I went to an interesting talk last night regarding Dr. Charles Kay's (you may remember him from the paper on wolves) regarding his Aboriginal Overkill hypothesis. For his PhD he went through every account of the Lewis and Clark expedition and noted when and what animals were sighted in relation to native peoples. His findings are that animals, of all species, were only found in much abundance between villages or nations at war! He concluded that it was mostly due to hunting my the Native Americans, which was supported by the data. He contends that the reason the picture of the West as teeming with large numbers of animals was our diseases had come here before many people did and killed most of the Native peoples allowing the game populations to increase greatly by the time many accounts of the West by settlers were written down. He presented relatively recent findings that show small pox may have entered this county and started killing of numerous Native Americans by as early as 1550's!
This is a much different picture of the West than what is depicted by most people histories. As such, he has now been banned from conducting research in Yellowstone (you must have a permit) because this does not support their management (or lack thereof) in the last 100yrs. In addition, he was blocked from giving a presentation to a group of Senators by the President!! His book on the subject should be on to the publishers by the end of April.
*NOTE* Before someone claims this comes from some hippy prof type, you must know this man is a very active hunter. Many slides in his presentation were of animals he's killed and he puts about $25K into application fees most every year!
I found this quite interesting and thought I'd pass it along. It also lends some support to the cause of the disappearance of the Anasazi from the Four Corners area as due to over use of resources! Modern Americans haven't been the first peoples here to have large impacts on the local evnironment. In many places of the West, the population estimates from the time of Columbus are greater than the population found there now.
This is a much different picture of the West than what is depicted by most people histories. As such, he has now been banned from conducting research in Yellowstone (you must have a permit) because this does not support their management (or lack thereof) in the last 100yrs. In addition, he was blocked from giving a presentation to a group of Senators by the President!! His book on the subject should be on to the publishers by the end of April.
*NOTE* Before someone claims this comes from some hippy prof type, you must know this man is a very active hunter. Many slides in his presentation were of animals he's killed and he puts about $25K into application fees most every year!
I found this quite interesting and thought I'd pass it along. It also lends some support to the cause of the disappearance of the Anasazi from the Four Corners area as due to over use of resources! Modern Americans haven't been the first peoples here to have large impacts on the local evnironment. In many places of the West, the population estimates from the time of Columbus are greater than the population found there now.
