THANKSGIVING = NAKBA By Omar Robert Hamilton Since its Thanksgiving tomorrow here are some facts from an excellent book called 1491 by Charles C Mann. - Pre-Contact Central Mexico was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile as India or China. - One estimate puts Native American population in 1491 at between 90 and 120 million people. As in, more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. - In 1491 the Inka ruled the largest empire on earth. It stretched over 32 degrees of latitude over what is now Peru. The same distance as separates St Petersburg from Cairo. - Tenochtitlan (Mexico) was an enormous metropolis built of of canals and (mostly) artificial islands that was bigger than Paris at the time. (pic) - The corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl (c. Mayan) is larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek. - Smallpox epidemics ravaged the native population of the Americas. Some epidemiologists calculate that up to 95% of the population died of the disease in the first 130 years after contact. - Because native Americans did not have horses, cattle or camels to domesticate they were highly susceptible to particular European strains of disease. After 1492 it swept the continents, often decimating populations before new conquistadors even arrived. - The Jamestown pilgrims were not farmers or woodspeople and were utterly unprepared for the landscape. They only survived on the charity of the Wampanoag. - The Lakota (Sioux) of North America recorded 1780 as the year of Smallpox Used Them Up.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 19:01:01 +0000
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