Pre-Columbian Native American Orchards?

I posted a video from an apple orchard in Alsace, France. Whether in France or in America, an orchard consists of just one species of fruit or nut tree, and practically nothing else like weeds, shrubs, etc. It is about as different from a natural forest as you can get.

But, before European contact, Native Americans had orchards. They were not orchards in which the people cut down a natural forest (which would have been a lot of work) but rather they were natural forests that the natives altered to have more of the tree species in which they were interested.

For example, Native Americans loved chestnuts. Chestnuts grew wild in North American forests (before an introduced fungus killed all of them in the twentieth century). According to forest ecologist Thomas Bonnicksen, after the ice ages about four percent of the eastern forest was suitable for chestnuts to grow. But chestnuts grew in forty percent of the forest area, primarily because Natives planted the seeds and set fires, thus altering the microclimate. They did not totally create chestnut orchards, but they enhanced chestnut forests into something like chestnut orchards. They did this so much that we can no longer know to what extent the “wild” chestnut groves are partly the product of Native orchards.

In southern North America there are many natural stands of pecan trees. Natives loved pecans. They had pecan orchards. They did not plant the orchards from scratch, but they altered existing pecan forests by planting more pecans, creating something like a pecan orchard. They did this so much that we can no longer know to what extent the “wild” pecan groves are partly the product of Native orchards.

In California, Native tribes depended on acorns. There were many natural oak forests, but the Natives pruned and planted oaks, to extend the existing forests and make them more productive. They did this so much that we can no longer know to what extent the “wild” oak groves are partly the product of Native orchards.

The most dramatic example is the palm oases of southern California. Are they natural? We always thought so. But why is it that these desert oases, east of San Diego, consist almost exclusively of native fan palms (Washingtonia filifera)? Some ecologists think that Natives planted the palm trees there and managed them, to keep other species out. Why? These fan palms, just like date palms, produce delicious and nutritious fruits. They did this so much that we can no longer know to what extent the “wild” palm groves are partly the product of Native orchards, if in fact there have ever been “wild” palm groves.

 

Native Americans transformed the landscape of North America and deserve credit for being something other than “mere” hunter-gatherers. I explain this in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

Yet Another Reason for Conservatives to Hate Global Warming Science

Most scientists, particularly those whose research has established the science of global warming, tend to be on the political left. They have been disproportionately targeted for the termination of federal government positions and funding, under the anti-global-warming leadership of Donald Trump. The outspoken advocacy of global warming science by former Vice President Al Gore particularly motivated conservatives to hate global warming science.

Well, I just ran across a new reason for conservatives to hate global warming science. The possibility of global warming was first discovered by a woman scientist.

And no ordinary woman scientist. She was a vocal advocate of women’s rights, and signed the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. She trespassed into the male territory of science and invention, and then she wanted to vote, too.

Eunice Newton Foote’s experimental demonstration of the possibility of global warming was very simple, and would today be considered simplistic, but it was valid. She took glass cylinders, used an air pump to remove the air, then put air into one cylinder, hydrogen gas into another, and carbon dioxide gas into a third. She had thermometers in the cylinders. (The actual experiment was a little more complicated.) When they had reached temperature equilibrium, she placed them in bright sunlight. The glass trapped the heat of the sun inside the cylinders—that is why it is called the greenhouse effect. The cylinder with carbon dioxide got much hotter than the others, reaching 125 degrees F. This cylinder also took longer than the others to cool off after being removed from the sun. She concluded not only that carbon dioxide held solar heat very well (actually, the infra-red radiation from objects that had warmed in the sun, and, further, that at times when the Earth’s atmosphere had more carbon dioxide—whether in the past or the future—the climate would have been or would be warmer. Years before John Tyndall, and a half century before Svante Arrhenius, who usually get the credit for the discovery of global warming, Eunice Newton Foote had it figured out. Her research, though it remained obscure, did get published. It was presented to the major American scientific society in 1856, though she avoided notoriety by having a man present it for her.

This graphic shows Foote, two of her glass jars, and the sun.

It was difficult, in the nineteenth century, for a woman to publish her own scientific findings, but some, including Eunice Newton Foote, managed to do so. It was legally impossible for a woman inventor to patent her own inventions, because she did not have the legal right to defend her patents from infringement in court. This is why Eunice Newton Foote, like other woman inventors, patented her inventions under her husband’s name. Fortunately Eunice had a supportive husband who was happy to promote her work.

Science, and the world, are better when women are given creative freedom. Most modern conservatives believe this, but they disapprove strongly of modern women who take Foote’s role in modern society.

Darwin Climbs a Cathedral

When I started making a video on the platform halfway up the cathedral in Strasbourg (which is the highest point that is open to the public and which can be reached on foot), I wondered how I could possibly tie it in with science. My YouTube channel, after all, is about science. I cannot simply post nice tourist videos showing the cathedral spire and the roofs of new and old Strasbourg.

But it didn’t take me long to come up with a science angle for the video. When they started building the cathedral in 1015, no one knew how old or big the world, or certainly the universe, was. People, especially the laborers who built the cathedral, lived in a cloak of darkness. Any question that could not be answered by the church was not worth asking. Scholars knew the world was not flat, but it might as well have been.

The builders kept adding to the height of the cathedral, and it reached its current height in 1439. This was before Copernicus was born. For over a century afterwards, people believed the sun, moon, and stars orbited around the Earth which was the center of God’s attention. From 1647 to 1874, the cathedral in Strasbourg was the tallest structure in the world. It is still the tallest building that was constructed entirely in the Middle Ages.

When Copernicus died, the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system was still heresy. But within a century, all of that changed. By the time the current Horlogue Astronomique (astronomical clock) was installed on the ground floor of the cathedral in 1843, everyone knew the planets orbited around the sun and that Copernicus was right. The giant clock even had the planets that were known at the time moving around the sun, and even had a portrait of Copernicus, the man the church would have killed in 1543 except that he was already dead. Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Copernican view of the universe. The Vatican even has an observatory and an official astronomer.

 

But by the time the cathedral had already reached its full height, the church and world were still in scientific darkness.

Another thing you can tell by looking at the roofs of Strasbourg from the cathedral is that Strasbourg has existed for a long time, at least since Roman times, when it was called Argentoratum (city of silver). Everyone is aware of the ancient legacy of Europe, Asia, and even Africa and Central and South America. But North America also had an ancient legacy of civilization. As I explain in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes, the big cities of North America (such as Cahokia and Spiro) have been forgotten by nearly everyone. Cahokia is now just some mounds of dirt, and Spiro not even that. The historical legacy of my Native American ancestors has been effaced from the surface of the planet.

President Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation

President Trump has proclaimed that on Columbus Day, 2025, Americans should honor Christopher Columbus as “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.” 

What followed Columbus’s encounter with America in 1492 was a legacy, not of “faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue” but of conquest, disease, and slavery. While I will admit that Columbus probably did not intend the entire Native population of two continents to be slaughtered and enslaved, and all their resources grabbed by force, he certainly began the process. While we may not necessarily condemn Columbus, neither should we revere him. He was NOT the original American hero, as if the indigenous people who were already in America did not even exist—there is no mention of them in Trump’s proclamation.

To listen to Trump, you would get the impression that the white domination over Native America was a completely good thing. This is false, as I explained in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-ColumbianNorth America and What We Can Learn from It. My book is not a vicious liberal attack on Columbus, but a scientific evaluation of what America was like before Columbus and what happened after him.

 

 

Native American history has, in the popular mind, largely been erased. Most Americans know nothing about Native Americans, other than as dark inconvenient people who stood in the way of white progress, and continue to do so today, as explained in detail in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.

We had been making progress so that even in many red states the Monday nearest to October 12 was recognized either as Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Under Trump, we have gone back to exclusively the white version. In this as in many other ways, Trump is leading us fearlessly into the twentieth century.

If you agree with Trump that Columbus was inspired completely by the desire to “spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”; that evangelism consists of killing some of the people who had not yet heard about Jesus, enslaving others, and taking their land, then you are welcome to join President Trump in celebrating Columbus. And you should get out your guns and go on an evangelistic expedition into whatever hotspots of anti-Christianity you might choose.

Darwin and Dewberries

This essay accompanies a video on the Darwin channel.

All over Europe, blackberry bushes (Rubus fruticosus) form thick hedges (ronces) out in the sun that are nearly impenetrable by humans or other large animals. The vinelike branches are thick, strong, and covered with nasty thorns. At first it might seem strange that the vines would be so well protected against animals, since they produce delicious blackberries that natural selection has designed for animal dispersal. Animals eat them, the seeds pass through the gut, and come out in a new location—exactly what the plant “wants” to happen. But apparently the ronces “want” birds, not mammals, to disperse the seeds.

The blackberry bushes have numerous adaptations to life in bright sunlight. The branches are thick with sapwood that conducts water to the thick leaves, which are white on the underside, an adaptation to occasionally hot, dry conditions. Because the shrubs grow so fast, they can produce an abundance of fruits, which are first green, then red, then black when fully ripe. The flowers begin to open in spring; then, starting in July, you and other animals can feast on the berries, that is, when you can reach them. 

Meanwhile, in the shade, another species of Rubus grows: Rubus caesius, the dewberry. They are adapted to life in the shade: narrower stems that conduct less water, and they have thinner leaves, which are not white on the underside. The flowers do not open until August, and the fruits are not ripe until September. Because they grow in the shade, they grow more slowly, and are smaller. For every one dewberry, a bird may find a hundred blackberries.

They also have fewer thorns. These differences are not just due to sun vs. shade conditions; even when both of the species grow together in the shade, one can distinguish them, for example by the number of leaflets (often five in blackberries, only three in dewberries).

Clearly, blackberries are the dominant species. Dewberries hide in the shade. There appears to be competition between the two species. Blackberries rule the summer sunshine; dewberries could not possibly win in competition against them. But dewberries find a refuge from competition by blooming later. Natural selection has favored dewberries that reproduce a little bit in the late summer shade, over dewberries that might uselessly attempt to reproduce in the same place and same time as blackberries. This is evolution (a kind called temporal niche displacement) acting upon the dewberries. It spells the difference between barely surviving, and not surviving at all.

Temporal displacement keeps the species from interbreeding. I have no idea whether they could interbreed; no one knows exactly how closely related the two species are. But they don’t interbreed because they flower at different times.

And they don’t live in exactly the same places. When a bird looks for a juicy berry, a dewberry is just as good as a blackberry, but a bird is very unlikely to eat both of them. As a result, a poop-load of blackberry seeds is likely to end up in a separate location from a poop-load of dewberry seeds.

It is conceivable that natural selection also acts upon the blackberries. Right through August and September, blackberries produce big red berries that ought to turn black. But when I look for ripe blackberries in August, I find that almost all of them have withered before I, or any birds, have a chance to eat them. I find this puzzling. The weather remains good for ripe blackberries, but something makes them turn into little dried black blobs.

Thus the fact that dewberry flowers and fruits are delayed, and also the fact that the late blackberry fruits wither, both keep the two species from blending together. Evolution at work. A human parallel would be an ethnic minority that could blend in with the majority, and lose its distinctness, remains distinct and survives by living in little, separate communities.