From the tip of South America to the Arctic, Native Americans developed scores of innovations from kayaks, protective goggles and baby bottles to birth control, genetically modified food crops and analgesic medications that enabled them to survive and flourish wherever they lived.
In fact, early European explorers who reached the Western Hemisphere were apparently so impressed by the achievements of the people they encountered that they felt compelled to dream up stories about Native Americans being descendants of ancient Phoenician traders or a lost tribe of Israel, in an effort to explain the source of their technological prowess.
Syringes
Native Americans fashioned syringes made of animal bladders and hollow bird bones to inject medications, according to Technology in America: A Brief History. The technology didn’t show up in European medicine until the 1850s when Scottish physician Alexander Wood began using needles to inject morphine to relieve pain.
Baby Bottles
The Iroquois took dried and greased bear gut and added a nipple fashioned from a bird’s quill to create bottles that could be used to feed infants, according to Iroquois historian Arthur C. Parker.
Cable Suspension Bridges
The Inca of South America figured out how to weave mountain grasses and other vegetation into cables, sometimes as thick as a person’s body, and then used them to build super-strong suspension bridges that spanned across gorges. Some of the structures spanned longer distances than anything European engineers of the time could construct with stone, though modern steel suspension bridges eventually achieved far greater scale. The last of the ancient Inca-style grass cable suspension bridges still spans a gorge in Peru’s Canas Province.
Snow Goggles
The Inuit also invented goggles fashioned from wood, bone, antler or leather to protect their eyes from over-exposure to sunlight reflected from expanses of snow. “They’d put a slit in there, to simulate the way that you can squint,” De Gennaro says. “It cut down on the ultraviolet rays that got into the eyes.” The snow goggles were the predecessors to today’s sunglasses.
Rubber
Some Native American inventions were appropriated by the Europeans, who had the trading networks and manufacturing infrastructure to commercialize them, and who sometimes added improvements. For example, rubber was a material developed by Native Americans, and then Columbus took a rubber ball back to Europe, De Gennaro says.
After Charles Goodyear developed the vulcanization process in the 1830s to allow the rubber to withstand heat and cold, colonizers developed vast rubber tree plantations in Asia to produce the raw material for factories. “Now, rubber is used all over the world,” De Gennaro says.
Corn
It may be a crop, but corn was carefully cultivated by ancient farmers as long as 10,000 years ago. Native Americans then taught European colonists how to grow the crop.
“Everybody knows about corn, but they don’t know that it’s a food that wouldn’t exist without human intervention,” says De Gennaro.
Farmers in northern Guatemala and southern Mexico selectively bred teosinte, a wild grass, for many generations to enlarge the ear and develop kernels that were soft enough for humans to eat. Once they’d created the corn plant, their invention spread throughout the Western Hemisphere.
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