California Not Always Land of Plenty

As a child I was very proud of my Native American heritage. My father's mother's mother was a full blooded Indian. I admired (and still do) a culture that lived in harmony with the world around it and hated the way they were treated. A few really good books to read: Black Elk Speaks, Ishi: The Last of His Tribe, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Even today, I keep my ear and eye out for information pertaining to native Americans. Today, I ran across an interesting article from Science Blog and traced it back to it's source (University of Utah).

Turns out that "University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years – from 1997 to 2004 – painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. He determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn’t possible, at least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years."

What was the conclusion of this painstaking work? "Broughton concluded that California wasn’t always a lush Eden before settlers arrived. Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to local extinction, and wildlife returned to “fabulous abundances” only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s."

I found this information to be very interesting. For the complete article go here.