American History - Salmon

Now according to the majority of anthropologists, agriculture is a pretty important factor in the creation of complex societies capable of brining together large groups of people who in turn create cities, build monuments, slap together complex hierarchies where everyone is uber aware of who is better than whom, and all those other things we generally identify as civilization whether we should or not. Part of the reason they hold this view is because throughout the arc of history its pretty much true across the board. One can argue the merits of a more egalitarian hunter gatherer society, but they tend not to be so good at creating stuff for us to remember them by. After all, one really doesn’t have time to worry about such things when they’re having to constantly wander around looking for things to eat. However, just because the majority of things are this way, doesn’t mean they all have to be.

A perfect example of this is the ridiculously complex multitude of civilizations jammed into what we today call British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and California. West of the Rocky and Cascade Mountains was a virtual paradise of food abundance; with a mild climate, oceans brimming with seafood, forests full of wild game, and prairies full of roots and berries. However, even more significant and unique, was the ass load of salmon who annually made their way from the oceans each year to literally fuck themselves to death in the region’s rivers and creeks. It was this abundance that originally drew the earliest Amarinds down the coast from Beringia, kicking off the widespread human settlement of the Americas, and as each subsequent group of Amarinds, and then Na-Dene, followed them south and spread across the two continents, groups broke off and stayed in that original area of plenty. After all, why keep going when the first place they found was pretty damn awesome. Unlike other areas where people had to travel far and wide for food, the tribes of the Pacific Coast could get the majority of their food needs from a relatively small area. Something that was helped by the use of controlled burns, fertilizing and tilling, streamscaping, and other methods to encourage greater natural production. As a result, the population along the Pacific Coast became the most genetically diverse in the New World, with a multitude of people crammed together, all speaking different languages and forming their own unique societies.

Now while salmon is a pretty awesome food source when its around, what with the rivers becoming teeming with literally millions of the bastards, it comes with the little caveat that its only around for part of the year, which isn’t really all that great. Though early people knew how to dry meat, it didn’t last for long, especially in wetter climates. This changed around 1,000 BCE when they figured out how to smoke meat, which changed salmon from a great food source when it was around to an all year diet staple. With salmon basically taking on the role of corn in Mesoamerican societies, the populations of the Pacific Coast exploded. Now having to move around even less to ensure nobody went hungry, these societies began building large long houses in which to live, decorating them with totem poles and intricate arts and crafts. With more time on their hands, they developed complex hierarchies and detailed social and religious ceremonies, with music and dancing playing a central role. Several tribes also developed a distinct look by purposefully flattening the foreheads of their babies, which became a mark of beauty.

Though often sharing similarities in basic technique and ideas, if anything the various tribes all crammed together became even more unique from one another. However, that did not negate them communicating. The ocean and various rivers made travelling long distances by canoe quite easy, resulting in a large amount of trade between the Pacific Coast tribes and the development of distinct trading languages as a central means of communication. The Pacific Coast tribes also traded with tribes from the interior, who were more than willing to pay out the nose for access to salmon and intricate artisanal crafts. One of the largest centers for this type of trade developed at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, which provided easy access through the Cascade Mountains to the interior. Trade goods came from as far away as the Southwest, the Great Plains, and Alaska. This trade made the Pacific Coast tribes very powerful, with the Chiefs, who were either appointed or elected, showing off their wealth via complex events called potlatches, where they vied to prove who could give away the most elaborate gifts.

Mountain ranges and their large populations kept the Pacific Coast tribes safe from their neighbors in the interior, who had to work much harder to sustain themselves in the less productive deserts of the Columbia Plateau and Great Basin. For their part, the Pacific Coast tribes seemed to have little interest in expanding their influence into such less fertile lands, though they were more than willing to use interior tribesmen as slaves, leading to a situation where many of the interior tribes would attack each other in order to gain slaves to trade. These slaves were viewed as being ethnically inferior, and often their children were automatically considered slaves as well. The Pacific Coast tribes were also not above attacking each other, sometimes to secure resources, and sometimes as part of raids to secure more slaves. The various tribes had a complex relationship of constantly shifting alliances. Some raiders would travel as far as northern British Columbia to the coasts of California to capture slaves. For some tribes, more than a quarter of their number were slaves and it was not uncommon at times to kill slaves during potlatches as a show of power and a disdain for material wealth. This chaotic situation helped sustain the individuality of their various Pacific Coast societies over the millennia, but did not weaken them to the point that they were vulnerable to outside attack. Relatively isolated from early European contact, they retained their power into the nineteenth century.

American History - Divergence

In the Old World, around 10,000 BCE, bands of hunter gatherers began the transition to agricultural societies, domesticating various types of livestock and cultivating various grains and other crops to create more dependable food supplies, probably because starving to death sucks big time. By 5,000 BCE, planting and herding had become the primary source of food across the majority of the Old World. As a result, many groups of people became less nomadic, building more permanent settlements which over time evolved into cities. Populations began to rapidly expand. Thanks to agriculture, food supplies became sufficient for people to start thinking about doing things besides trying to get food, leading to the formation of complex hierarchal societies and religions which created art and monuments and studied the world around them. Facing mounting logistical challenges, these complex societies created writing to record and share information and ideas. The domestication of the horse around 4,000 BCE allowed these ideas to spread rapidly, not to mention also the establishment of long-distance trade and the rapid movement of people and supplies, allowing the growing cities to exert their influence over a wider area, allowing for the growth of kingdoms and empires. Though simple copper and gold ornaments had long been worn by most peoples, the widespread smelting of metal allowed for the crafting of tools and weapons, bringing the stone age to an end. By 3,000 BCE, the first great civilizations began emerging in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China.

Things didn’t quite work out the same in most of the New World, due to a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with the racist reasons your drunk uncle brings up when he ties one on and claims to be stating facts too true for polite society. Native Americans in southern Mexico first began cultivating corn, beans, and squash around 9,000 BCE, with the crops spreading southward through Central America and large parts of South America soon after. However, they moved north much more slowly, largely due to the fact that the northern part of Mexico and the southwestern United States are mostly desert where tropical plants don’t grow so great. The fact that Native Americans had nothing analogous to the horse didn’t help anything either, greatly slowly the spread of new ideas and methods for better living this crazy thing we call life. In fact, Native Americans pretty much had no livestock whatsoever, the majority of large animals on the two continents apparently not being down with the whole domestication thing whatsoever. Aside from the dogs their ancestors had brought with them, the only animals widely domesticated by Native Americans were the llama around 2,000 BCE and the turkey around 1,000 BCE.

Despite these handicaps, complex civilizations began to form in the agricultural dependent areas of southern Mexico, Central America, and the northwestern parts of South America, the first great civilization being the Olmec who emerged around 1,500 BCE. These civilizations built cities, experienced population booms, formed complex hierarchies and religions, developed systems of writing, built trading networks, and created art and monuments, including large stone statues and colossal pyramids. What they didn’t develop was metallurgy, which effectively kept them in the stone age. Though like in the Old World, from early on people utilized copper and gold for ornamentation, and even developed smelting to make more complex pieces, they failed to make the shift to metal tools. Lacking easy access to tin and other such metals, they couldn’t make harder and more durable early alloys, such as bronze, leaving their stone tools the better alternative, thus limiting any interest in pursuing such endeavors. Though over time these Mesoamerican civilizations rose and fell, they continually grew grander in scale, both in relation to the territory they controlled and the monuments they built, resulting in the construction of cities containing more than 100,000 inhabitants by 500 AD, with some cities reaching over 200,000 inhabitants by the time the Europeans arrived on the scene.

Comparatively, the early Native Americans of what is today the United States and Canada pretty much retained the same hunter gatherer lifestyle as their ancestors who crossed Beringia, though this is not to say they didn’t adapt their environment to their needs, just that the option of domesticating plants and animals wasn’t available to them. Though they did utilize practices such as starting fires in forests to create prairies for grazing animals, overall they largely survived by adapting to the world around them. Mostly because they had no other option and starving has never been seen to be all that great of an option. Populations remained relatively stable based upon the ability of the surrounding land to support them, growing in times of plenty and shrinking in times of scarcity, which often resulted in conflicts between tribes attempting to secure limited resources. Though such movements were limited by their lack of pack animals and the relative strength of their neighbors. While trade did occur, it was very geographically limited, and communication remained solely an oral affair. However, despite all of this, many tribes, especially those in areas more naturally food secure, began to expand and build more complex societies by 1,000 BCE. This process first occurred on the coasts, where food was more abundant, but was then aided by the development of corn, squash, and bean varieties better capable of surviving in a wider diversity of biomes. By 2,000 BCE, these crops began appearing first in the American Southwest and then in the Eastern Woodlands. The resulting agricultural revolution resulted in widespread change in these areas.

American History - Into America

Unfortunately for the various hunter-gatherer bands that made their way to Beringia, though they could walk deep into what is today Alaska and parts of the Yukon, travel further east and south was blocked by a giant damn ice sheet that covered all of Canada. After all, though such things were starting to wane a bit, it was still the fucking ice age. As a result, these groups just kind of hanged out, traveling back and forth across the land mass, even returning to Siberia at times. Eventually these groups remained apart long enough to become genetically distinct from other nearby groups, becoming the Amarind people, the ancestors of most Native Americans, most closely related to groups which later became the Mongolian, Amur, Japanese, Korean, and Ainu populations.

As the Earth began to shift to a warmer climate, the great ice sheets began to recede, leaving behind a scoured landscape and resulting in the massive Missoula and Bonneville floods across the Pacific Northwest. As the ice sheets began to disappear, by 13,000 BCE it started to become possible to travel from Beringia down the British Columbia coast to what is today the United States. The earliest travelers on this route would have needed boats to get around many areas, but eventually a largely ice free corridor likely came into being. Drawn by plentiful food supplies, bands of Amarinds moved down this corridor, soon finding themselves in a land of plenty with a climate that didn’t involve freezing one’s balls off. Untouched by human hands, this new world had to have seemed like a paradise to these early pioneers.

What followed was a rapid migration into North and South America, with all parts of the new continent touched by human habitation by 10,000 BCE. The primary and initial route of migration was down the west coast with its rich food supplies, with groups eventually branching off eastward into the interior and onward to the Atlantic coast. The warming climate was playing havoc on the local biomes, causing erratic weather and large swings in the availability of food supplies. Most of the large wooly animals that had long sustained the Amarinds were going extinct, unable to adapt to the world changing around them. Not really wanting a similar fate, the Amarinds kept on the move, adapting their diets to eat anything they could find. This continued until around 6,000 BCE, when the climate finally stabilized into something fairly similar to the world of today.

With Mother Nature no longer acting completely insane, the various bands of Amarinds began to settle into distinct areas, adapting themselves to the specific biomes in which they found themselves and beginning to form distinct diets, cultures, and languages. In the area that is today the United States, these could be categorized broadly into the Northwest Coast, the California Valleys, the Columbia Plateau, the Southwest, the Plains, the Northeast, and the Southeast. Various bands staked out their claims, and from this point forward little gene flow took place between the major groupings, though within the groupings the bands interacted, both trading and fighting each other for resources. The Amarinds grew more numerous and split into hundreds of different unique tribes.

As the ice age came to a close, sea levels began to rise and Beringia began to sink under the Bering Sea, sundering the Old and New worlds once again. However, prior to this taking place, a second group crossed into Beringia and then into North America. The Na-Dene were a distinct group of people, both in their genetics and cultures, with a language quite different than the Amarinds. First entering North America around 8,000 BCE via the marshy remains of Beringia, they became the primary inhabitants of Alaska and Northwestern Canada, claiming some of the last lands to be uncovered by the retreating ice sheets and pushing out or breeding out the Amarinds still living in the area. Though largely remaining in the north, a few small groups did make it as far south as the northern Californian coast by 3,000 BCE. Thus established, they split into unique tribes that remained distinct from the earlier arriving Amarinds.

Though the former land bridge of Beringia was now underwater, a third distinct wave of migrants followed the Na-Dene. Around 3,000 BCE, the Aleut-Inuit people used boats to cross over from northwestern Siberia to Alaska. Too few to challenge the descendants of the Na-Dene and the Amarinds, they spread across the barren shores of the Arctic Ocean, carving themselves out a life in the harshest of conditions. Of all the early peoples who came to the Americas, they remained the most closely related to their Siberian predecessors.