The
Contrasts
1
On the evening of October 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus, on board the Santa Maria in the Atlantic Ocean, thought he saw a tiny light far in the distance. A few hours later, Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on the Pinta's forecastle, sighted land. In the morning a party went ashore. Columbus had reached the Bahamas. The connection between the Old and New Worlds, which for more than ten millennia had been no more than a tenuous thing of Viking voyages, drifting fishermen, and shadowy contacts via Polynesia, became on the twelfth day of October 1492 a bond as significant as the Bering land bridge had once been.1
The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day to become alike. That trend toward biological homogeneity is one of the most important aspects of the history of life on this planet since the retreat of the continental glaciers.
The Europeans thought they were just off the coast of Asia—back to Eurasia again—but they were struck by the strangeness of the flora and fauna of the islands they had discovered. The record kept by Columbus is full of remarks like:
I saw neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast, but I have been here but a short time, half a day; yet if there were any I couldn't have failed to see them. …
There were dogs that never barked. …
All the trees were as different from ours as day from night, and so the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things.2
The distinctiveness of the human inhabitants of these islands struck Columbus, as well. He found the Indians unlike even black Africans, the most exotic people he had ever met with before. The Indians' hair was “not kinky, but straight and course like horsehair; the whole forehead and head is very broad, more so than any other race that I have ever seen.” These Arawak Indians were so impressed with the Europeans—their vessels, clothing, weapons, shapes, and colors—that they thought them demigods and gathered around to kiss the Spaniards' “hands and feet, marvelling and believing that they came from the sky … [and] feeling them to ascertain if they were flesh and bones like themselves.”3
The differences between the life forms of the two worlds have amazed men ever since 1492. Most nonbotanists are inclined to pay more attention to animals than plants, so the contrast between the flora of the eastern and western hemispheres has never excited as much interest as that between the fauna, but the contrast is a marked one. It is not absolute—some 456 species of plants, for instance, are indigenous to both North America and Japan—but the uniqueness of American flora must be acknowledged. Cacti, for instance, are exclusively American in origin. Despite hundreds of years of contact via shipping between the northeastern part of the United States and adjacent Canada and the rest of the world, only about 18 percent of the total number of plant species growing in this part of America are of non-American origin.4
The pre-Columbian agriculturalists developed the American food plants from an assemblage of wild plants which was very different from that which the inventors of agriculture in the Old World had. Even the most optimistic of the early colonists of Virginia had to admit that the flora was alien more often than it was familiar. This difference becomes more and more pronounced as one moves south into Mexico and beyond. Jean de Léry, who was a member of the abortive French colony at Río de Janeiro in the 1550s, found only three plants with which he was familiar: purslane, basil, and a kind of fern. All the others were strange, leading to all sorts of difficulties. With no grapes, how were the Europeans to make the wine needed to celebrate the Lord's Supper? Was it better to forego the ceremony until wine could be obtained from Europe or to operate on the theory that Jesus used wine only because it was common in Palestine, and that, therefore, His sacrifice of Himself on the Cross could be commemorated with one of the local Indian beverages?5
The contrast between the Old and New World fauna has impressed everyone who has ever crossed the Atlantic or Pacific. Some species are common to both worlds, especially in the northern latitudes, but sometimes this only serves to point up other contrasts. In South and Central America the biggest native quadruped is the tapir, an animal also present in southeast Asia, but by no means the most impressive animal there.6 The Old World elephant has a much more useful nose and is many times larger. Tropical America's four-legged carnivores are more impressive than the herbivorous tapir, but here, too, the strange disparity between New and Old World mammals appears. The jaguar is not an animal to treat with contempt, but compared to a lion or tiger, he is one of the middle-sized cats.
The early explorers wondered at the smallness of the American mammals they came upon in their early expeditions, most of which were limited to the torrid zone. It was the reptiles, snakes, birds, and insects that really impressed them. Europe has no reptile as big as the iguana; there is probably no animal quite as ugly. The iguana reminded Amerigo Vespucci of the flying serpent of legend, except for the lack of wings. Vespucci and his comrades reacted to the iguanas exactly as nature intended that the enemies of these harmless beasts should: “Their whole appearance,” he wrote of the reptiles, “was so strange that we, supposing them to be poisonous, did not dare approach them.” Many of the fellow jungle-dwellers of the iguanas were at least as strange, often as terrifying, and frequently a good deal more dangerous. In the rivers there were eels that defended themselves with electricity, and rays and piranhas. There were monkeys—no oddity in itself, but these swung by their tails! Who had ever seen a bird as strange as the toucan, who seemed more beak than body, and who had ever seen a land bird as large as the Andean condor actually fly? And who, outside of a nightmare, had ever seen bats that drank blood or a snake quite as long as the anaconda?7
Europeans found the animals of temperate North America less alien than those of the lands to the south, but still very unlike the animals of Europe. The rivers contained more kinds of fish than had ever swum in the Ebro or Guadalquivir. One of the biggest kind swam in the Mississippi and had whiskers like a cat, “the third part of which was head, with gills from end to end and along the sides were great spines, like very sharp awls.” There was a snake with a castanet on his tail (rattlesnake, no doubt) whose bite left the victim with enough time for his last confession, but for little more. Strangest of all, when Coronado rode onto the plains, he found no gold but a kind of huge cattle as numerous as fish in the sea (buffalo or bison). They were as large or larger than oxen and had short, thick horns and humps like camels and when they ran, they carried their tails erect like scorpions. The Spanish horses were frightened of them “for they have a narrow short face, the brow two palms across from eye to eye, the eyes sticking out at the side, so that, when they are running, they can see who is following them. They have very long beards, like goats, and when they are running they throw their heads back with the beard dragging on the ground.”8
Men returned from America with stories of mythical beasts—like that of the Mexican bird which never lands as long as it lives and even lays and hatches its eggs in the air9—but there was no need to resort to fiction. American fauna is richer in species of unique animals than any imagination could devise. In the 1850s Philip L. Sclater, on the basis of what he knew about the geographic distribution of bird genera, decided that our planet is divided into six regions, each one with a characteristic bird population: two of these regions make up the New World. Twenty years later, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Darwin of the modern concept of evolution, saw that Sclater's six-part division of the planet is as valid for animals in general as for birds in particular. The animals of the six sections are prevented or at least inhibited from intermingling by oceans, mountain ranges, deserts, differences in temperature. The fauna of these regions are not absolutely distinctive—the tapir is native to both tropical America and tropical Asia; the cougar, rattlesnake, and hummingbird are native to both North and South America—but, to quote a modern zoo-geographer, “the animals in different parts of one faunal realm are on the whole more related to those of other parts of the same region than to those of other regions.” To illustrate, although there are many similarities among the fauna of the Irrawaddy, lower Niger, and Amazon valleys, a zoologist can differentiate between them at a glance.10
South and Central America plus the West Indies and part of Mexico make up one of the Sclater-Wallace regions. The rest of Mexico, plus the United States, Canada, and Greenland make up another. Of the two, the southernmost is the richest zoologically, with forty-five families of backboned animals peculiar to it alone, according to Wallace. (Research since his time has shown that neither this southern region of the New World nor any of the other five regions is quite so clearly distinctive as he thought—accumulation of data always points up exceptions to any rule—but the general validity of the Sclater-Wallace system is still accepted.) It seems clear to the layman that southern America, with its unique anteaters, sloths, monkeys with prehensile tails, vampire bats, rodents as big as dogs, and wild profusion of insects and birds must rank as a separate region. Only Australia equals it in being truly exceptional.
Northern America is not nearly as distinctive. At most, Wallace grants only thirteen families of vertebrates as native to it exclusively, but it does have claim to uniqueness. A number of mammalian genera are peculiar to it, including several kinds of moles and species like the Rocky Mountain goat and the prong-buck. It shares with the region to the south the distinction of being home to the only marsupials outside of Australia and the only hummingbirds in the world. It is very rich in kinds of reptiles and amphibia, despite the fact that temperate and cold climates usually limit the numbers of such animals. And its peerless system of lakes and rivers give it a wealth of fresh water mollusca and fish unequalled anywhere else on this planet.11
Alfred Russel Wallace's careful accumulation of evidence and guarded generalities confirmed what Jean de Léry had guessed on the basis of one trip to Brazil more than three hundred years before: that America is so truly “different from Europe, Asia and Africa in the living habits of its people, the forms of its animals, and, in general, in that which the earth produces, that it can well be called the new world. …”12
The contrasts between the two worlds piqued European curiosity. Not everything was different. American palms were quite like those of Africa, and the jaguar was very much like the leopard. But why even slight differences, and why the great ones? Why were there no horses or cattle anywhere in the Americas? Why were there no four-legged beasts bigger than a fox in the West Indies? Even those who had voyaged to Africa for slaves and to the Far East for spices found little in America that was familiar, and many things that were utterly strange.
The Europeans had emerged from the Middle Ages with intellectual systems, Christian and Aristotelian, claimed by the orthodox (and so few even guessed there was anything beyond orthodoxy) to explain everything from the first and last ticks of history to what happens in the egg prior to the hatching of the chick. These systems proved too cramped to accommodate the New World. Aristotle had quite logically supposed the equatorial zone of the earth so hot that life could not exist there. Joseph de Acosta crossed directly under the sun on his way to America in 1570 and “felt so great cold, as I was forced to go into the sunne to warme me: what could I else do then but laugh at Aristotle's Meteors and his philosophie. …” Pliny's Natural History contains thirty-seven books, and yet he did not mention the llama in any of them. The works of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna occupied whole shelves of every good fifteenth-century library from Baghdad to Oxford to Timbuktu, but these three giants of medicine had not a word to say about syphilis. Ancient and medieval geographers had made fine maps of all the world, but the men of the Columbian generation discovered that “Ptolomeus, and others knewe not the halfe.”13
The ancient and medieval pronouncements on humans and human behavior seemed to leave Europeans little choice but to condemn the Indians as allies of the Devil. For instance, Christians agreed that heterosexual monogamy was the way to handle the sex relationship. The Indians, with a kind of abandon unmentioned in even the candid pages of the Old Testament, practiced promiscuity, polygamy, incest, and sodomy. The Europeans had either to conceive of the naturalness of cultural diversity and invent cultural toleration to go along with it, or to assume that Indians were in league with Hell. Most made the latter choice. The exception, of course, was Montaigne, who found nothing barbarous in what he heard of America, except insofar as “everyone gives the title barbarism to everything that is not according to his usage. …”14
The Bible was the source of most wisdom, and the book of Genesis told all that one needed to know about the beginning of the heavens, earth, angels, plants, animals, and men. There was one God and there had been one Creation; when mankind had offended God, God caused a great flood in which all land creatures, including men, had perished, except those preserved in Noah's ark. This explanation seemed sufficiently broad to include within its bounds all the diversity of life—plant, animal, and human—which the European was obliged to acknowledge up to the end of the fifteenth century. Then da Gama and Columbus brought whole new worlds crashing into the area of European perception.
The problems of explaining Africa and Asia were difficult but surmountable. After all, it had always been known that they were there and, if Europeans had not seen elephants, they had at least always known about them. But America, who had ever dreamed of America? The uniqueness of the New World called into question the whole Christian cosmogony. If God had created all of the life forms in one week in one place and they had then spread out from there over the whole world, then why are the life forms in the eastern and western hemispheres so different? And if all land animals and men had drowned except for those in the ark, and all that now exist are descended from those chosen few, then why the different kinds of animals and men on either side of the Atlantic? Why are there no tree sloths in the African and Asian tropics, and why do the Peruvian heathens worship Viracocha instead of Baal or some other demon familiar to the ancient Jews? The effort to maintain the Hebraic version of the origin of life and man was to “put many learned Christians upon the rack to make it out.”15
The problem tempted a few Europeans to toy with the concept of multiple creations, but the mass of people clung to monogeneticism. They had to; it was basic to Christianity. For example, what would happen to the validity of the Pope's 1493 grant to Spain of “all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered, and to be discovered,” in the western Atlantic unless their inhabitants were truly men and women and thus under papal jurisdiction? The famous Requirement of 1512, which the Spanish monarchs ordered the conquistadors to read to the Indians so that they would realize that their subsequent slaughter and subjugation were justified, opened with a statement that “the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created Heaven and Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and I, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants. …” Being descendants of Adam and Eve, the American aborigines were subject to the Pope and, by his donation of America to Spain, to Ferdinand and Isabella.
If monogeneticism in this instance worked against the Indians, in 1537 it worked for them. The Pope denounced as satellites of the Devil those who claimed the Indians “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service,” a view common among the conquistadors. The Pope proclaimed “that the Indians are truly men, and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.”16
Thus it was decided by Rome that the aborigines of America were worthy of conquest and too worthy to be treated as domesticated animals. Again and again during the centuries of European imperalism, the Christian view that all men are brothers was to lead to persecution of non-Europeans—he who is my brother sins to the extent that he is unlike me—and to the tempering of imperialism with mercy—he who is my brother deserves brotherly love.
The papacy remained undisturbed in its confidence that the book of Genesis provided all the paleontology that a Christian needed. But America was such a very square peg to fit into the round hole of Genesis. In 1520 Philippus Paracelsus, whose mind was ballasted with little dogma of any variety, is supposed to have said that no one would easily believe that “those who have been found in the out-of-the-way islands … are the posterity of Adam and Eve. … It is most probable that they are descended from another Adam.”17 Joseph de Acosta was a churchman, but the contrast between the creatures of the Old and New Worlds, which he had seen with his own eyes, also led him to the brink of heresy. There are in America, he wrote,
a thousand different kindes of birdes and beasts of the forrest, which have never beene knowne, neither in shape nor name; and whereof there is no mention made, neither among the Latins nor Greeks, nor any other nations of the world.
He offered the explanation that “it may be God hath made a new creation of beasts.”18
The problem of America troubled the seventeenth century, too, helping to lead some few men into unorthodoxy and at least one right into jail. If Eden and Mount Ararat were both in Asia, then how could man and animals be in America? The most influential of the men opposed to orthodox views on the subject was Isaac de La Peyrère. He was more inspired to heresy by biblical ambiguities and references in ancient documents to seemingly pre-Adamite events in Egypt and Phoenicia than by the enigma of a biologically unique America, but his theory provided explanations for all three sources of confusion. Adam was the product of a second creation and father only to the Jews. The first Creation, which preceded that of Adam by a very long time, had included the creation of the ancestors of all the non-Jews—the pre-Adamites—and the Flood had been only Palestinian in extent and had not affected them. Among the descendants of the pre-Adamites were “the Mexicans whom Columbus discovered not so long ago.” La Peyrère's book was burned and he was arrested, but polygeneticism lived on.19
In 1857 Philip L. Sclater, one of Britain's leading zoologists and originator of the six faunal zone scheme referred to previously, read before the Linnean Society a paper in which he showed himself to be one who still entertained the idea of multiple creations. This idea would explain how his birds and all other land animals, including man, were distributed as they were. Like all polygeneticists, he started with the false premise that
every species of animal must have been created within or over the geographical area which it now occupies. Such being the case, if it can be shown that the areas now occupied by the primary varieties of mankind correspond with the primary zoological provinces of the globe it would be an inevitable deduction, that these varieties of Man had their origin in the different parts of the world where they are now found, and the awkward necessity of supposing the introduction of the red man into America by Behring's Straits, and of colonizing Polynesia by stray pairs of Malays floating over the water like cocoa-nuts, and all similar hypotheses would be avoided.
It was in this paper that Sclater put forth his hypothesis that the birds of the world are distributed in six distinctive regions. These regions he divided into two groups, one for the Old World and one for the New. The titles he chose for the two prove him a brother of Acosta: Creatio Palaeogeana and Creatio Neogeana,20 or Old World and New World Creation.
Sclater was among the last of the respectable polygeneticists. In 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace presented essays to the Linnean Society in which they put forth the modern theory of evolution. One year later, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, shattering the concept of multiple creations (while also knocking loose a large part of the foundation of traditional Judaism and Christianity). Once the new theory of evolution was accepted, polygeneticism lived on only as a rationale for racism, in which capacity it still serves.21
The real source of conflict between orthodox Christians and the tiny but stubborn number of polygeneticists was that Christians had no adequate concept of change on which to base an explanation of how the earth and the life on earth had reached their present condition. The concept of evolution had existed from at least the time of Aristotle, but it was neither popular nor orthodox: the task of the Christian philosopher and biologist was to provide man with the intellectual means to freeze reality into a stable system, and not to send it slipping and tumbling down the slope of time toward no destination in particular. The accepted belief was that all the kinds of plants and animals, plus the first two people, had been created during the first week of time and that all species were complete as of that first Sunday and were without possibility of developing into new species.
Even if the European had had the concept of evolution to help him explain how the differences between the Old and New Worlds had come to be, he had no concept whatsoever of the amount of time the forces of evolution had been working on the life forms of this planet. A theory of biological evolution is useful only when thought of in terms of millions of years. The Requirement of 1512 set the date of creation at five thousand years prior to the writing of that document. By the next century the date had been calculated with more exactness. Bernabé Cobo, the great expert on America, stated in 1651 that God had created the world “5,199 years before the birth of his Only Begotten Son and Redeemer our Jesus Christ.” James Ussher, bishop of Ireland and a contemporary of Cobo, reckoned the date to be 4004 b.c. Disagreements on the exact age of the universe became more and more common, but everyone did agree that Adam had been dead for only a few thousand years. There had barely been enough time for mankind to move from pictography to the alphabet, and not nearly enough for the differentiation of the llama from the dromedary or the jaguar from the leopard.22 Not until the geologist Sir Charles Lyell published his work in the 1830s did man really begin to know how old the world is, and how long natural forces have had to mold life into different forms.
It was approximately 60 million years ago that the world began to resemble the one we now know. The grasses, deciduous trees and shrubs, and all the plants that flower were already pushing in beside the ferns and conifers and were already beginning to differentiate into the quarter million species that now exist.23 The dinosaurs died off and the mammals became prevalent, differentiating into bats and whales, sloths and antelopes, and, after most of the 60 million years had passed, men.
If one has some slight familiarity with this 60 million year period, the Cenozoic Era, and the course of evolution during it, then the difference between the Old and New World flora and fauna can be explained without resorting to extra creations. The course of that evolution was profoundly influenced by the emerging and submerging of the various great land bridges of the world, joining or separating the continents where various experiments in new types of life were going on. The most obvious example of the importance of a land bridge or, in this case, the lack of one, is Australia, which has been separated from Asia since the very beginning of the Cenozoic, and where the rule of the marsupials was nearly uncontested until the arrival of the Europeans and their placental mammals: horses, sheep, rabbits, and so on.24
The existing intercontinental land bridge, which was probably under water for the longest time in the Cenozoic, is the isthmus of Central America. For tens of millions of years, beginning early in the Cenozoic, South America was another Australia, where mammals that could not have survived the competition of their cousins in the Old World and North America proliferated. Then the land connection with the north reappeared, and many of the species native to South America disappeared beneath the wave of more efficient mammals rolling down from North America. The few who survived were those which missed by the widest margins fitting sixteenth-century European preconceptions of what mammals should be: the armadillo, tree sloth, and American anteater.25
Far to the northwest of the Central American isthmus is the most notoriously retractable land bridge of them all and one which had the greatest influence on evolution during the Cenozoic. It now lies beneath the Bering Sea, but it was once 1,500 kilometers of dry land from north to south, and thousands of species of plants and animals, super- and submicroscopic, moved across it from world to world. If the water level today fell forty meters, the Bering Strait would again be dry land.26
The existence or nonexistence of an isthmus between the Old and New Worlds began to fascinate Europeans almost as soon as they realized that Columbus had found not Asia but a new continent. The possibility of a land bridge from Tierra del Fuego to Asia never stirred as much interest as the possibility of an Arctic equivalent. The English, finding the southern sea passages to Cathay and the Spice Islands an Iberian monopoly, permitted their desire for a waterway to the Orient to persuade them that such a bridge did not exist between America and Siberia, and therefore that northwest and northeast passages between England and the Orient did exist. Sir Humphrey Gilbert cited Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Strabo, and a number of contemporary geographers, none of whom had ever been within half a world of the Bering Strait, to prove “that America was an Iland; and that there lyeth a great Sea betweene it, Cathay and Greenland. …” He had not only authorities for this view but also reason: if America were connected with Asia then certainly the people of northwestern America, “hoping to have found some like commodities to their owne …,” or the Tartars, fleeing the cold and poverty of their country, would each have found their way to the other's continent. Furthermore, “there hath not at ani time been found any of ye beasts proper to Cathay, or Tartarie, etc., in America: nor of those proper to America, in Tartarie, Cathay, etc., or ani part of Asia.” Off the English sailed to freeze their toes and lose their lives from Nova Zembla to Hudson Bay.27
Sir Francis Drake was among the first to disagree with Gilbert on the basis of practical experience. Drake coasted along California and northward in the 1570s, probably looking for an easy way home with his Spanish loot, but found no indication of a strait. The search was given up because of “the large spreading of the Asian and American continent which (somewhat northward of these parts), if they be not fully joined, yet seem they to come very neer one to the other.”28
Joseph de Acosta reasoned along a different line than in his statement quoted on page 12 and re-created the isthmus that Gilbert had erased. If God had created life only once and if all land animals had passed through only one ark, then how could there be animals in both the eastern and western hemispheres if the two worlds were and always had been separate? “I have long beleeved that the one and the other world are joyned and continued with another in some part, or at least very neere.”29
The participants in this argument, which lasted until the eighteenth-century voyages of Bering and others, were each both right and wrong. Their disagreements not only reflected their ignorance about the northern Pacific but also the simple fact that evidence existed for both the union and disunion of Asia and America. The history of the land bridge area has been one of successive submergences and emergences. During the former periods the Old and New Worlds developed independently and divergently. During the latter, biological revolutions swept both worlds, as life forms native to one, foreign to the other, crossed over into virgin territory.30
It is probable that these cross-migrations usually affected the New World more profoundly than the Old, because the latter, being larger, usually had produced a greater variety of life forms during the period of separation and isolation. But America, too, developed unique and long-lived life forms. The modern camel and horse, for instance, are North American in origin. The camels migrated west to become the dromedaries and Bactrian camels of Asia and Africa, and south to become the llamas of Peru. The horses trotted along with them into Asia and thence to Africa and Europe. Both animals disappeared in their homeland, the last of them dying during the latter millennia of the last epoch of the Cenozoic, the Pleistocene.31
The demise of the horse and camel in North America is part of one of the most mysterious chapters of the last million years. In a period of about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago at least two hundred kinds of animals disappeared, leaving us to inherit, in the words of Alfred Russel Wallace, “a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strongest forms have recently disappeared. …” Mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, saber-toothed tigers, woolly rinoceroses, giant bisons, and others, all disappeared completely. The extinct animals were usually of the largest kinds, although the huge whales in the oceans were not affected. There was no dramatic decrease in the ranks of the plants. These large land mammals were not replaced by similarly sized rivals. This is extinction without replacement, which makes it something of an oddity.32
The explanation that climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene caused these extinctions is not satisfactory. Climatic changes were gradual, which would have permitted the animals to adjust by means of the survival and reproduction of the fittest. Or the animals could simply have moved over a period of generations to regions where the climate was comfortable for them. Disease, cosmic rays, “racial senility,” and other such deus ex machina explanations have been offered, but why would these forces have affected only the largest animals?33
The last of the large mammals to attain its present form and to arrive in America was man, and a currently popular explanation for the Pleistocene extinctions points to him as the extinguisher. He, seeking food in quantity, would choose the large rather than the small herbivores to prey upon. As these herbivores decreased in numbers, so would the large carnivores and scavengers that depended on them for food. The chief weakness of this theory is that it obliges one to believe that a scattered population of Stone Age hunters could have eliminated millions of gigantic and presumably very dangerous animals. The Indians of recorded history never wiped out the herds of American bison, even with the help of musket and rifle. Could prehistoric hunters have eliminated similarly large herds of scores of different animals, even if they had thousands of years to try?34
It is much easier to deprecate the prehistoric hunters as the great murderers of the Pleistocene than to suggest a better explanation for the Pleistocene extinctions. The theory seems more satisfactory for America than for the Old World. In Australia, Madagascar, New Zealand, and America—the areas most difficult to reach from the lands of man's origin—the extinctions took place most recently, within the last 15,000 years. The most inaccessible of all these areas, except possibly for New Zealand, was America.35
During the late Pleistocene the Bering land bridge was high and dry for long periods, and a corridor free from ice led down from Alaska between the glaciers through Canada. It is generally thought that during one or more of these periods men crossed from Siberia into America. The first came possibly as long ago as 28,000 years, and there is no proof that there were not even earlier migrations. These people, who for many thousands of years had been perfecting their hunting skills against animals who had had an equal amount of time to adjust to these two-legged predators, moved into a world teeming with animals which had never seen a single man. The hunting was superb.36
Whether it was some proto-Indian who drove his spear into the heart of the last mammoth in the Americas is, of course, a matter for debate. It is true that man's arrival and the disappearance of the larger animals in America do roughly coincide. And the advantage of “the element of surprise” which the abruptness of man's appearance in the Americas gave him would help account for the strange fact that the extinction of the larger fauna in the New World was more thorough than in the Old.
The presence of so many fewer large animals in the western than in the eastern hemisphere struck the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europeans as very odd, indeed. The eighteenth-century naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, leaped to the conclusion that if the quadrupeds of the New World were inferior to those of the Old in size, then so was most everything else American inferior to its counterpart in Europe, Africa, and Asia. One of the most glaring examples of American inferiority, according to Buffon and those of his school, was the American Indian. He was inferior in technology, political organization, military prowess, resistance to disease, intelligence, and—most important of all—in “ardour for women.”37 In the twentieth century, we are perhaps sophisticated enough to grant that the Indians have as rich a sex life as any people and also that their “stupidity” was simply evidence of the cultural gap between Europeans and Indians, but we must admit that the Old World snob was roughly correct in much of the rest of his estimation. When Columbus arrived, even the most advanced Indians were barely out of the Stone Age, and their armies were swept aside by tiny bands of conquistadors. Their agriculture was impressive, but they had few domesticated animals, and those were not very impressive. What European could but smile when comparing the Indian's dog, turkey, duck, llama, and guinea pig to his own horse, ass, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese? The Indians died in droves of diseases the Europeans, Africans, and Asians had accommodated themselves to long, long ago. As one indignant Spaniard put it, Indians “died like fish in a bucket.”38
It was clear and still is clear that American Indians are different from the rest of mankind in a number of important ways, none of which worked to their advantage in their confrontation with Columbus and those who followed him. It may be accurate to say that the Indians were more different from the rest of mankind in 1492 than any other major group of humanity. A probable exception to this rule are the Australian aborigines, who were also isolated from the rest of humanity for a period of thousands of years.
The uniqueness of the American Indian is measurable. It lies not so much in his color, height, weight, bone formation, and other physical attributes—he is obviously some sort of cousin to the Mongoloid people, as Amerigo Vespucci noted—as in the physical uniformity of Indians from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Three hundred years ago Bernabé Cobo remarked on this uniformity, and many anthropologists of the twentieth century agree with him.39 There are no contrasts among the Indians to equal those between the Watutsi and pygmies, or the blond Prussians and swarthy Sicilians. It is not true that “if you have seen one Indian, you have seen them all”—no one would mistake a San Blas Indian for an Iroquois—but, to quote the physical anthropologist Frederick S. Hulse, “Compared to the diversity in bodily form and genetical constitution found among the peoples on the eastern side of the Atlantic, the American Indians show a surprising degree of uniformity.”40 Some anthropologists have gone so far as to rate the Indians not as a subgroup of the Mongoloid people, but as an entirely separate race.41
This unique uniformity is especially apparent in the distribution of blood types among American aborigines. Unlike superficial racial and cultural characteristics, blood type distribution provides a scientific way of differentiating between groups of human beings. A human's blood type is irrevocably dictated by heredity. No change in training, food, climate or anything else can alter an individual's blood type; and there is no way in which a people of blood type O, for instance, can suddenly start having great numbers of children of blood type B unless there has been an infusion of genetic material from outside the original group. It is also true that a people whose blood type distribution is, let us say, 60 percent O, 30 percent B, and 10 percent A is very unlikely to produce children or grandchildren or even great grandchildren whose blood type distribution is markedly different, unless they breed with outsiders.
The accompanying maps show dramatically how uniform and unique is the blood type distribution of the Indians.42 The maps do not prove that the American aborigines are an utterly homogeneous people. No one claims the Eskimos to be Indian. There are other ways of measuring the physical properties of the Indian population which do not produce as homogeneous a picture as do these maps.43 Even the maps for type A and type O seem to indicate that the Indians of Canada and the northernmost part of the United States and their—quite literally—blood brothers, the Athapascans of southwestern United States, have not exactly the same ancestors as the aborigines elsewhere in America. But it is still safe to say, after proper acknowledgment of the law that all generalities are false, that either something happened to kill off most of the Indians with A and B type blood, which is most unlikely, or that almost all Indians are closely related to each other.
Their uniformity of blood types becomes even more impressive when contrasted with the disuniformity of distribution in the Old World. Blood type maps of the eastern hemisphere aborigines are of great complexity, with one variety of distribution here and a different one a hundred or a thousand miles beyond. There has obviously been a great mixing of peoples in the Old World. In contrast, the American Indians are so “purebred” that T. D. Stewart states “that no population of comparable size has remained so uniform after expanding, in whatever time has been involved, over such a large area.”44
This uniformity of the Indians and the extent to which they are like and yet unlike the Mongoloid people, taken together with what we know about the Bering land bridge, suggest the following interpretation of the prehistoric history of the Indians. Some tens of thousands of years ago, when the Bering Straits were dry land, Asians began to cross into America. They were not Mongoloids, but probably of the people who were the common ancestors both of the present-day Chinese and Japanese, and of the American Indians. These immigrants and those who followed them were few in number. The climate of Siberia was such that few people lived near the Bering land bridge; hence relatively few people
made the journey to America. The question of how the large Indian population of 1492 could have descended from only a few ancestors is easily answered. To give an extreme example, only four hundred males and females, reproducing once every twenty years at an increase per generation of only 1.4 percent would have 10 million sons and daughters in 15,000 years.45
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Then 10,000 years or so ago, the Bering land bridge submerged again. Thereafter very few types of terrestrial life found their, way from the one world to the other. Homo sapiens and moose and elm trees and all the life forms of the two worlds were left in isolation, and the differences between the geographically separated life forms began to become greater. A few scattered groups of men continued to find their way from Siberia to Alaska, just as a tiny number of Asians, Polynesians, and Americans undoubtedly managed to drift across the Pacific, perhaps carrying ideas and a handful or two of seeds. It has been demonstrated to be possible: in 1815 a Japanese junk set out from Osaka to Yedo, lost its masts and rudder, and drifted seventeen months before the three men left alive out of a crew of at least seventeen were taken aboard an American brig off Santa Barbara, California.46 But quantitatively the basis constitution of the human population of the New World as it existed from circa 8,000 b.c. to 1492 a.d. was completed by the former date. This is also true of the plants and animals that man in the New World was to live with and learn to adapt to his own purposes.
The ancestors of the Indians crossed into the isolation of America probably before agriculture had been invented, and certainly before the people of Siberia had taken it up. The first Americans entered the cul-de-sac of the New World before the major domestications of wild animals had been accomplished, or they came at a time when only the first domestications had taken place, such as that of the dog.47 They crossed over long before the foundation of the first Sumerian city had been laid, long before the Chinese began to write. The American Indians developed their ways of life in very nearly complete isolation.
That isolation not only hampered the growth of their civilizations, but also weakened their defenses against the major diseases of mankind. In the first place, the climate of Siberia, the land bridge, and Alaska screened out many diseases: the cold killed the germs and, more important, the cold and the rigor of the life in those latitudes eliminated all humans suffering from debilitating diseases. In the crudest sense, the life of the earliest Americans was a matter of the survival of the fittest.48
These first emigrants carried few diseases with them and found no humans in America, diseased or healthy. They lived, died, and bred alone for generation after generation, developing unique cultures and working out tolerances for a limited, native American selection of pathological micro-life. When the isolation of the New World was broken, when Columbus brought the two halves of this planet together, the American Indian met for the first time his most hideous enemy: not the white man nor his black servant, but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.
NOTES
1. The theoretical basis of this chapter and this book in general is neatly summed up in George Gaylord Simpson, The Geography of Evolution, 69–132.
2. Christopher Columbus, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison, 72–73, 84.
3. Christopher Columbus, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison., 66, 90.
4. Hui-Lin Li, “Floristic Relationships Between Eastern Asia and Eastern North America,” 403; Henry A. Gleason and Arthur Cronquist, The Natural Geography of Plants, 34; Ronald Good, The Geography of the Flowering Plants, 64.
5. Jean de Léry, Journal de Bord de Jean de Léry, ed. M. R. Mayeux, 129, 293; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, 117–133; Stefan Lorant, ed., The New World, 230–262.
6. Carl H. Lindroth, The Faunal Connections Between Europe and North America, 15–134; Léry, Journal, 239. The tapir is an odd sort of animal with a stubby semi-prehensile nose; at the most, it is only three feet high and six feet long. The best that Léry could say of the Brazilian tapir was that it was something like an ass, something like a cow, and entirely unlike either.
7. Martin Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Introductio by Martin Waldseemüller … To Which Are Added the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, trans. Joseph Fischer and Franz von Wiesser, 106; Simpson, Geography of Evolution, 167–208.
8. Pedro Castañeda, The Journey of Coronado, trans. George Parker Winship, 140–141; Frederick W. Hodge and Theodore H. Lewis, eds., Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543, 210.
9. Samuel Champlain, Narrative of a Voyage to the West Indies and Mexico in the Years 1599–1602, trans. Alice Wilmere, 36.
10. Philip J. Darlington, Zoogeography, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, 423; Philip L. Sclater, “On the General Geographical Distribution of the Members of the Class Aves,” 137–145; Alfred Russel Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, l: 58ff.
11. Wallace, Distribution of Animals, 2: 5–19, 115–125. For a corrective for Wallace's oversimplification, see Darlington, Zoogeography, 442–449.
12. Léry, Journal, 406.
13. Joseph de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Edward Grimston, 1: 90; André Thevet, The New Found Worlde, or Antartike, trans. Thomas Hacket, 138.
14. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Montaigne, Selected Essays, ed. Blanchard Bates, 77.
15. Quoted in T. Bendyshe, “The History of Anthropology,” 365.
16. Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History, 3; Lewis Hanke, ed., History of Latin American Civilization, Sources and Interpretations, 1: 123–124; Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, 33, 72–73.
17. Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology,” 353.
18. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 277–278.
19. Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology,” 355–366, Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, 182ff; Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians, European Concepts, 1492–1729, 139–140; David Rice McKee, “Issac de La Peyrère, A Precursor of Eighteenth Century Critical Deists,” 456–485; Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, 207–253; Isaac de La Peyrère, Prae-Adamitae, 23.
20. Sclater, “Geographical Distribution of the Class Aves,” 131, 145.
21. For an example of polygenetic racism, see Alexander Winchell, Preadamites, or a Demonstration of the Existence of Men Before Adam.
22. Bernabé Cobo, Obras, 1: 13–14; Hanke, Latin American Civilization, 1: 124; Paul Hazard, The European Mind (1680–1715), 47.
23. Raymond C. Moore, Introduction to Historical Geology, 578–579.
24. Edwin H. Gilbert, Evolution of the Vertebrates, 424.
25. Edwin H. Gilbert, Evolution of the Vertebrates., 262–267, 338, 348.
26. David M. Hopkins, “The Cenozoic History of Beringia—A Synthesis,” 410; Hansjurgen Müller-Beck, “On Migrations Across the Bering Land Bridge in the Upper Pleistocene,” 380.
27. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Voyage and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1: 137–142.
28. Quoted in A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethans and America, 29.
29. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 60.
30. Hopkins, “Cenozoic History,” 451ff.
31. Hopkins, “Cenozoic History,”., 475; Colbert, Evolution of Vertebrates, 360, 364, 386.
32. Wallace, Distribution of Animals, 1: 150; P. S. Martin, “Prehistoric Overkill,” 78.
33. William E. Edwards, “The Late-Pleistocene Extinction and Diminution in Size of Many Mammalian Species,” 143–145.
34. Martin, “Prehistoric Overkill,” 75–120.
35. Martin, “Prehistoric Overkill,”., 77.
36. Müller-Beck, “Migration,” 373, 381; Edwards, “Late-Pleistocene Extinction,” 145–148.
37. Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth Century Controversy, 53ff.
38. Quoted in D. P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes, 5–6.
39. Cobo, Obras, 2: 13; Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Introductio, 92.
40. Frederick S. Hulse, The Human Species, An Introduction to Physical Anthropology, 346.
41. J. V. Neel and F. M. Salzano, “A Prospectus for Genetic Studies on the American Indians,” 249.
42. A. E. Mourant, Ada Kópec, and Kazimiera Domaniewska-Sobczak, The ABO Groups, Comprehensive Tables and Maps of World Distribution, 268–270.
43. Neel and Salvano, “Genetic Studies,” 253.
44. T. D. Stewart, “A Physical Anthropologist's View of the Peopling of the New World,” 262.
45. W. S. Laughlin, “Human Migration and Permanent Occupation in the Bering Sea Area,” 416.
46. Charles W. Brooks, Japanese Wrecks Stranded and Picked up Adrift in the North Pacific Ocean, 10.
47. Fredeick E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, 436–439.
48. Stewart, “Peopling of the New World,” 265.