
Originally Posted by
chad
[Yes native Americans altered their environment in major ways. But what animals or plants went extinct?
Ground sloths, American lions, dire wolves and short-faced bears. Also 19 species of birds.
From About.com:
==========
At the end of the last ice age, at the same time as the human colonization of the last, farthest-flung regions from Africa, large-bodied mammals (called
megafauna) became extinct all over the world. The mass extinctions were neither synchronous nor universal, and the reasons proffered for those extinctions include (but are not limited to) climate change and human intervention.
Before
Homo sapiens left Africa to colonize the rest of the world, all of the continents were already populated by a large and diverse animal population, including our hominid cousins Neanderthals and
Homo erectus. Animals with body weights greater than 100 pounds (45 kg), called megafauna, were abundant.
Extinct elephant, horse, emu, wolves, hippos: the fauna varied with the continent, but most of them were plant eaters, with few predator species. Almost all of these megafauna species are now extinct; most of the extinctions followed the path of
Homo sapiens colonization.
=============
The thousands killed during the Osage-Iroquois war would be one example.
I would say none or very little because native Americans had respect for nature.
That's like saying that we have respect for nature because some US citizens are Wiccans and some buy organic milk. The myth of the noble savage was debunked long ago. Not surprisingly, native Americans had a lot of the same problems every other society in the world had.
But a capitalist-like society is like an organism, and its only goal is to make money. And within the capitalist organism there are greedy people who care about nothing but money. And once these greedy people get into the mechanism of business they will destroy nature and kill their own people to make money.
The American Indians did all those things as well. We did not invent greed.
America's logging corporations would have cut down every giant redwood in America (if a few people did not chain themselves to the trees to stop them, and then get lucky getting a national park created.)
And native Americans would have killed every buffalo in the US if they could have managed it.
Would non-capitalist Native Americans cut down every giant redwood or trade products with their neighbors that killed people?
They DID kill people. War was endemic among the Mayans, for example.
No because they had respect for nature, and one was saying "trade this product with your neighbor that will kill them, and then you will get a mansion and a brand new Lamborghini."
Instead they were saying "leave and give us your hunting grounds or we will kill you and take them."