How did the Native Americans make rubber?

22 Mar.,2024

 

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.

“People don’t realize the ingenuity or the knowledge that native people had, and continue to have about the world around them,” explains Gaetana De Gennaro, a supervisory specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, who manages a permanent interactive exhibit on Native American inventions.

Because various Native American groups were connected through 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 the Tohono O'odham tribe in southern Arizona.

Corn

8 Incredible Inventions of the Indigenous People of the Americas

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 teosinthe, 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. 

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 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.

Kayaks

Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Inuits in kayaks in Noatak, Alaska, 1929.

The Inuit in the Arctic developed the concept of a small, narrow boat, with a sealed cockpit to protect the paddler from sinking in the event that the craft capsized, according to Canadian technology historians David Johnston and Tom Jenkins. The classic vessels were fashioned entirely from natural materials, with wood or whalebone frames covered by stitched sealskin or other animal hides. Today, the kayaks in use across the world are sometimes built from modern materials such as plastic and carbon fiber, but as De Gennaro notes, “the design is still essentially the same.”

Snow Goggles

SSPL/Getty Images & DeAgostini/Getty Images

A wooden case and pairs of snow goggles made by the Inuit people.

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.

Cable Suspension Bridges

Geraint Rowland Photography/Getty Images

The Inca bridge at Q'eswachaka, Peru.

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.

Raised-Bed Agriculture

DEA/G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images

Aztecs strengthening the land of the city of Tenochtitlan using chinampas method.

Natives in South and Central America invented the technique of enriching soil and piling it to build raised garden plots called chinampas on swampy land and in lakes, according to Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield in their Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World. The technique was a forerunner of raised-bed farming used for modern vegetable production.

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.

Anesthetics and Topical Pain Relievers

Bildagentur-Online/UIG/Getty Images

Jimson weed.

Native American healers pioneered pain relief. In what is now Virginia, natives used jimson weed (scientific name Datura stramonium) as a topical analgesic, grinding the root to make a plaster that they applied to external injuries such as cuts and bruises, according to Keoke and Porterfield’s book.

Healers also had patients ingest the plant as an anesthetic as they set broken bones. Another native remedy for pain and inflammation was tea brewed from the bark of the American black willow (Salix nigra), which contains the chemical salicin. Once it gets into the body, salicin produces salicylic acid, the active ingredient in modern aspirin tablets. Native Americans also used capsaicin, a chemical found in hot peppers, for topical pain relief, according to De Gennaro.

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.

Hammocks

MPI/Getty Images

Caribbean Indians invented the hammock as a lightweight bed for hot climate.

When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he found natives resting in hammocks, a bed made from cotton netting and suspended between two trees or poles, according to his 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 stoneseed, also known as Columbia Puccoon (Lithospermum ruderale) as an oral contraceptive, long before the pharmaceutical industry developed birth control pills.

Mouthwash

Various tribes in Northeastern North America used the wildflower goldthread (Coptis trifolia) as a mouthwash and a treatment for oral pain.

HISTORY Vault: Native American History

From Comanche warriors to Navajo code talkers, learn more about Indigenous history.

WATCH NOW
  1. a b

    Phillips, Charles "The Complete Illustrated History of the Aztec & Maya: The Definitive Chronicle of the Ancient Peoples of Central America & Mexico - Including the Aztec, Maya, Olmec, Mixtec, Toltec & Zapotec" 2015.

  2. a b

    Froman, Frances & Keye, Alfred J. "English-Cayuga/Cayuga-English Dictionary" 2014.

  3. ^

    Filloy Nadal discusses the Aztecs' use of "ancient rolling technique" (page 30) while Ortiz discusses the use of this technique by the Olmecs (page 244).

  4. ^

    Miles, Susanna W, "An Analysis of the Modern Middle American Calendars: A Study in Conservation." In Acculturation in the Americas. Edited by Sol Tax, p. 273. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

  5. ^Hirst, Kris (January 20, 2019). "The History and Domestication of Cassava". ThoughtCo. Dotdash Publishing Family . Cassava (Manihot esculenta), also known as manioc, tapioca, yuca, and mandioca, is a domesticated species of tuber, a root crop originally domesticated perhaps as long ago as 8,000–10,000 years ago, in southern Brazil and eastern Bolivia along the southwestern border of the Amazon basin. Cassava is today a primary calorie source in tropical regions around the world, and the sixth most important crop plant worldwide.

  6. ^

    "Chumash Indians-Sports and Recreation". Retrieved 2008-09-16.

  7. ^[1] . Lodestone Compass: Chinese or Olmec Primacy?. Retrieved February 2015.
  8. ^

    H. Lechtman, "A Pre-Columbian Technique for Electrochemical Plating of Gold and Silver on Copper Objects," Journal of Metals 31 (1979): 154–60

  9. ^

    New perspectives on Moche Metallurgy: Techniques of Gilding Copper at Loma Negra, Northern Peru, Heather Lechtman, Antonieta Erlij, and Edward J. Barry online abstract via www.jstor.org

  10. ^Chazan, Michael (2008). World Prehistory and Archaeology: Pathways through Time. Pearson Education, Inc. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-205-40621-0.

  11. a b

    Chafe, Wallace L. "Handbook of the Seneca Language (North American Indian Languages Edition)" 2007.

  12. ^Staller, John E.; Carrasco, Michael (2009). Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. p. 317. ISBN 978-1-4419-0471-3.

  13. ^Aveni, Anthony F., Gibbs, Sharon L., Hartung, Horst (June 1975). "The Caracol Tower at Chichen Itza: An Ancient Astronomical Observatory?". Science. 188 (4192): 977–985. Bibcode:1975Sci...188..977A. doi:10.1126/science.188.4192.977. PMID 17759669. S2CID 10865295.

  14. ^Weatherford, Jack (2010). Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World. p. 240. ISBN 9780307717153.

  15. a b

    Jahner, Elaine A. & DeMallie, Raymond J. "Lakota Myth" 2006.

  16. ^

    Ebberts, Derek (9 March 2015). "To Brew or Not to Brew: A Brief History of Beer in Canada". Manitoba Historical Society. Manitoba Historical Society. Retrieved 28 January 2017. "Quebec was the geographic epicentre of the development and expansion of the brewing industry in Canada."

  17. ^

    D'altroy, Terence N. (2001). 18

  18. ^

    Buechel, Eugene & Manhart S.J., Paul "Lakota Dictionary: Lakota-English / English-Lakota, New Comprehensive Edition" 2002.

How did the Native Americans make rubber?

List of pre-Columbian inventions and innovations of Indigenous Americans

Are you interested in learning more about Hot Sale Cnc Plastic Machined Parts Supplier, Longya Rubber plastic, Pp Board Price? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!