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!