It's a "Guns, Germs, & Steel"-informed retelling of the Thanksgiving story by the author of a forthcoming book on pre-Columbian America.

In Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's 1914 painting "The First Thanksgiving," as in other depictions of the first Thanksgiving meal, natives and newcomers share their feast on a field of bluegrass, dandelion and clover - three species that did not exist in the Americas before colonization.

Clover and bluegrass, tame as accountants at home, transformed themselves into biological Attilas in the Americas. The peach proliferated in the Southeast with such fervor that farmers feared the Carolinas would become a wilderness of peach trees.

According to the Pilgrims' own accounts, natives outnumbered newcomers at the meal by almost two to one. But soon after Europeans arrived, European diseases killed 90 percent or more of the hemisphere's original inhabitants.

The huge herds and flocks seen by Europeans were evidence not of American bounty but of Indian absence.