More Animal/Human distinctions

One of the things Krech's book accomplishes is make the native America seem closer to the state of humans today. Whatever subconcious views we may have had relating the Native Americans of thousands of years ago to a more animalistic human who is naturally very much in tune with the processes of nature, are completely gone after reading this book, thanks to passages about true economic, hunting, land use, etc. practices. One of the most interesting lines in the book for me is found on page 46 about the disapearance of the Hohokam:

"They upset whatever balance existed between themselves and their environment."

THEY upset...not the balance was upset and they disapeared. It shows the weight we put on the idea of humans, any human in any time period, having total power to control the environment. It is a fundamental difference between the animals that really are interconnected with nature and must adapt to their environment. If an animal goes extinct it is through no fault of their own except that they couldn't develop a random mutation that made them more successful than the next guy. But for humans, even the idealized Noble Savage, it is because they somehow messed something up.