Another Look At Indians (native Americans, Amerindians)

Native Americans are often cast in the role ofDr. Richard H. Steckel and Dr. Jerome C. Rose -
victims of White aggression and unbridleddiscovered that the haleness of Native-Americans
avarice-driven or gratuitous violence, especially indeclined markedly in the 1000 years before
the territories known collectively today as theColumbus "discovered" them.
United States. But the first massacre wasThe vast majority of the skeletons showed
perpetrated by Indians in the British colonytelltale signs of advanced degenerative joint
Jamestown, in Virginia in 1622. They slaughtereddisease, deteriorating dental health, stature,
347 white men, women and children on thatanemia, arrested tissue development, infections
occasion.and trauma from injuries. These were attributed
Europeans are also accused of importingby the participants to limited diets and urban
pathogens, disease causing agents, such ascongestion. People became shorter and died earlier
smallpox and measles, malaria and yellow fever.- on average at age 35 - as the centuries passed.
Indigenous people had no immunological resistance"Pre-Columbian populations were among the
to these illnesses as they were never exposed tohealthiest and the least healthy in our sample," Dr.
them.Steckel and Dr. Rose said. "While pre-Columbian
But recent findings by a team of anthropologists,natives may have lived in a disease environment
economists and paleopathologists who havesubstantially different from that in other parts of
completed a massive study of the health ofthe globe, the original inhabitants also brought with
people living in the Western Hemisphere in the lastthem, or evolved with, enough pathogens to
7,000 years - suggest that Native American'screate chronic conditions of ill health under
health was severely run down long before theconditions of systematic agriculture and urban
Europeans delivered the coup de grace.living."
The researchers analyzed more than 12,500Moreover, there are signs that diseases hitherto
skeletons - half of them pre-Columbian - from 65thought to have been introduced by the white
sites in North and South America for evidence ofexplorers were actually indigenous.1,000-year-old
infections, malnutrition and other health problems.Peruvian mummies, for instance, were found to
The study - "The Backbone of History: Health andhave been infected with tuberculosis in their lungs.
Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere", edited by