From the tip of South America to the Arctic, Native Americans developed dozens of innovations—from kayaks, goggles, and baby bottles to birth control, genetically modified food crops, and painkillers—that allowed them to survive and thrive wherever they lived. .
In fact, the first European explorers to reach the Western Hemisphere were apparently so impressed by the achievements of the people they encountered he felt obliged dreaming up stories about Native Americans being descendants of ancient Phoenician traders or a lost tribe of Israel in an attempt to explain the source of their technological prowess.
“People don't realize the ingenuity or the knowledge that the locals had and continue to have about the world around them,” explains Gaetana De Gennaro, supervisor at National Museum of the American Indian in New York, who manages a permanent interactive exhibition about Native American inventions.
Because different Native American groups were connected by trade routes, new inventions created by one group could quickly spread from North to South and East to West, according to De Gennaro, a member of Tohono O'odham tribe in southern Arizona.
Corn
8 Incredible Native American Inventions
It may be a crop, but corn was carefully cultivated by ancient farmers 10,000 years ago. Native Americans then taught European settlers how to grow crops.
“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 selective breeding of teosinthi, a wild grass, for many generations to enlarge the ear and develop kernels that were soft enough for humans to eat. Once they created the corn plant, their invention spread throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Rubber
Some Native American inventions were appropriated by Europeans, who had the trade 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 develop it vulcanization process in the 1830s to allow rubber to withstand heat and cold, colonists developed huge plantations of rubber trees in Asia to produce the raw material for factories. “Now, rubber is used all over the world,” says De Gennaro.
Kayaking
Inuit kayaking in Noatak, Alaska, 1929.
Inuit in the Arctic developed the idea of ​​a small, narrow boat with a sealed cockpit to protect the rower from sinking if the boat capsized, according to Canadian technology historians David Johnston and Tom Jenkins. Classical vessels were made entirely of natural materials, with wooden or whalebone frames covered with sewn sealskin or other animal skins. Today, kayaks used around the world are sometimes made from modern materials such as plastic and carbon fiberbut as De Gennaro notes, “the design remains essentially the same.”
Snow goggles
A wooden case and pairs of snow goggles made by the Inuit.
The Inuit also invented large goggles made of wood, bone, horn or leather to protect their eyes from excessive exposure to sunlight reflected off the snowfields. “They would put a slit there, to simulate the way you can squint,” says De Gennaro. “It reduced UV rays entering the eyes.” Snow goggles were the predecessors of today's sunglasses.
Cable Suspension Bridges
The Inca Bridge at Q'eswachaka, Peru.
The Incas of South America discovered how to weave mountain grasses and other vegetation into cables, sometimes as thick as a man's body, and then used them to build extremely strong suspension bridges that spanned canyons. Some of the structures extended further distances from anything European engineers of the time could build in stone, however modern steel suspension bridges eventually achieved a much larger scale. The last of the ancient Inca-style cable-stayed bridges spans a gorge in the province of Canas, Peru.
Raised bed agriculture
The Aztecs fortify the land of the city of Tenochtitlan using the chinampas method.
The indigenous people of South and Central America invented the technique of enriching the soil and piling it up to build raised garden plots called chinaba in swamps and lakes, according to Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield in Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World. The technique was his forerunner raised bed farming used for modern vegetable production.
Baby bottles
The Iroquois took dried and fattened bear gut and added a bird's feather nipple to create bottles that could be used to feed infants, according to the Iroquois historian. Arthur S. Parker.
Anesthetics and local analgesics
Jimson weed.
Native American healers pioneered pain relief. In what is now Virginia, Native Americans used jimson weed (scientific name Datura stramonium) as a topical pain reliever, rubbing the root to make a poultice that they applied to external injuries such as cuts and bruises, according to Keoke and Porterfield's book.
Healers also had patients swallow the plant as an anesthetic as they set broken bones. Another native remedy for pain and inflammation was a tea made from the bark of the American black willow tree (Salix nigra), which contains the chemical salicin. Once inside the body, salicin produces salicylic acid, the active ingredient in modern aspirin tablets. Native Americans also used capsaicina chemical found in hot peppers, for topical pain relief, according to De Gennaro.
Vocal chords of birds
Native Americans made syringes from animal bladders and hollow bird bones to inject medicine, according to Technology in America: A Brief History. The technology did not appear in European medicine until the 1850s, when Scottish doctor Alexander Wood began using needles to inject morphine to relieve pain.
Hammocks
Carib Indians invented the hammock as a light bed for warm climates.
When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he found natives resting in hammocks, a bed made of cotton netting and suspended between two trees or poles, according to letters. Hammocks were so comfortable and convenient that European sailors began sleeping in them on merchant and naval ships, according to Indians of North America.
Oral Contraceptives
The Shoshone and Navajo tribes used stone seedalso known as Columbia Puccoon (Lithospermum ruderale) as an oral contraceptive, long before the pharmaceutical industry developed birth control pills.
Oral solution
Various tribes in northeastern North America used the wildflower gold thread (Coptis trifolia) like mouthwash and a treatment for oral pain.
