american-holocaust

BEFORE COLUMBUS 11of the size of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas. In the 1940sand 1950s conventional wisdom held that the population of the entirehemisphere in 1492 was little more than 8,000,000-with fewer than1,000,000 people living in the region north of present-day Mexico. Today,few serious students of the subject would put the hemispheric figure at lessthan 75,000,000 to 100,000,000 (with approximately 8,000,000 to12,000,000 north of Mexico), while one of the most well-regarded specialistsin the field recently has suggested that a more accurate estimatewould be around 145,000,000 for the hemisphere as a whole and about18,000,000 for the area north of Mexico. 13IIIIn the most fundamental quantitative ways, then, recent scholarship hasbegun to redirect inquiry and expose falsehoods that have dominated characterizationsof the Americas' native peoples for centuries-although verylittle of this research has yet found its way into textbooks or other nontechnicalhistorical overviews. It now appears likely, for example, that thepeople of the so-called New World were already well-established residentsof plains, mountains, forests, foothills, and coasts throughout the WesternHemisphere by the time the people of Europe were scratching their firstcarvings onto cave walls in the Dordogne region of France and northernSpain. It also is almost certain that the population of the Americas (andprobably even Meso- and South America by themselves) exceeded thecombined total of Europe and Russia at the time of Columbus's first voyagein 1492. And there is no doubt at all, according to modern linguisticanalysis, that the cultural diversity of the Americas' pre-Columbian indigenouspeoples was much greater than that of their Old World counterparts.14A bit of common sense might suggest that this should not be surprising.After all, North and South America are four times the size of Europe.But common sense rarely succeeds in combating cultural conceit. And culturalconceit has long been the driving force behind the tales most Europeanand white American historians have told of the European invasion ofthe Americas.The native peoples of the Americas are far from unique, of course, intraditionally having the basic elements of their historical existence willfullymisperceived. In his sweeping and iconoclastic study of IJ,!Odern Africa, forinstance, Ali A. Mazrui makes the cogent point that ethnocentrism has soshaped Western perceptions of geography that the very maps of the worldfound in our homes and offices and classrooms, based on the famous Mercatorprojection, dramatically misrepresent the true size of Africa by artificiallydeflating its land area (and that of all equatorial regions of theworld) in comparison with the land areas of Europe and North America. 15Because the Mercator map exaggerates the distance between the lines of