So why did great civilizations develop in Central America but

As a dumb guess I'd say that simply because nobody found and colonized it until Columbus (excluding whatever literal whos stumbled across it and set up camps), and even then it was an extremely slow trickle of people until some time in the 1700s when full on colonization started.

The native Americans were there however, and they had a stable way of life. They didn't have huge numbers but they were successful, they lived in balance with their environment and has no need or desire to form a huge great civilization.

Anyway this is all from a non-historian's POV so there's probably a much more informed explanation.

>>2177205
climate probably

I hear that a contributing factor was that the only domesticable animal in the Americas was the llama.

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PNW natives had a massive abundance of resources, very sophisticated craftsmanship and art that is more typical of a nation state, and had massive settlements and structures. unfortunately made of wood. they also didn't write anything down. that aside, there is plenty of evidence of civilization-scale population centers all around the puget sound and northwest coast. they are the first peoples to come to mind when I imagine an advanced native culture in north america. some of these fuckers literally went whaling in canoes.

moundbuilding civilizations don't seem that impressive from what's left over, but the surplus resources required to embark on much of the massive terraforming projects east coast natives underwent reflects a complex agricultural society with heierarchies. the ridges in ohio are particularly interesting, a series of terraformed hills set apart so that natives could communicate quickly over long distances using fire or smoke. that's not something some buttfuck hunter gatherers develop.

in the southwest, there were complex pueblo cities before the drought around the beginning of the last millennium.

also, even when it comes to hunter/gatherers, the great plains themselves are largely an artificial product of native americans, mass biome alteration. at some point they noticed growth improved after wildfires, so they started setting everything on fire to create more grazing areas and support more grazing animals to hunt. native americans are the reason for the literal lake of bison that existed in the plains when europeans got around there.

native american culture was a lot more sophisticated and immense than the west was ever able to witness. by the time europeans were seeing the developments of native american culture, most of the population had suffered from disease and many societies had crumbled or withered into shadows of what they once were.

>>2177364
llama, alpaca, turkey, guinea pig were all domesticated.

Inland rarely develop civilization.
It doesn't matter if its the Elves(Tynset, Alvdal and parts of Osterdalen around 0 BCE), or any other inland group, such as what Pre Mongol Russians where before unification.

Civilization is simply too coast, lake and river Dependant.

>>2177321
The Native Americans formed successful societies, but didn't form civilizations in the same way that Afroeurasians did because they didn't have the right domesticable plants and animals. No horses, no wheat, no rice.

>>2177205
crops

>>2178024
That's the most retarded thing I've ever read. Everything is domesticatable. Eurasians and Africans didn't just happen to discover horses a bunch of animals and plants that were civilization building from the get go. They took a wild animal smaller than a zebra and turned it into a horse, another animal, the auroch, which was bigger and more dangerous than bisons, and turned it into the cow, a small weed that barely grew past their knees and turned it into the civilization sustaining wheat etc.
It's a matter of societal need, culture and how the utilized the resources. Not what they had available.

>>2177376
Good answer. Native American in the north were sick as shit too

>>2178024
>No horses

They had horses but they drove them to extinction.

It's interesting how hard it is to get people to admit that certain civilizations were smarter.

>>2178182
>They had horses but they drove them to extinction.
so did europeans, horses were reintroduced from Central Asia

>>2178182
>>2178188
I love when dumb race supremacists are dumb

>>2177364
Llama is not in Central America though, the climate there is not cold like the Andes. Mesoamericans never had nor domesticated such animals.

>>2178024
They didn't have rice or wheat but had maize. It arrived later than South and Central America but they were farming it. They also grew several other foods.

>abundant animals
>open space
>relatively temperate climate
Same as Africa.

>>2178182
Yeah, drove em to extinction millenia before any evidence of their domestication in eurasia

>>2178140
Well remember they had served a purpose before hand. Before horse were large they were for food.

>>2178621
Horses were food in the americas as well, they were just hunted to extinction.

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>>2178140
>a small weed that barely grew past their knees and turned it into the civilization sustaining wheat
that's cute

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>>2178140
>the auroch, which was bigger and more dangerous than bisons, and turned it into the cow
then how come euros couldn't domesticate their bisons?

>>2178654
It's not a wheat measuring contest anon, but yeah, corn is another good example that anything can be domesticated.
As lons as humans think it's useful enough in it's natural wild state to be deliberately cultivated or raised, it will eventually get domesticated.

>>2178673
Probably because Europeans already had cows by the time Europe stopped being a giant frozen forest and became suitable for agriculture and herding.

>>2178140
>Everything is domesticatable.
No it fucking isn't, at least not in any way that's feasible. If something won't breed in captivity then you can't domesticate it. If something costs more resources to feed keep in captivity than you have available then it's not realistic even if technically possible, which is far from a guarantee especially when the animal in question is a slow breeder or has small litters and requires years of investment before you even know if their kid will be useful and demonstrate the required traits.

>Eurasians and Africans didn't just happen to discover horses a bunch of animals and plants that were civilization building from the get go. They took a wild animal smaller than a zebra and turned it into a horse, another animal, the auroch, which was bigger and more dangerous than bisons, and turned it into the cow, a small weed that barely grew past their knees and turned it into the civilization sustaining wheat etc.
Selective breeding is fucking easy, what's hard is getting it to breed in the first place, which many animals simply won't do, and devoting resources to a multi-generational project with practically no surety of any return is impossible in a primitive society.

the idea that bigger=harder is really retarded.

>>2178789
No shit. Of course an animal or plant needs to be cost efficient even in it's natural wild state for such societies to undergo domesticating it, whether deliberately or accidentally. That Doesn't mean that north America didn't have anything that could domesticated, it simply means that whether because of pragmatic, societal, cultural reasons, or simply because it never occurred to them, the native Americans living there saw no reason to engage in animal husbandry or agriculture.

>Selective breeding is fucking easy, what's hard is getting it to breed in the first place, which many animals simply won't do

That's only relevant for animals really, and you're not gonna get an entire continent without any animal that would breed in captivity, especially the free range captivity nomadic tribes would keep them.

>and devoting resources to a multi-generational project with practically no surety of any return is impossible in a primitive society.
Domestication in the past wasn't done with much deliberation. It was simply a way of keeping food close by and available at most times. It didn't need much in the way of resources.

>>2177205
same reason why the Middle east was the center of civilization until the Age of Discovery.

center point = center of trade

>>2178897
don't disagree with anything you're saying in this post, just your previous point that anything can be domesticated. If it was hyperbole then I apologise but I've seen loads of idiots saying shit like "why didn't thy just domesticate polar bears lol"

Iroquois civilization seems comfy AF desu.

>hurr durr why didn't they just domesticate animals
You people literally have no understanding of biology. You're the same idiots who think because horses look like Zebras, Zebras should be domesticable.

Watch this video and understand why most animals were not domesticable with stone, bronze or Iron Age technology and understanding.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo

>>2177321
Also lack of large scale wars

>>2178140
>Everything is domesticatable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgS0KgT5APc

>>2179057
Also here's part 1 but it's longer and focused on diseases.

>>2179127
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
Oops

>>2179057
>>2179128
I recall that everything in the video is from guns, germs and steel.

>>2179057
This video is awful and so is your post. This is literally the crash course world history of biology.

I watched this thing and all the points are simplified or outright wrong. (we didn't domesticate animals like bisons because they were dangerous? Are you retarded?)

As for the Zebra points, they're flat out wrong. Zebras do form family bonds at least as complex as those of boars, or more complex depending on the Zebra specie. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing if the specific pack mentality modern horses have was something that existed in ancient horses or was bred into them.

So overall 0/10. This is just a propaganda video masquerading as simple science "facts" to discredit counterarguments to Diamond's shitty book.

>>2179147
And..? This does not explain to me your position at all.

>>2179155
Boars were never domesticated in lieu of their family structure though, they were domesticated because they're small and easy to catch and keep penned. A big boar, no, but a piglet or adolescent or female isn't particularly massive.

>>2179128
>americas didn't have horses
Wrong.

>>2179158
Just pointing out a where the video got its fact from.
>>2179155
>we didn't domesticate animals like bisons because they were dangerous? Are you retarded?
Then why did nobody domesticate bears?

>>2179172
The America's had horses so long ago it's irrelevant by the time humans began building societies. They died out something like a hundred thousand years ago and the earliest signs of development for humans is 12,000 years ago.

>>2179193
>The horse evolved in the Americas, but became extinct between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago.

>The other hypothesis suggests extinction was linked to overexploitation of naive prey by newly arrived humans. The extinctions were roughly simultaneous with the end of the most recent glacial advance and the appearance of the big game-hunting Clovis culture.[13][14] Several studies have indicated humans probably arrived in Alaska at the same time or shortly before the local extinction of horses.

>>2179172
Correct me if I'm talking shit, but I thought horses went extinct in the Americans in the holocene ~10000 BC and that the Horse was first domesticated around ~3500 BCE.

>>2179197
Maybe I'm thinking of a different species then, my bad.
Either way, horses were still extinct in the Americas by the time civilization building began there.

>>2179206
I think that's correct, but the Europeans also managed to not drive their horses to extinction.

>>2179183
>Then why did nobody domesticate bears?
Cause bears aren't particularly useful, are more trouble than they're worth, mature slowly and as apex predators accumulate toxins a lot faster than herbivores and even other omnivores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification

It's the reason we didn't domesticate predators unless they had other uses beyond food. A bear takes too much resources to keep alive and isn't going to be much use beyond being a guard animal.

>>2179213
Europe didn't have horses, they came from the Asains steps
>>2179217
Bears would have been great for battle and in wars, as apex predators they can hunt down everything and are great for digging up honey.

>>2179228
Bears also would have been great at killing people trying to capture or contain them.

>>2179213
Europeans managed to extinguish other animals, its irrelevant.

>>2179245
It's relevant because horses enabled civilization and cities. No horses in America anymore means nomadic tribes.

>>2179237
Yeah almost like they where to dangerous to domesticate

>>2179213
Europeans managed to begin building civilizations before horses were around. By the time horses had been brought over cities were quite common in the Levant

>>2179250
>No horses in America anymore means nomadic tribes.
Do you disregard all non-nomadic civilizations in Mesoamerica and the Andean region?

>>2179261
>Levant
>Europe

did everyone agree that the answer to OP's post is just limited agriculture and livestock development?


>>2179228
using bears in battle or wherever is not worth the efford and risk. if it was, we would have seen them in european and asian wars. it's not that they were too dangerous, it's a matter of cost versus reward

>>2179257
So were aurochs and a dozen other animals we domesticated. Bears just weren't worth the effort it would take to domesticate them and had no use before being domesticated.

>>2179266
There was civilization in the Levant before there was in Europe, and domestication of horses there first as well. Domesticated horses were brought into Europe proper.

>>2179264
Smaller and more mountainous region means less likely to be as nomadic.

>>2177205

I heard that there were two waves of diseases. The one from the Spanish/Portuguese and a much earlier wave that seems to have come from the Vikings.

There were accounts of there being a lot more natives in North America by the early explorers than by the time later explorers and the colonists came.arrived.

By the time the French, English, Dutch and Swedish colonists came, it was the Injuns in post-apocalypse mode.

>>2179128
Were dogs domesticated before man spread to the americas, or did it happen idependantly?

Also, didn't they native americans domesticte turkeys and guinea pigs? They aren't large enough for anything other than meat, but still they're an example of domsticateable animals native to the americas aside from llamas.

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>>2177205
>North America was still mostly mud huts and teepees
Who cares when it produced this.

>>2179408
Pretty sure those are Asians, not native Americans.

>>2179435
This. Why are you even on this board?

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>>2179326
The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization,centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddohad had a taste for massive architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, enormous monuments. After Soto’s army left,notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas,the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto’s(1539)and La Salle’s(1682)visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies-was wiped out”.

One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many simultaneous plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americasin the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine, even if it was their only real weapon against disease. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside. In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in Manitou and Providence(1982), family and friends gathered with the doctor/priestat the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness—a practice “that could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.”

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They had a few cool cities

>>2177364
Yes but the Central americans made do without it

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>>2181188

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>>2181190

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>>2181192

>>2179128
why do people watch that channel

Combination of nomadic traditions being very popular in most of North America as well as not really getting into masonry. In the PNW natives built very elaborate wooden structures, very large and impressive ones, but being made of wood nothing remains of them except the indentations in the ground where they were built.

>>2178140
>Everything is domesticatable.
if you have technology advanced enough
we could probably domesticate white sharks if we devoted a few billion dollars on that, but the ancient greeks could not have done it
some plants and animals are simply easier to domesticate than others and if you are not living in some post-scarcity scenario the species you domesticate must serve some purpose and the process must be cost effective

>>2177376
Also the introduction of European arms meant that tribal grudges changed from amalgamation and integration into ones of conquest and extermination. The ability to kill effectively enables several plains tribes to expand their spheres of influence, particularly the Sioux. This in turn led to increased aggression from the natives and while some "bad apple" tribes instigated white settlers, the entire continent suffered for it.

>>2178673
Bison are very hard to contain. As one of the biggest land animals in North America, their respect from Natives is well deserved. I was reading up on bison farming awhile back wondering similar to you why bison is not more popular than cattle. It essentially comes down to them being less predictable and docile than cows, which means selectively breeding them and being around males in heat and sows with calves is a deathwish.

tl;dr cost of containing a bison isn't greater than what they fetch on the market so it's a niche commodity

>>2178995
N'Amerind Boozhoo.

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>>2178182
>different animals related to the horse, roughly the size of a big dog or a calf, present in the plains of North America and a few enclaves in the rest of America went extinct because of climate change in the territories they inhabited
>this proofs that the cultures which developed in America thousands of years later are inferior compared to the Asian cultures that domesticated the horse and the European culture which got it from them

mmmmmmmmmmm

>>2177385
>llama, alpaca, turkey, guinea pig

only the turkey is north american you fagit

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>>2178140
>Everything is domesticatable
not remotely true. See Bison, Hippos, Wildebeest...

And don't be a dipshit and say we never tried either. Also learn the word "domesticable," it will make you look like less of a moron in the future

>>2178182
How fucking retarded do you have to be not to realize horses are from europe and when introduced to NA society they became immensely important? The dominance of the Sioux nation depended on it you dip

>>2177205
Ideal latitude.

>>2179193
good point- they always go oooh natives were so stupid! they ate their horses instead of riding them.!

>>2181410
Greeks didnt have billions of dollars to pay for all that.

>>2179435
>those are Asians
So?

>>2179467
>Why are you even on this board?
You gonna stop me?

>>2181188
>>2181190
>>2181192

What happened to this? Abandoned like Teotihuacan?

>>2183463
Anymore of Anri Okita's set cosplaying as a native qt?

>>2177205
NA had some pretty great civilizations, even if they weren't Aztec/inca/Mayan/Olmec tier. What people don't realize is NA tribes we're going through a dark age when Europeans arrived.

>>2183751
Pretty much every civilization in the Americas we're going through a dark age (specially the Incas), except the Aztecs, those guys shoot themselves in the foot way too many times.

>>2183805
They should have stopped playing around with Tlaxcala and just conquered them.

>>2178024
Guns germa and steel is a poor explanation for history bucko.

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>>2177321
>non historian pov

Then why answer? Just to see yourself talk?

>>2178188
Don't find anything about it on google, and there's unique european horse sub-races so there's no way they went extinct the last few thousand years

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>>2181536
when in doubt, blame either climate change or racism - the regressive leftists guide to colouring books

>>2184772
>humans in are America are only present at this time in the western coast of Northern America
>these small dog like horse species go extinct in the whole continent
>the cultures which developed almost 10000 years later are inferior because of this

Dumb Frankposter

>>2177385
What good are guinea pigs and turkeys going to do as work animals though? And only the turkey was in North America.

>>2178140
>Everything is domesticatable.
I do not think that you are aware of significant difference between zebras and horses and why only the latter were domesticated.

>>2179408
sauce?

>>2185510
JAV models Anri Okita and Hitomi I think the other ones called.

>>2183673
It's nowhere near as big, but there are numerous theories about where it went, because it disappeared suddenly. One that makes sense to me is that it was a trading hub between two existing settlements that were similar in size (this part is fact) and they banded together to destroy Etowah to get rid of the middleman that was profiting off of them and growing too powerful (this is the speculation).

The mound pyramids are still visible, the site's in Georgia.

>>2183805
Cortes didn't really over throw Monteczuma II. His own people saw him as a weak ruler. Part of the chaos that led to the Spanish supposedly slaughtering them in their capital was that something was miscommunicated and the King died. The Spanish knew they were up shit creek with no paddle so they had to fight their way out with their native allies.

An interesting note is that the Natives that served with the Spanish during the conquest of the Aztecs were rewarded for their services by being allowed to administer their own territory and keep their traditional names instead of being Europeanized. This was very nice of them given that at times the majority of Spain's new world armies were Native soldiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaxcala_(Nahua_state)

>>2177330
Bingo

There were settlements in the north-east all over the place, then the diseases hit. Its really hard to overstate how destructive this was. The peoples in North America that interacted with the colonists were the post-apocalyptic bands of rag-tag survivors rather than the true strength they once had.

>>2177205
Because North Americans were hunter gatherers whilst the Aztecs and Mayas were agrian.

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>>2186099
If you have no knowledge, then at least don't waste dubs.

>>2181208
can someone please answer this why the hell do people care about CGP grey

>>2181494
What makes you think aurochs were any different before we domesticated them?
Hell, just comparing the aggressiveness of pigs and boars should be enough to show you how much of a difference domestication can make in the docility of an animal.

>>2185072
I don't think you understand that domesticating an animal doesn't just change their body, but can also fundamentally alter their behavior and intelligence.

>>2186970
>I don't think you understand that domesticating an animal doesn't just change their body, but can also fundamentally alter their behavior and intelligence.
Taming isn't the same as domesticating. If domesticating is so easy, zebras would be domesticated long time ago.

>>2186987
>Taming isn't the same as domesticating
It's not, but how's that related to what I said?

> If domesticating is so easy, zebras would be domesticated long time ago.
Not really. Foxes for example have been around forever, but they were only domesticated in the 60s by the Russians.
Just because something can be domesticated doesn't mean people are going to do it. It depends on society, economics and culture.

On Jacques Cartier's second expedition he found the Iroquoian settlement of Hochelaga at the site of modern day Montreal. He described it as a large village of over 100 long houses with a population he estimated at around 3000 people. When he came back a decade later it was completely abandoned, probably due to plague and war with the Huron.

It's not tenochtitlan but it's still something.

>>2185757
He wasn't a weak ruler, he was just overly cautious and more superstitious than the usual Aztec. He expanded the empire to it's largest extent under his reign. Maybe if he had Tlacaelel at his side like Moctezuma the elder did, when Cortes arrived things might have been different.

more maize

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>>2183463
Put your dick away, normie

>>2181192
>Cahokia
It tingles my dick every time

>>2186970
Domestication tends to correspond to species that have the capacity to learn to read humans and can retain commands. So some species just plain lack the right "intelligence" to be domesticated. Others are simply not practical due to either a lack of interest or time and money being too prohibitive compared to the market demand for said animal.

And domestication is sort of an illusion. Let's not act like well trained animals don't go off sometimes because of factors we don't understand sometimes. All animals are still wild at their core, it's just that some of them have adapted to share our habitats.

>>2182258
Why do you think they're in debt now?

Why when colonists were just so goshdarn mean to the natives didn't the rest of the country worth of natives or at least enough to be effective crush the Whiteys?

>>2189720
The answer is inadequate communication and/or cultural differences.

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>>2178140
This faggot.

Things like the wheel and domesticated animals didn't simultaneously develop all around Europe. The wheel for example, was invented by a sole human being around BC Ukraine, then, that shit spread, same for horses and cows, developed in small comunities, and spread.

>inb4 the wheel is stoopid, anyone could have invented it

Read some info about it then come back

>>2181933
>>2185069
he said only the llama was domesticated in the americas, so I corrected him. work animals and north america specifically have nothing to do with his statement.

>>2177321
"had no need or desire to form a huge great civilization"

This is nonsense. There is no evidence that native americans had this great reverence for the environment or their particular way of life.

In fact, the moment that new technology or animals (guns and horses, notably) arrived, they quickly adopted it.

The noble savage myth needs to fuck off and die.

>>2190690
the wheel was objectively invented separately in at least two areas in the world. eurasia as a tool and the americas as a toy. claiming "it's not actually a wheel" is retarded when they clearly had wheels on their toys. obviously they didn't see them as feasible tools for their situations. I doubt the guys chillin around tenochtitlan moving goods effortlessly with canoes through canals in their city saw much of a use for a wheelbarrow.

>>2184772
Good Lord. /pol/ is so fucking stupid.

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>>2181950

There were American Horses during the later stone age. There were also American Cheetahs, American Lions, fucking Mammoths. All extinct before the Natives thought it'd be neat to ride them instead of eat them.

Reminder Incans>Mayans>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Inuits>Aztecs

>>2194503
why?