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Originally Posted by jbgusa
The bolded part, I believe, has a kernel of truth since I have read this elsewhere.
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The fact that you read it elsewhere does not make it true. It just means you read the same lie proffered by another somewhere else.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
The difference between the bolded part above and the bolded part below is that the depopulation of Europe did not cause any reversion of large areas to wilderness whereas the Amerindians' population reduction did.
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That's false. Large areas did revert to wilderness.
What's more, you're oblivious to the Asiatic Plague that swept through the Roman Empire.
At least 25% of the population died. 100s of villages were left depopulated with no survivors. Those accounts were recorded by the governors from different regions.
If you want to know how massive the depopulation was, there are written accounts of legion units being attacked by packs of bears. In one account, a century -- they weren't standardized but typically 90-120 men -- had only 16 survivors.
Well, technically, there were more survivors, but there's no way the 16 survivors -- some of whom may have been injured but ambulatory -- could carry 40-60 badly mauled comrades 10-20 miles to what? An aid station? They left them there to die.
There are 2 written accounts of legion units being attacked by huge packs of wolves. They fared better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
Their fires stopped, allowing forest to return to areas such as Kentucky and other areas.
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That is nothing short of silly.
In the first place, the reason the 1st Roanoke, Virginia colony failed is because the Little Ice Age already was.
In the second place, the reason the 2nd Roanoke Colony failed was the same reason the 1st Roanoke Colony failed and that is they couldn't grow anything because of the Little Ice Age.
Finally, the reason the 3rd Roanoke Colony failed and disappeared was it suffered the same fate as the first 2 colonies.
The Little Ice Age was already in play circa 1550. It peaked about 1680. The 100+ New England colonies, and yes, there were more than 100 colonies in New England enjoying near-famine conditions and they merged into a single colony called the Dominion around 1685 due to that and events taking place in England.
The Dominion was short-lived and more or less broke up almost into the "original" colonies of the "original 13 colonies" (snicker). There were actually more than 200 colonies and Carolina was a single colony before it had a civil war and broke into North and South Carolina and then merged back into a single colony before splitting into 2 colonies again.
That's right, you're supposed to believe we were all one big happy family even that couldn't be farther from the truth.
The point being no one had penetrated into North America so there was no massive die-off in North America.
The actual first permanent colony was in Jamestown, Virginia. Plymouth gets all the love because Plymouth is in the north and the North won the civil war so Jamestown being the South is down-played or out-right ignored.
The first official act of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower was not the Mayflower Compact. It was a mutual defense treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Tribe.
If the Narragansett attacked the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims would come to the aid of the Wampanoag and if the Narragansett attacked the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag would come to their aid.
What happened to the Narragansett and Wampanoag? Nothing. They weren't decimated by smallpox and neither was any tribe in the whole of the New England area.
The tribes in the New England and Atlantic Coast areas were largely settled, meaning they were not nomadic or semi-nomadic like the other 450+ tribal groups. The settled tribes had little contact with each other except of raids for food.
None of the tribes in New England or the Atlantic Coast had any idea were Kentucky was or that it even existed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
There was no reforestation of Europe since, even with the Black Death it remained densely populated and, more important, largely urban and agricultural.
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No, wrong. If you bothered to read what the Spanish actually wrote you'd know they were totally blown away by what they saw in Mexico.
There were more than 1 Million people in that city. The Spanish had never seen a city that large because there was nothing even remotely close to that in Europe.
At the time of the Great Fire, which was in the 1660s, there were only 350,000 people in London.
At the time of the Black Death, there wasn't even 50,000 people in London. The largest cities were all in Spain, Italy and France, and none of them had populations greater than 150,000. The largest city at the time was actually Cairo, but if you wanna go global then China had more than a dozen with populations double and triple that.
I don't consider saplings to be reforestation, so while I don't see reforestation in Europe, it was also non-existent in Central and South America. Overgrowth, yes, reforestation, no.
I know where those lies come from. They come from
National Geographic.
There's a Useless Tube video from Nat Geo about what would happen if people abandoned cities and Nat Geo is just plain wrong.
We know that because we can look at the Pennsylvania town that was abandoned. A coal seam runs under the town and the seam caught fire in 1952, or at least the fire was detected in 1952, and the town was abandoned 10 years later.
60 years -- 6 decades later --- and it proves Nat Geo's reforestation model is wrong. We can also look at a half-dozen Chinese towns that were abandoned, one of them for almost 2 centuries, and those were towns were abandoned because of earthquakes or floods. There's little to no reforestation.
You can look at Arkwright (in Britain) or Gilman, Colorado. Those have only been abandoned for a few decades but they don't look anything like Nat Geo says they should look like.
This idea that people die and the whole area is reforested in 10 years is nonsense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
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There's no evidence of that.
The population models are all wrong. If we were to believe the population models then Tasmania should have had 4 Million Tasmanians living on it instead of 4,000.
There were 250,000 to 300,000 Aborigines at first contact. If we were to believe the population models, there should have been 25 Million at least.
For North America, there are 567 Amerindian tribal groups. That's about a dozen more than when colonists arrived. That's due to the fact that after the Dawes Rolls in 1905 or so some bands split off from the main tribe and "bands" is what they call themselves.
Of the ~550 tribal groups, 46 were settled, meaning they lived in houses with wells, roads (well-defined trails or paths), border/boundary markers, market places, and storage/processing structures for storing and drying grains and other food and non-food crops.
We can use archaeology to examine the expansion and model the population.
This is the same technique used to debunk the Hebrew Exodus that never happened. If that many people poured into the area, there'd be evidence of expansion and none exists except in 2 places. In the mountains attributed to the tribe of Reuben there's evidence of expansion that would accommodate about 20,000 people and then south of Jerusalem there's evidence of new building that would house about 14,000. Jerusalem shows no evidence of expansion until centuries later when the northern kingdom is over-run and some refugees flee south to Jerusalem causing the population to swell to 20,000 people.
The population model used for settled tribes is not the same model one would use for nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples. About 150 tribes were semi-nomadic and the rest were nomadic.
We can get accurate population models. There are still dozens of fully nomadic tribes in Siberia. They were not decimated by disease or at war with Russia. After 100 years the population of one tribe went from about 10,000 to about 12,000 and that's what you'd expect. Nomadic life-style is harsh and the birth-rate is -2.0 to 2.0 not 8.0.
When they found those 3 tribes in the Amazon jungles in Brasil back in the 1950s, how come there weren't 100,000 of them?
Those population models are intentionally skewed to over-exaggerate the population of Amerindians in order to make claims that evil White people engaged in biological warfare.
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Originally Posted by jbgusa
Many others of that genre make pre-"white man" America a perfect world and blame native casualties on deliberate activity. This one is more nuanced and balanced. The book covered the decimation of the Native Americans by smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases.
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Diphtheria? Please, it's only fatal 5% to 10%.
Smallpox is certainly more fatal but at most the death rate would be 3 in 10 not 9 in 10. Your own CDC says so.
So, claims that smallpox decimated tribal populations are over-exaggerated.
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Originally Posted by jbgusa
This tragedy occurred in part because Hernando de Soto left pigs and horses behind after his exploration of Florida. Most of the 95% or so of Native American deaths occurred long before any had seen a White man. Charles Mann details the evidence of dense population of both North and South America, and that it rapidly disappeared.
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There's no evidence of dense population with the exception of Central Mexico.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
The numbers I have read about the Black Death, by contrast, are between 30% and 60%, and even that higher number was only in some cities. See From Black Death to fatal flu, in Science Magazine.There is no question that habitation causes "urban heat island" effect. Urban heat island effect, though, doesn't melt glaciers, de-ice the poles, or kill polar bears. |
There were no "urban heat islands" in that era.
Urban heat islands are a totally modern phenomenon of the last 50-70 years due to the building and construction materials used.
Global warming nutters disingenuously use temperature data from urban areas to skew the average temperature readings in order to claim that temperatures are increasing when they are not.
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