SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Archaeologists have unearthed evidence that native Americans were raising turkeys for centuries before the European colonists even arrived in the Americas.
"Our research tells us that turkeys had been domesticated by 400-500 AD," explained Gary Feinman, an archaeologist at The Field Museum in Chicago, in a press release.
Dr. Feinman and colleagues found unhatched turkey eggs alongside the bones of both juvenile and adult birds at a 1,500-year-old archaeological site in Oaxaca, Mexico. "The fact that we see a full clutch of unhatched turkey eggs, along with other juvenile and adult turkey bones nearby, tells us that these birds were domesticated," Feinman said.
We know Native American cultures like the Mississippians practiced intensive agriculture. It looks like they also practiced animal husbandry. It's a much different picture from the hunter-gatherers of the modern, popular imagination.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:20AM
If you read the "Letters from Hernán Cortés", you will find out that:
The native Americans had turkeys, no need to dig anything to find out: "[...] and they roast many chickens, like those of the Tierra Firma, which are as large as peacocks." [historians.org] (obviously turkeys)
Cortés clearly states that: "This great city of Tenochtitlan is situated in this salt lake, and from the main land to the denser parts of it, by whichever route one chooses to enter, the distance is two leagues. There are four avenues or entrances to the city, all of which are formed by artificial causeways, two spears' length in width. The city is as large as Seville or Cordova [...]" [historians.org] So no hunter-gatherer shit, when their cities could be compared to the Spaniards' own. And do mind that "league" is about three miles...
Of course, it was to our advantage to later portray them as savages...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @07:03AM
Not sure what schools you all went to. But when I was going through school (27 currently) I was taught to great extent that every white person personally assisted in the willful genocide of the native peoples. Going out of their way to truck them out of whatever goods and land they had in exchange for diseased blankets.
What we did to the native peoples was not admirable. But it was not like we did this to them because they were necessarily different (this definitely played a part). The early peoples of Europe inslaved the Slavic peoples (slav means slave), the Greeks and Persians took slaves as they conquered one another, the Romans waged genocidal invasions of Gauls, Germans, and folks from the Iberian peninsula.
What the modern American people's ancestors did to the native peoples was par for the course by human standards. China is still sterilizing non-approved ethnicities, African tribes are genociding their neighbors as they have for thousands of years, the Isrealies are still being Isrealies, the atrocities of WWI and II. The native tribes themselves waged war on one another.
It is wrong to act like nothing happened, it is equally wrong to act like it was something special in the pilgrams nature that made them any more or less evil than all humans have always been. My west coast school painted the pilgrams as Nazis and the Iriquois as sages whose political foresight was greater than a million Athenian philosophers and the tribes as a whole more peaceful than the Swiss and more tolerant than the Swedish.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Thursday December 01 2016, @01:45PM
"The native Americans had turkeys, no need to dig anything to find out"
Yeah, except that Cortés dropped by a about 1000 years later (400-500 AD to post-1500 AD).
So... even if the natives Americans kept turkeys in 1500 AD, that does not tell you much about 400-500 AD.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @07:04PM
In theory, yes. In practice, what were the odds (prior to this discovery) that they had just domesticated turkeys when the Europeans showed up?
TFA not only portrays the evidence of domesticated turkeys c.500 as some sort of surprise, rather than confirmation of the expected, but also uses the Pilgrims' hunting of wild turkeys (in Massachusetts) to imply that we previously believed there were no domesticated turkeys in the Americas at that time. Jelizondo is certainly right to point out that this representation of our previous knowledge is bullshit and didn't need digging to debunk it.