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To: ManyMoose who wrote (225362)	10/22/2007 11:13:22 AM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793955

The modern holiday of Halloween has it's origins in the ancient Gaelic festival known as Samhain. The Festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is regarded as 'The Celtic New Year'.[2] Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The Ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the deceased would come back to life and cause havoc such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, where the bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.[3][4] When the Romans occupied Celtic territory, several Roman traditions were also incorporated into the festivals. Feralia, a day celebrated in late October by the Romans for the passing of the dead as well as a festival which celebrated the Roman Goddess Pomona, the goddess of fruit were incorporated into the celebrations. The symbol of Pomona was an apple, which is a proposed origin for the tradition of bobbing for apples on Halloween.[5]

To: ManyMoose who wrote (225362)	10/22/2007 11:30:32 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

They had been farming and burning off woods for thousands of years, ever since they came over from Siberia Yep. At its height before 1400, the Indian city of Cahokia had a larger population than contemporary London or Paris. One of the probable reasons the civilization collapsed when the climate cooled around 1300 was environmental damage. Their civ depended on heavy use of wood and they clearcut their surroundings and over-planted the soil.

To: ManyMoose who wrote (225362)	10/22/2007 11:52:06 AM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

I’m more inclined to accept the lower estimates… Recent estimates for the size of the aggregate North American Indian population in A.D. 1492 vary from about 18 million to less than 2 million. The unusually favorable archaeological characteristics of Mohawk Iroquois sites in eastern New York have allowed a detailed demographic reconstruction of one case for the period A.D. 1400 to 1776. The case indicates that exogenous epidemics did not reach the region until the 17th century and supports arguments favoring the lower populations estimates for North America as a whole. sciencemag.org Stannard (history, Univ. of Hawaii-Manoa), whose previous works include Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory ( LJ 6/1/80) and Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact (Univ. of Hawaii Pr., 1989), turns his attention to the devastating impact of the European intrusion into the New World. He argues that with more than 100 million people the Americas were not the unpopulated open spaces so often described and notes the squalor and disease that dominated Europe in contrast to the relative peace and harmony that prevailed in the New World. amazon.com * * *

To: ManyMoose who wrote (225362)	10/22/2007 3:14:21 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793955

Most of these people were agriculturists, not the idyllic nomads depicted in "Dances With Wolves." In what we call "the West," I know the Navajos were farming. I believe most of the rest were hunter/gatherers. The Navajos could well have learned to farm from the Spanish, I don't know for sure. Remember, they had no "domestic" animals. For instance, the lives and culture of the tribes in the West were drastically changed by their acquisition of horses from the Spanish long before other Europeans showed up. "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" is a well-known 1997 book by Jared Diamond. He points out that the lack of cows in the Western Hemisphere drastically limited the agriculture of the Natives. Same with pigs. They couldn't raise animals for meat because they didn't have any tame ones to speak of. They weren't "farming" Buffalo. In the East, the Tribes were mixed. It's hard to get info on what they were doing when the White man showed up, because the immediate intermingling of the first white men with the tribes ended up with descendants of mixed marriages leading the tribes, and many being led by all-white Chiefs. By the time accounts of their daily life were written, it had already been Europeanized. Since none of them had a written language, the oral tradition of their history is open to doubt. I am highly suspicious of the written versions of the history here in the Islands. People who memorized this had good reason to sanitize it. For instance, we do know for sure that after Cook was killed by them during the first week of contact, his returned body was partially eaten when the ship got it back. But you had better not bring this up when discussing "early days." Added to our knowledge of Native history in the US is the historical filter set up by the fact that our recent historians tend to be followers of Rousseau and/or Multiculturalists. They are starting with "The Noble Savage" and the "They were a poor but proud people" outlook. You run into this all the time here. Reminds me of the crap we Fathers fed our boys in the "Indian Guides" program. So early accounts of the Indians in America is discounted by present-day Historians as colored by the racism of the settlers and their desire to make the Indians look bad. Tough to find what was really going on.

To: ManyMoose who wrote (225362)	11/5/2007 2:10:32 PM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793955

Cloning could save ancient redwoods Fri November 2, 2007 cnn.com SAN GERONIMO, California (AP) -- An arborist on a mission to preserve and restore Northern California's towering redwoods has begun taking cuttings that he hopes can be used to make genetic clones of the ancient trees. On a recent foggy day in Marin County, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of San Francisco, David Milarch assembled a team of crack tree climbers who used ropes and harnesses to clamber more than 100 feet (30 meters) into the treetops at Roy's Redwoods Preserve. The workers clipped boughs from some of the preserve's oldest and tallest trees to get genetically pure samples of some of nature's ultimate survivors. Milarch, 58, believes these trees can provide the toughest possible stock for a kind of "genetic savings account." He hopes that material can be used to restore old-growth redwoods in their native range up and down the state. About 95 percent of the original forest has been cut down over the last few hundred years. Milarch, from the state of Michigan, recalled thinking on his first visit to Northern California in 1968 that he would see avenues of coast redwoods 100 miles (160 kilometers) long. What he found instead was a "moonscape," he said. Nearly 40 years later, Milarch has returned, and he believes the latest advances in genetic cloning could save the most ancient of these trees. "What does this tree's immune system have in it that it has survived when other trees haven't?" Milarch asked, leaning against a massive, shaggy trunk of a redwood he's dubbed "Grandma." He estimates the tree is at least 800 years old. Average mature redwoods stand between 200 to 240 feet (60 to 73 meters) tall and have diameters of 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters). The tallest trees have been measured at more than 370 feet (112 meters), making coast redwoods the tallest living organisms in the world. The hardiest members of the species can live to be 2,000 years old. Redwoods have gained a prized status among nature lovers, but their high-quality timber has long been favored by home builders seeking the same durability that allows the trees to survive in the wild, which has led to widespread harvesting. Milarch said coast redwoods can reproduce themselves through a natural cloning process and by mating with other trees. A tree like Grandma could effectively be the latest incarnation of an individual tree that first saw daylight 20,000 years ago, he said. "If we're going to pick out the strongest, longest-lived genetics, this old gal's a survivor," Milarch said. Horticulturists and genetic engineers plan to use the samples from the Marin County redwoods to see which of several techniques -- some traditional, some cutting-edge -- work best to reproduce the trees. Milarch has high hopes for the most advanced approach, known as tissue culturing, which creates exact genetic replicas by manipulating individual cells. Not everyone agrees that cloning represents the most effective way to preserve redwoods. Conservation groups have traditionally focused on curbing development and logging along the 500-mile (800-kilometer) stretch from Big Sur to the Oregon state line where most coast redwoods grow. "Protecting the habitat of the species in place -- I think that's the most important approach to conservation," said Deborah Rogers, a redwood geneticist and director of conservation science for the San Diego County-based Center for Natural Lands Management. Rogers said a genetic storehouse that could protect the entire species from an unforeseen cataclysm caused by climate change or an imported disease would require samples from hundreds of trees across the state. Milarch hopes that samples from about 20 individual trees taken from ancient redwood stands in five distinct areas will be enough to get his restoration effort under way. Next he plans to solicit landowners and communities for plots of at least five acres where the clones will be planted and, ideally, interbreed. E-mail to a friend * * *