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*11 Because the point is persistently misunderstood, it bears repeating that Indians’ relative genetic homogeneity does not imply genetic inferiority. Even a champion of Indians like historian Francis Jennings got this wrong: “The Europeans’ capacity to resist certain diseases,” he wrote in his polemical Invasion of America, “made them superior, in the pure Darwinian sense, to the Indians.” No: Spaniards simply represented a wider genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family reunion.
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*12 In 2004 two U.S. anthropologists and a Venezuelan medical researcher proposed that Native American susceptibility to infectious disease might have a second cause: helper-T cells, which like HLAs help the immune system recognize foreign objects. To simplify considerably, helper-T cells occur in two main types, one that targets microorganisms and one that targets parasites. The body cannot sustain large numbers of both, and hence adult immune systems tend to be skewed toward one or the other, usually depending on whether as children they were more often exposed to microorganisms or parasites. Indians have historically been burdened by flukes, tapeworms, and nematodes, so they have long had majorities of parasite-fighting helper-T cells. Europeans, who grew up in germ-filled environments, usually lean the other way. As a result, the three researchers suggested, adult Indians were—and possibly still are—more vulnerable to infectious diseases than adult Europeans. Conversely, Europeans would be comparatively more vulnerable to parasites. If further research supports this hypothesis, preventing childhood parasite infections might allow Indian immune systems to orientate themselves toward bacteria and viruses, possibly reducing future deaths.
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*13 Historians increasingly shy away from the term “Aztec,” because the nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt coined it in a misapprehension. Humboldt’s “Aztecs” were actually the people of three nations, the members of the Triple Alliance.
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*14 I use the hedge words “basically,” “almost,” and “in essence” because sperm actually have 50 to 100 mitochondria, just enough to power them through their short lives. By contrast, the egg has as many as 100,000 mitochondria. When the sperm joins the egg, the egg eliminates sperm mitochondria. Every now and then, though, a few escape destruction and end up in the embryo’s cells.
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*15 A puzzle to Europeans, anyway—Indians seem to have been, as a rule, satisfied with traditional explanations of their origins.
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*16 Hrdlička’s complaint about the lack of skeletal evidence was unfair for another reason: paleo-Indian skeletons are extremely rare. In Europe, archaeologists have discovered scores of skeletons ten thousand years old or more. By contrast, only nine reasonably complete skeletons of similar age have been found in North America (a few more exist in South America, although, as with the Lagoa Santa skeletons, their provenance is often unclear). “It’s a big mystery why we don’t find the burials,” the University of Vermont archaeologist James Petersen told me. “Some Indians will tell you that their dead all moved to a spiritual plane, and that’s about as good as any answer that we’ve got.”
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*17 Here and throughout I give the currently accepted dates, which are made with better techniques and more grasp of the vagaries of carbon dating than were then available to Haynes. Scientists discovered in the 1960 s that the rate of C14 formation and intake varied more than Libby had thought. As a result, raw C14 dates must be corrected (“calibrated,” in the jargon) to obtain calendar dates, something archaeologists do not always make clear. In addition, they often write dates not as years A.D. or B.C. but as years B.P. (Before Present), with the present set by convention at 1950 A.D. Thus 2000 B.P. is 50 B.C. In an attempt to reduce confusion, all dates in this book are ordinary calendar dates—that is, radiocarbon dates corrected by the most recent calibration. Scientists usually report C14 dates with their potential error, as in 3000 ± 150 B.P. (1050 ± 150 B.C.). To avoid typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing that readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels of residual radioactivity.
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*18 I am not criticizing McNeill for failing to include the Americas on his list of civilizations; he was simply reflecting the beliefs of his time. I would criticize World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity, a high school text published two decades later, in time for my son to encounter it. Referring exclusively to the “four initial centers” of civilization, this “world history” allocated just nine pages to the pre-Columbian Americas. The thesis of the book in your hands is that Native American history merits more than nine pages.
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*19 Given the choice between their own scratchy wool and the Indians’ smooth cotton, the conquistadors threw away their clothes and donned native clothing. Later this preference was mirrored in Europe. When cotton became readily available there in the eighteenth century, it grabbed so much of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to ban the new fiber. The law failed to stem the cotton tide. As the historian Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box: they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets, where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed. This novel form of protectionism was never put into place.
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*20 The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led “Africanist” historians like Clyde Winters and Ivan Van Sertima to claim that the Olmecs either were visited by Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African knowledge gained thereby explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. These views are not widely endorsed. Surprisingly, several noted archaeologists, including Betty Meggers and Gordon Ekholm, have suggested the geographical opposite: that Olmec society was inspired by China. Visitors from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god. This hypothesis, too, has failed to stir enthusiasm.
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*21 Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am being chronologically inexact. The oldest Zapotec palisade Flannery and Marcus excavated yielded calibrated radiocarbon dates in the range between 1680 and 1410 B.C., which for brevity’s sake I render as “about 1550 B.C.”
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*22 Actually, it didn’t. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day “millennium,” began with 13, rather than 0. The first day in the calendar was thus 13.0.0.0.0. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to a mathematician, he pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so irregular that children have to learn rhymes to remember the number of days in the months (“Thirty days hath September…”) are in no position to scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other cultures. At least all the “months” in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number of days, he said.
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*23 Chak Tok Ich’aak’s name, like most Maya names, is easier to pronounce than it looks. In most transliterations, all letters are pronounced much as they are in English, except that x is “sh.” Thus the small ruin of Xpuhil is “Shpoo-heel.” The only difficulty is the glottal stop, the constriction of the throat that occurs when someone with a classic Brooklyn accent pronounces “bottle.” In Maya, the glottal stop is indicated by an apostrophe, as in Ich’aak. Chak Tok Ich’aak, incidentally, meant something like “Great True Jaguar Claw.”
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*24 The river’s main channel is in this area called the Solimões. English-language maps usually put Manaus at the meeting of the Negro and the Solimões, with the latter changing its name back to Amazon upstream. Brazilian maps say that the Amaz
on begins at the conjunction of the Negro and Solimões.
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*25 Terra preta exists in two forms: terra preta itself, a black soil thick with pottery, and terra mulata, a lighter dark brown soil with much less pottery. A number of researchers believe that although Indians made both, they deliberately created only the terra mulata. Terra preta was the soil created directly around homes by charcoal kitchen fires and organic refuse of various types. I use terra preta loosely to cover both.
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