I no longer spend enough time around here to keep up with all the new members and their posts so I've completely missed the posts by josepp. I saw the recent thread on the landscape beneath the ocean floor and became curious about the poster. That led me to this thread and have a couple of things to say here.

I don't see anything in the posts left by josepp to warrant the barrage of ridicule I've read here. It looks to me as though josepp has spent a great deal of time preparing his/her posts and I take his/her motive as simply a desire to share this with thoughtful people and perhaps have a reasoned discussion.

I have no academic credentials that would permit me to bless josepp's information as correct nor have I any reason to think that he/she is some kind of loony. My impression is just that he/she is interested in the subject and went to a lot of trouble to share some information with us. Mudcat isn't the Groucho Marx show. We don't get higher ratings for making fun of people. What's the deal here?

More to the point, I'm currently reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a 2005 book by well known science writer Charles C. Mann. It deals with the Americas prior to the incursion of Europeans and includes a lot of information that has been only recently discovered or understood.

Here is a quote from a 2006 review in American Scientist magazine by Michael Coe.

It is a rare textbook on world history that does not begin its account of the past in the Western Hemisphere with the European invasion that took place soon after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Almost all of the achievements of Pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations have been systematically neglected or depreciated by most Western-oriented scholars. How was it that small bands of gold-hungry conquistadores could have defeated the armies of empires with populations that numbered in the millions? Was much of North America an almost empty land waiting to be developed by more advanced colonists?

In his ambitious new book, 1491, accomplished science writer Charles C. Mann provides answers to such questions and poses many more that have been raised by recent anthropological and archaeological research. He concludes that in 1491 the Western Hemisphere was (as it had been throughout much of its long history) "a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere." Of course, to archaeologists and historians of Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Inca, Maya and Aztec, there is nothing particularly new or controversial in this statement—we have long appreciated the accomplishments and demographic size of these peoples. But what is new is Mann's revisionist view of regions that have long been thought of as lightly populated backwaters, far removed from the centers that were supposedly more civilized, such as the Amazon and the eastern United States.

It turns out that the American native populations encountered by the earliest European settlers were only five to ten percent of the populations prior to European encounters and their cultures were far older and more advanced than generally thought. I find Mann's book very interesting not to mention enlightening. I recommend it to those who share an interest in the subject.

I know nothing of the plates referenced by josepp but I think it might behoove us to update our own research before lashing out at josepp and then reply in the spirit of discussion rather than ridicule.

      - Mark