But archaeology, and history, tell a different story: that Native Americans before 1492 seemed to be, well, people.
Courtesy Gregory Springer, Ohio University
This stalagmite, found in a West Virginia cave, showed a major change in the area's local ecosystem at about 100 B.C.
The latest evidence for this comes from scientists at Ohio University, who have made a startling connection between Native Americans and something we tend to think of as a modern industrial problem: climate change. In fact, their analysis of a stalagmite in West Virginia suggests that Native Americans were making a less than trivial contribution to greenhouse gases long before the first mills started appearing in 19th-century America.
The researchers' chemical analysis of the stalagmite pointed to a major change in the local ecosystem around 100 B.C., which piqued their interest because archaeologists had found evidence of a Native American community in the area about 2,000 years ago.
In addition, an examination of local stream sediments showed high levels of charcoal beginning around the same time.
Taken together, the researchers said, the evidence suggests that the Native Americans were clearing and burning the forest for agricultural purposes -- and pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere all the while.
"They had achieved a pretty sophisticated level of living that I don't think people have fully appreciated," Gregory Springer, associate geology professor at Ohio University and lead author of the study, said in a press release. "They were very advanced, and they knew how to get the most out of the forests and landscapes they lived in."
Native Americans may have changed the landscape in other ways that we tend not to imagine. For example, some suspect that the great roaming buffalo herds -- that symbol of the untamed West -- were largely a human creation. The inhabitants of the Great Plains would control the herds using fire, the theory goes, and stampede them off cliffs in order to harvest them.
There may have been far more people, too, than was previously thought. Some modern estimates put the population of pre-Columbian America at above 100 million; in his book "1491," author Charles C. Mann suggests that there may even have been more people living in America than in Europe.
When Europeans arrived, however, infectious diseases like smallpox traveled faster than the colonists themselves, leading to a decimated view of the Americas that colored European impressions for years to come.
