Native American's Influence On Modern Life

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An amazing and powerful read. This covered this influence of Native Americans, or Indians as the author referred to them, on almost every aspect of modern life. Indians changed what the rest of the world ate and grew permanently. I knew that, of course. I had read elsewhere about how much of what modern people eat today came from the Americas. Imagine your daily diet without any tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, chilis, corn, beans, and much, much more. Just corn and potatoes by themselves had revolutionized agriculture forever. The author cited a comparison of European agriculture based on before potatoes and after. Compared to the wheat that was the most common staple and potatoes, the wheat was inferior in the amount of work it took to grow it, its susceptibility to weather and predators, and most especially, to the amount of calories produced versus the amount taken to work the field. Potatoes gave over three times as much return. And then the population exploded, as Europeans finally had enough to eat and to trade. And how about modern government. Think we got that from the Greeks and Romans? Think again. The US Constitution, which became the model for many other countries, was based not on the ancients but on the…show more content…
The main reason, the author felt, is not that the Indians were less advanced. It was just that they had chosen to focus on different things. Europeans used animal power, which the Indians couldn't use. The largest animal on the Americas was the llama, and it's not a beast you can plow with. The Europeans also invented machines and devices to make their work easier. But Indians had life pretty easy in some ways. Plenty of food, less trouble with fitting the environment. They had focused not on machinery or animal husbandry but on medicine, agriculture, transportation. Trouble was, none of these areas of expertise helped them stand up to an enemy that had them outmanned and

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