Darwin and Native American Agriculture

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It (image). I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a video about Native American agriculture: https://youtu.be/cU5KeXESTMI which corresponds to chapter 4 of my book. This photo shows a reconstructed Cherokee field of maize, beans, and squash (watermelon), with gourd bird-houses for biological control of insect pests:

 

The first fact, which might surprise many people, is that there was such a thing as Native American agriculture. Not just a garden here or there, but large fields on which large Native populations depended for their food.

Many Native American tribes depended on agriculture, since their populations were too large to support by hunting and gathering. Their main crops were maize (corn), squash, and beans. Their European and white American conquerors wanted to depict Native Americans as savages who just gathered wild nuts and berries. But the English and American conquerors of the Cherokee tribe knew that this was not true. In order to subdue the Cherokees, English and then American generals had to go through the Cherokee farmlands and pull up the cornstalks one by one to starve out the villages: something that would have been unnecessary for hunter-gatherers.

Native tribes practiced polyculture, that is, different kinds of crops mixed together [image]. This differed from monoculture, such as is found in most modern American and European farms. Monoculture is huge fields of one kind of crop, while polyculture mixes them together. Each kind of crop depletes the soil a little differently, and in some cases (such as beans) enrich the soil. Native American style polyculture is superior to modern American monoculture.

Native tribes also practiced agroforestry, in which they grew their crops partially in the shade of trees. The trees helped to protect the soil and reduce the effects of heat and drought. Agroforestry is superior to modern American monocultures. Was this because the Natives were more scientifically advanced than we are today? Maybe not. Maybe it was just too much work to cut down the trees with stone tools before planting the field.

Native cultures were advanced societies based on agriculture, like ours only better. So much for the grossly unfair image of Natives as savages.

Darwin Eats an American Dinner

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have just posted a video on this topic.

As I explain in chapter 4 of the book, Native Americans depended largely on agriculture. Native Americans (mainly in Mexico) domesticated many important crop plants, such as maize (what we usually call corn), some kinds of beans, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, and chocolate. The impact on world agriculture has been significant: today, maize is grown not just in the Americas but Europe, Africa, and Asia as well.

In chapter 2 I explain that pre-Columbian Native Americans and their villages and cities were healthy. Largely this was because of a healthy diet. The meat was largely venison, turkey, and squab (from passenger pigeons). But also their diet, based on corn and beans, was healthy because of protein complementarity. Corn has protein, but you cannot live on corn protein, because an essential amino acid (lysine) is largely absent. Beans have protein, but you cannot live on bean protein, because an essential amino acid (methionine) is largely absent. But mix the two together, and you have a complete source of protein.

This is called protein complementarity and is found all over the world: corn and beans in America, lentils and wheat in the Middle East, and rice and soybeans in Asia. All of these traditional diets were healthy.

In addition, Native American diet had plenty of Vitamin C—as did the traditional diets of people on other continents, if the poor had access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

But in one important aspect, European peasants had an unhealthy diet and Native Americans did not. Many European peasants had to live off of rye bread. The ergot fungus (Claviceps purpurea) lives in rye plants, and when the rye grain is produced it is mixed with ergot spores. These spores have a toxin, lysergic acid diethylamide, that partially destroys blood circulation and results in fingers and toes being stubby and falling off, and in a generally crummy state of health. No such fungus or toxin grows in maize, the basis of Native American food.

Lysergic acid diethylamide is better known as LSD, and at larger doses can produce hallucinations.

Once in a while, outbreaks of ergotism occurred in European rye fields, especially after cold winters and wet springs. At these times, the peasants got a big dose of LSD and had hallucinations—acid trips, which they could not explain. This was the cause of witch hunts and werewolf crazes in the middle ages. Once again, this is something that never happened among Native Americans.

Native Americans, before Columbus, were healthy, and one reason was that they ate healthy food which, unlike European peasant food, never contained LSD.

Have a nice July 4 meal of corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, peppers, and of course chocolate! 

Forgotten Landscapes: Truth and Sanity

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

 

I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.My first video is Darwin Restores Truth and Sanity.

In March 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I’m sure Donald Trump thinks he can rewrite American history by simply speaking His version of it into existence, but even He cannot do this. All he can do, by executive order, is to remove all National Park and Monument signage that does not have His version of American history on it. He cannot rewrite the textbooks and change all school and college courses, however much He would like to do so.

What version of American history does He want to impose? The white supremacist version. He wants to proclaim that white settlers moved into an empty North America and brought the bright white light of civilization to the few savages who already lived there. Trump is offended by signage that makes reference to slave owners and to white who killed Native Americans.

My book, Forgotten Landscapes, is in fact the way to restore truth and sanity to American history. I do not, like Trump, do so by calling my critics liars and insane. Instead my book presents the evidence:

• That Native population densities were large before European diseases decimated them
• That Natives managed the North American landscape through fire management, hunting, and agriculture

This is not the first time the Trump Administration has tried to erase Native Americans from history. In January 2025 the Justice Department proclaimed that Native Americans did not quality for birthright citizenship. The very day I made this video, the Supreme Court was deliberating a birthright citizenship case. (Update: On June 27 the Supreme Court decided that Trump had the right to limit birthright citizenship: This means that Cherokees like me might very well not be citizens of the United States or of any other country.)

The only way to restore truth and sanity to American history is for all of you, individually, to make sane and truthful use of the evidence. My book provides that evidence.

The Real Me and the Real You

My main purpose in my social media is to help you make better sense of the world and your life in it. I do this primarily by sharing my scientific understanding and my personal experiences. My social media (just two blogs, here and here, and video channel) have now had over 900,000 visits. The main traffic is from search engines. This means that most of my readers are not followers but are finding my work because they are searching for insights not about me but about the topics I write about. And that is just the way I like it.

Perhaps the most fundamental question we have about ourselves and the world is, who am I? This question is of interest not just to me, but to whoever might read this essay.

What, exactly, is the real me? There is no easy answer to this question. Each of us consists of at least two general things: the self that we want to be, and the self that we are subconsciously.

Over the first of these we have a measure of control. We can control what we think, the decisions we make, the kinds of interactions we have with people, the things we say. This is generally the self that we present to the world. Some people think this is a false face, merely an image of what we want people to think about us. But we all know it is much more than this. It is the self that we want to be, not just how we want to appear.

Over the second of these we have less control. We can generally control what we say, but sometimes we blurt things out before we have a chance to think about them. Curses, for example, come from a different part of the brain than regular speech. Most of us cannot control our dreams, either. When we experience things that make us angry or lusty, our heartbeats and breathing become more rapid, and there are other physiological responses that I do not need to tell you about, even if we try to calm ourselves down. These things make up the self that we do not want to be, not merely the things we wish to keep hidden.

Over some things, we have an intermediate level of control. For example, my blood sugar is high, enough for me to require medication but not drastic intervention. I cannot completely control it. It is my cell membranes that do not absorb enough of it from my blood. The main thing I can do is to eat less sugar. Medication and eating less sugar has reduced my blood sugar down from the crisis level it used to be. Blood sugar level is the result both of things I can control and things I cannot.

I suggest that the real me, and the real you, are the first of the two. They are the most highly developed systems in our evolutionary history. The second “self” has an ancient origin that goes back at least to the origin of the vertebrates. At least, I think so. Do fishes get angry?

Another way of dividing ourselves up into the selves we want and the selves we hide is to consider the things over which our DNA has direct control. Our DNA does not control everything about our bodies. It controls the structure of our brains, nerves, muscles, bones, and systems such as the digestive system. It controls, basically, everything that is within our epidermis and mucous membranes. But it does not control what is outside of our bodies, which includes the things that are in our digestive system.

The contents of our intestines includes not just the partially-digested things that we have decided to eat (which is under our conscious control) but also trillions of bacteria and other microbes. We cannot control what those microbes do. They metabolize, to get energy and nutrients for themselves, and eject their wastes into our intestines. These wastes include carbon dioxide (odorless), methane (odorless), and hydrogen sulfide (the smell of farts). Though we can to a certain extent influence their timing, neither we nor our DNA can control our farts. The cosmos inside our intestines is a wild world over which we have no control other than diet (yogurt helps) and medicine.

And our digestive system responds not so much to us—our nervous system, or even our DNA—as to the wild world in our intestines. When the bacteria in the food produce a lot of gas, they expand the intestine. Local nerve networks take care of what happens next. Intestinal nerves detect the expansion, then cause the smooth muscles around the intestine to start contracting, which will push the food and the farts along further down the line. One result is that when a fart is on the way, you can’t stop it. Another result is that when you gotta go, you gotta go. Your brain can control the muscles at the end of the line, the sphincter muscles, to try to hold it in, but success is not guaranteed.

So another view of yourself is that the real you is what the DNA controls, and the secret you is what your bacteria do.

So when an honest biographer says, regarding the subject, which might be you or me, “he or she tells the true story, warts and all” (maybe farts and all), this is not really being honest. Warts are caused by viruses, and farts by bacteria. Your honest biography would be what your DNA does, and what you decide to do, rather than by the random, uncontrollable activities of your bacteria or your subconscious mind.

The bacteria and subconscious mind are not always bad. Having written what I just wrote, and living a more relaxed life, both the products of the real me, have an effect on what my subconscious mind and even my bacteria do.

I hope this helps. And tell your bacteria that I said hi.