessarily a naturally balanced state either.)

Native Americans weren't a monolithic group, and the balance with wildlife is just a part of the noble savage myth, for most of the groups. Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

Notice that there isn't a 'noble industrialist' meme? I wonder why?

> before collapsing (and before Columbus)

In the alternate universe you come from, who was fighting Cortez?

They were referring to the arrival of Columbus as the watershed moment that signal the arrival of Europeans en masse to the Americas.

> Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

On a second reading it seems that GP had most likely meant that they were deforesting before Columbus, not that they had collpased before Columbus, but it's still strange to refer to getting conquered as a "collapse".

Closet racism. There is far more evidence that Europeans destroyed these cultures and ignored their advances, than there is proving this so-called myth.

See for example, the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

We are STILL uncovering major advances in these cultures today.

Other thank some claims about land management and herbal medicine, what were that not only more advanced in but FAR more advanced?

Ship building, metallurgy, literature, maths, chemistry, conflict management, law?

I am genuinely curious.

There is much to learn about oneself once you drop the prejudice.

I'm not suggesting we haven't "advanced" beyond them now, but I am suggesting that we may have overlooked something in our race to the moon, and their 40,000 year old tradition of unbroken oral tradition ..

Snark detected.

I am genuinely curious. [after all propagandists have prevented me from imagining, let alone knowing.]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

   Native Americans who lived in an 
   ecological balance with wildlife.

But those quotes are about a lot more than one iconic species. Overall, the picture is accurate.

80,000 years may be a blink in an eye in evolutionary terms but it does not take that long for a predator to come into an environment and become entrenched as the natural check on some other species.

I would say https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1111 for example of introduction of species

something like this https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/285705 for how dominance of predator works.

However not sure how well the Native Americans were actually keeping animals in check given the many species they have been shown to have helped bring to extinction.

That said not sure how long it would take from being a natural predator to being a keystone species.

One doesn't need to be someone's long time natural predator to have an impact

The fallacy that, IMO, we are falling into is (ironically) caused by scientific reductionism... the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. This doesn't work as well for the evidence types paleoanthropology has to work with.

Take Israel or Morocco as a comparative example. There were sapiens there before Neanderthals, but they are not thought to be ancestral to any modern people. The majority are not. This makes intuitive sense when thinking of species or subspecies (eg Neanderthals), but it works the same with populations.

Also, it's easy to think of ourselves in permanent "infinite growth" mide, where we colonise and dominate. But, recent years aside, humans bloomed and receded just like other species. Range expanding and contracting.

Just because a population is in the same place does not mean that it's ancestral. The first, second or eighteenth population may have no current ancestors... or none in that area.

As Dawkins puts it "descendants are common, ancestors are rare."

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep5-nightmares-of-indianapol...

Here is an interesting map of the historic and current grizzly bear ranges.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/historical-and-current-gri...

It is truly amazing how nearly completely we wiped the continent of wildlife. Many of our teams are named after the animals we wiped out. Florida Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, California Golden Bears, Michigan Wolverines, etc.

> Whales as far as the eye could see all day long.

The near extermination of whales along our shores changed geopolitics. One of the reasons why commodore perry "visited" japan was to open japanese ports to our whalers.

Nevertheless, is so sad that humans have effectively pushed animals outside of their habitats. Animals are smart enough to avoid humans, just as a deer is smart enough to avoid a wolf, but at some point the world is only so big.

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/994/254987

There are places still.