AND NOW A NEWS BULLETIN ABOUT MAMMOTHS | 2003-05-17
About ten thousand years ago there were mammoths in North America and giant sloths in South America. About that time the Indians crossed the land bridge into America.
It had always been taken for granted that "man destroyed the mammoths." I remember seeing pictures of white men in animal skins killing mammoths. It was the ice age, but everybody was depicted as being half naked, which was the signal for "barbarian."
But when it came to North America, the historians have suddenly had a Revelation.
They had routinely condemned "Man" for killing the mammoths and showed those white guys doing it. It suddenly hit them that Man, in North America, meant Native Americans, those innocent lovers of Nature.
You can almost hear the "Screech!" of brakes as historians reassess this idea that Man destroyed the mammoths. The mammoths had existed through millions of years of ice ages and hot ages, but now the historians tell us that they died out naturally at exactly the time the Indians got here.
I am sure that we will soon be told the Native Americans tried to save them.