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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 Phoenix666 on Thursday December 01 2016, @12:10PM
Settled, urban societies that practiced agriculture, engaged in extensive trade networks, and had social hierarchy were even more extensive than that. The Anasazi/Puebloans across the Southwest built many cities whose ruins you can visit today, and who lived from fields irrigated with wadis. The Mississippians built huge mounds, which took about the same level of organization and engineering as the Egyptian pyramids, and stretched from roughly Minnesota/eastern South Dakota to Pittsburgh, from Oklahoma to the Florida panhandle.
Nomadic, hunter-gatherers were more the exception than the rule. Some of them eventually picked up agriculture from others like the Anasazi, like the Paiutes did. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head who started- and stayed that way were tribes in a limited area of the Great Plains like the Blackfoot and Sioux.
Washington DC delenda est.