ABSTRACT
When European immigrants fi rst encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Americas during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, the latter almost certainly had a more sophisticated understanding of the basic principles of ecology and possibly even of evolutionary biology (J. Marshall 1995, 2001; see below). The ignorance of the average American of European heritage was quite striking. In 1907 the American philosopher Henry Adams said in reference to the year of his birth, “In essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy, history, literature, art, and the concepts of science the American of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900” (Adams 1918).
