In North America, people had existed for many thousands of years

>>59809
Dude Europeans saw only the tail end of the Mississippian complexes that collapsed shortly after first contact.

Also this is very /pol/

>>59833
>By European standards

I had read something about them living in what essentially was a post-civilization society. Is this true?

>>59846
Most Europeans at that time were farmers living without literacy and dealing with famine and war.

There isn't much difference comparing the masses of both populations.

>>59822
lol

>>59833
I am not implying that the Native Americans were inherently inferior.

I rather hoped to call into question whether a land can be so fertile, or rather a "Eden" of sorts, that even a hunter-gatherer society would be entirely self-sufficient. A good example would be the ecology of the Salmon run in the far west. It seems that the nature itself provided everything that one would need.

>>59809

Well, first thing to remember is there were no horses. Before the white man brought horses, if you wanted to travel you had to do so by foot, so things were generally more isolated, so generally it came down to a specific group being in an area where they would have both the means and a compelling reason not to just live as hunter-gatherers. Now, the Puebloans IIRC had settled villages and agriculture. They lived in a desert, and they also traded on occasion with Mesoamerican merchants IIRC. And, of course, you had the Mississippian civilization, who IIRC got corn, beans, and squash from foreign traders and had the good luck of settling along the Mississippi river valley, where they built a city-state that is thought to have had over 40,000 inhabitants at its peak.

>>59940
I'm well aware of advanced civilizations throughout the rest of the Americas. Incas, Aztecs, etc. come to mind.

But the ones further north, think Canada. They seemed rather simple.

>>59927
Judging by the more advanced societies that existed in mexico and the andes, there probably was some lack of incentive to civilize in the north for whatever reason.

I can't imagine the IQ difference between the northern and southern natives would be big enough to explain such a huge gap in development.

>>59955

Well yeah, like I said, they were isolated as fuck because there were no horses.

>>59894
So what's the story behind it? And how has it become popular even though there is no evidence for it?

>>59809
genetics and they never became agricultural which is required for civilization (Inca and Aztec had civilization.)

>>59927
You are wrong to assume such things do nothing. Intensive foraging allowed for Northwest nations to become heavily hierarchial and ceremonial.

They did infact practice things we now call agriculture seeing as ozette potato and other adopted from the Spanish remained in the tended gardens along with silverweed and other root crops.

They didn't laze about eating and not doing anything, their culture was forever evolving.

The biggest hindrance of native societies was the phytosensitivity and climatic issues of corn, it's advance was slow because it needed to adapt to colder climates. The Mississippian grain/psuedograin crops that were supplanted could not all compete and eventually became extinct, corn just was far too good and given more time access stable food would have built up New England Native societies as well.

Eden does not and has never existed, all populations before the industrial revolution worked for their food and faced famines like everywhere else in the world.
>>60035
Pol go

Technically yes

>>59809
No beast of burden
No real crops

But also, yes, no real need to.

There were civilizations in North America like the Anasazi or the Mississipians that collapsed 400 to 50 years before the English arrived in North America. The little ice age brought down their civilizations.

>>60085
Would you say that the Natives, if time had gone on without contact, would have developed contemporary European technologies like guns, steelworks, and large scale infrastructure? If so, within what timeframe? 100 years? More or less?

>>59809
Considering they relatively only recenlty arrived in the americas and had to start from scratch without beasts of burden they did pretty well.

They also very quickly adapted to an equestrian lifestyle once horses were reintroduced by the pseudo moors.

Their ancestors were beyond stupid though for hunting the native horses and camels to extinction though without domesticating them

>>60085
>that snarky fedora snip at the end

You didn't sound like a faggot until you spewed that one out.

>>60122
....why do you expect any people not in contact to go the same path as another?

It's like asking why didn't Europeans invent gunpowder, metallurgy or writing. They just didn't, nothing is wrong with them because of that it just didn't happen.

>>60085

Not him, but which claim are you denying? It's basically impossible to conclusively prove or disprove that genetics is a factor in cultural development, so I guess we should leave that aside for now unless it's explicitly being discussed (ie refuting or asserting Diamond's conclusions). His comment on agriculture was basically, but not entirely, correct.

>>60171
Saying genetics has no place here.

>>60175
His genetic post has no point here and yes North Americans have an independent agricultural development.

>>60122

Probably not, regarding guns or steelworks. Gunpowder IIRC was discovered by pure accident when Chinese alchemists were trying to make an elixir of immortality. As for steel; well, in most of the settled areas, it was way too hot, and the areas where it wasn't (like Canada and the northern half of the USA) were too isolated.

Bronze weapons were occasionally used in Mesoamerica (the P'urepechas and the Incas, just off the top of my head, liked bronze maces) but iron generally wasn't used (because remember that the switch from bronze to iron in the Eastern hemisphere only happened because tin and copper became increasingly difficult to get whereas iron ore is basically fucking everywhere, and early iron was actually slightly worse than bronze, so it would've been extra pointless to even make much use of iron, much less ever figure out how to make the iron into steel.

>>60172
Because much of the Old World had gone along relatively similar paths. China, India, Persia, East Africa, etc...

Of course, these civilizations were all in contact with one another at some point, but surely had extensive periods where they were isolated from one another.

>>60193
>>60203
Honestly, in terms of this topic, which is always on the front page, "why didn't Native Americans do X" doesn't have anything to do with genetics, not on the surface anyway. I don't know anything about it, but did the Native peoples not have trade routes and connection with one another? Were the North American natives completely ignorant of their more advanced cousins in Central America?

>>59809
Horses

>>60223
>Chinese trying to make immortality potions

Did their alchemists seriously have nothing better to do? I hear this all the time, Chinese trying to make immortality for centuries. The shitposters of their time, without a doubt.

>>60236
>>60172
I am starting to get though that Euro-esque civilizations are not necessarily the end-all of what we think of as "progress".

>>60240

Generally speaking, Mesoamerican trade routes didn't go further north than maybe the Iroquis confederacy. Generally, there wasn't really much need to, especially if there were no horses and you would have to walk the whole way.

>>60263

A lot of those emperors were *really* afraid of dying.

>>59987
thats bullshit.
Armies on campaign have walked across whole continents. Their primitiveness can not be attributed to this one factor

>>60236
>but surely had extensive periods where they were isolated from one another.

well, no, eurasia became extensively linked by trade right after settled agricultural civilisations came around.
It was actually a strong driving component in progress, enabling greater accumulative technological development.

>>60283
Did the Natives even have labor inventions similar to the wheelbarrow / cart?

>>60300
That I'm well aware of. "Trade (And war) + Time = Progress".

Did the indigenous Native Americans however not have their own amounts of trade and warfare between one another?

>>60317
So I'm the person you probably originally were talking to but strangely enough while Aztecs had toys with wheels they never utilized it for things like wheel barrels
>>60270
Well yeah dude
>>60240
Linguistic gaps and desert man, it's not like Aztecs went to New England and gave them corn. It took thousands of years for a single crop to make it on the other side of the continent and not everything in mesoamerican culture came along with it.

>>60290

Entirely on foot, with no support, going with no orders, no guidance, no compelling reason, to travel in some random direction without any way of knowing what might be there or what they might find?

No.

>>60317

I think there were rickshaws in Mesoamerica.

>>60328

Yeah, but on foot, which made it harder and more localized.

>>60328
Of course, it just led to a different result than Eurasia and it wasn't the same given that all the factors of one place didn't occur in another.

>>60328
Trade and well established (meaning very old) conflict was true among the Aztecs and their neighbors. This was the reason the Spanish were able to gain an alliance with some of the smaller tribes (the Tlaxcala being the most important) during their campaigns against the Aztecs.

>>60328
just like people are saying in the posts above, trade is heavily impeded by actually lacking beasts of burden.

There were also geographical factors, like the narrow and densely forrested chokepoint through Panama and central America that didn't exactly foster easy trade routes.
And I'm guessing the Mexican Gulf was a much poorer environment for maritime trade than the Mediterranean was.

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>>59809
Asked my Native American History Professor why Indian people didn't use copper more from the Great Lakes region, and why it didn't diffuse during the amazing trade that took place across the North American continent before the Mississippian civilization disappeared or whatever. He said, for the most part, that we're not entirely sure. He guessed on the spot complacency, as a possibility (sure, this new -insert metal- spear point looks cool and all, but what's wrong with the stuff we use now?) but no one knows for sure.

You're asking a good question, OP.

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>>60450
What are you talking about every Native American mound in Ohio and the part of the midwest was full of copper

Hell tribes in Yukon Territory were using copper.

>>60317
No, since there were no animals to give manual power to these tools.

Reduced agricultural producticity quite heavily.

>>60480
I meant Northwest Territories

Also copper down there was more valued than gold, it was near the end used only for ceremony and jewelry by the elite so that effect stopped copper making into tools

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lots of Indians in what is now the US Southwest had towns and cities with well-developed agriculture (including irrigation and canals)

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I think its a wide combination of things really. They first arrived in The Americas proper just ~12,000 years ago, compare that to about 100,000 years ago when the first modern humans were living in the region of the Fertile Crescent. They didn't really have much to work with when it came to animals suitable for domestication, leaving them without livestock or beasts of burden. Which also led to them being far more isolated from each other than cultures in he Old World were. Meaning less potential for trade, little exchange of knowledge and ideas, and barely any pressure to advance.

The Americas were also a far more conducive environment for the hunter-gather lifestyle than other places humans have inhabited. Previous hunter-gather cultures only started to move past that stage when their populations outstripped the capacity of what nature around them was able to provide. Which is why I think you saw the more advanced indigenous civilizations popping up in the less ideal regions on the two continents.

All in all you have a group of people who had a fraction of the time to develop, lacked many things that were very critical to the development of advanced civilization in the Old World, and in general just had far less pressure to develop than civilizations/cultures in the Old World did.

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>>59927
>I rather hoped to call into question whether a land can be so fertile, or rather a "Eden" of sorts, that even a hunter-gatherer society would be entirely self-sufficient.
I don't know about American history, but this was pretty much what it was like in New Zealand. The Maori actually lost some indispensable technologies (like sailing and pottery) after emigrating because they became redundant and unnecessary.
Before the arrival of Maori, New Zealand had no real native predators. The largest mammal was a tiny adorable fruit bat that can fit in the palm of your hand. The ecosystem was so peaceful that many species of bird had lost the ability to fly all together. Just like how the Maori no longer needed sailing, the birds no longer needed to ever leave the ground.

Coming from the hostile pacific islands, with its sweltering sun, yearly hurricanes and limited resources, New Zealand must have seemed like a paradise. Probably the closest thing to a real Garden of Eden that our earth has ever produced.

Unfortunately, the natives birds were so fat, defenseless and tasty, that many of species were quickly hunted to extinction. RIP in peace, moa. We hardly new ye.
So, even though NZ was probably the most hospitable land on earth for a hunter gatherer society, the native tribes people didn't live in harmony with nature like hippies think they did.

Also this pic is incorrect, because the Maori never needed or even invented bows. They could just herd the birds into giant killing fields and slaughter them with ease.

>>60770
Don't forget the Haast Eagle
>fucking huge eagle
>eats Moa for dindins
>steals seanigger babies away from villages
Would have been impressive to see it IRL

>>60727

desu, a society where half the population had to do all the work while the other half dicked about all day sounds pretty terrible, and i have to say that two eagles and his people deserved to be conquered.

>>60813
watch some anthropological documentaries on hunter gatherers or whatever, your understanding of roles within those societies is lacking d e s u

>>60727
Wtf are you talking about, the America's was by and large a farming society from the Inca to the Cassava growing peoples on the Amazon to the tannier and cassava growing Caribbean tribes to the corn growers of Mexico and later north america and the Mississippian cultivators of the floodplains

Even th buffalo hunters by and large were agriculturalists who gave up farming to hunt buffalo and trade with agricultural tribes.

Even in places without what you would call agriculture large scale systems of tending created extensive managed fields and orchards. Read "Tending the Wild" for that last bit, hell read any book because you are highly misinformed.

>>59822
kekity

>>61049
Where anywhere in that post did I say they lacked agriculture?

>>60290
>Armies on campaign have walked across whole continents.
and they tended to be accompanied by miles of horse and ox drawn wagons carrying food, water, weapons and general supplies. The importance of pack animals to human movement cannot be understated.

>>59809
Because the Natives of North America had only recently adopted organized agriculture (not, of course, the mesoamericans, who had long since learned that). An agarian society and the ensuing population burst (As well as the population pressures of that growth) is a major catalyst in the growth of a culture. The Iroquois Confederacy had only farmed for five centuries when the first Europeans began settling North America, and they were so powerful because they had led the pack in doing so.

>>59809
there were no useful beasts of burdens in north america, besides buffalo, and those only happened in one region and i'm not sure if they're good for pulling plows.

It's hard to develop more than rudimentary agriculture when you have nothing but human labor to sustain it, and Iroquois et all did have agriculture and cities.

>>61078
The fuck you think
>The Americas were also a far more conducive environment for the hunter-gather lifestyle than other places humans have inhabited.

It was not at all

>>61196
>besides buffalo and caribou and dogs

>>61229

Buffalo can't be domesticated, and both caribou and dogs would be pretty shitty draft animals.

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>>61268
Agreed, they tried though

>>61229
This shit ain't efficient

>>60555
Is that it? I know about Cahokia and Anasazi n shiet btw mang

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>>61229
get a caribou, dog or buffalo to pull a plow as effectively as a horse or ox and i will pay your mortgage.

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>>59822

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The Puebloan tribes of the American Southwest settled down in mud houses in the desert much like the Babylonians and had complex agricultural techniques. The Hopi, for example, raised specialty blue corn created through selective breeding.

The whole region of the American Southwest also sits on the largest iron and copper mineral deposits in the United States. Right now, foreign mining companies are moving into the American Southwest against the will of the peoples on reservations to mine all its copper worth $20 billion/year. Source: http://www.mintpressnews.com/congress-approves-secret-giveaway-sacred-apache-land-foreign-mining-compan/199871/

I'd say, if given enough time, they would have developed Bronze and Iron Age tools. They were just out of time and 4000 years behind when they finally managed to settle down and the Spaniards/Anglos arrived.

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>>61588

>against the will of the peoples on reservations

pretty sure that's illegal, unless those companies made some sweet deals with the tribal governments and gave them some (much needed) money.

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This is some grade-A bullshit tbн senpai

>>61817
Wikipedia offends me every day.

>>61756
Of course it isn't illegal, because because John McCain attached attached a land swap to a defense bill and Congress passed it already.
"Let's give these Natives 5000 acres of this land they don't want in exchange for these prime 2000 acres of land we need for a mine. Good? Good. It's all settled, then. Start building your mine and strike the earth, Resolution Copper."

Also, the mining company is foreign, so all the money that will be made will be going to the UK and Australia. The tribes are protesting in DC, but of course, nobody cares.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2015/07/23/apaches-arizona-copper-mine-protest-cns/30542301/

>>61882
Christ, Indians just can't escape the whole "white men making promises they won't keep" thing, eh?

>>61367
>get a wolf to be your family friend and I will pay your mortgage

>>61817
I don't know biology, is there a reason that's impossible? I remember reading that the ancestor of modern horses was some tiny PoS from the Americas or something, don't see why that has to be wrong.

>>61882
That's not what's happening at all though

The land is only the natives spiritually
It isn't native reserve land mate
It's national forestry

Like did you even read the article?

>>60290
Armies walked across the entire continent, on road systems.
That means you can keep up 5-6km/h for almost 18 hours a day. And the practical limit is so long there is light.
Once you have to cross uneven non road terrain that drops to 2-3km/h, and you get tired faster.

And remember: This is armies or traders. They KNOW they have shit to get done.
Regardless of how strong the Llama is, it has to follow traders, and the traders have their limitations too.

Honestly Native Americans were plenty advanced, they domesticated a whole range of plants, built some somewhat advanced architecture and had many advanced civilizations and societies. Sure, they weren't as advanced as Europe or parts of Asia but at the same time you really can't paint them as Australian Aboriginies or Sub-Saharan Africans.


One of the main reasons I think that the Native Americans lagged behind is that they never had horses so they couldn't transport goods over long distances as well which meant that trade would never be as good as it was with Europeans, they also couldn't use horses to plow the soil and have as good agriculture as Europeans - still they did domesticate many plants and must have independently discovered agriculture. Not having horses also meant that transporting rocks/bricks was a lot harder compared to how Europeans did it.

Also, when Spanish horses escaped into the wild and started to go feral the native Americans quickly learned how to ride and became fearsome horse archers within a generation.

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>>61882

what's that 5,000 acres the government's getting in return look like?

>>62027
I mean it's not like horses were these nice easily tameable creatures originally
They were simply bred that way by humans

I think it has more to do with natives in general never really speccing into animal taming to the same degree as the old world

Smaller population over a larger area of land. Less competition.

>>59955
well canada is rather inhospitable actually
thick forests also tend to not be a very good place to make settlements
also you have to take a look at the "ideology" that many natives americans hade
they respected nature to a point where it was holy and it was taboo to take more then you needed to survive this probably played a part in why native north americans never evolved passed a point of hunter-gatheres

also we know very little about the history off the americas, societies that could easily rival late bronze age civilizations could have existed through out the americas but time destorys everything evidence and civilizations included
for example if they used clay to build their cities little evidence would be left today
also the america is two gigantic continents and remote locations could have evidence of great civilizations just that we havent found it yet

>>60172
>metallurgy or writing
Actually it looks like some LN European cultures did develop these. They weren't the first but they did seem to develop them independently

>>59833
OP
It comes down to agriculture, the lack of calories from easy work inhibits mental processes, hunting is time consuming. Hunting also doesn't lend toward building a structure or inventing. If you're relatively peaceful and just go shoot a buffalo or whatever...where's the need for invention?

I read a decent book about agriculture and human development, 10k explosion?

>this is very problematic

Haha suck shit.

>>61817
The horses in the region died pretty quickly

>>61283
If you had enough dogs and had a cart with wheels you could get things moving. Of course that would mean you would have to build roads etc. and i don't think they were willing to do either of those things.

>>62802
They were far from peaceful, they warred with eachother constantly.

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So many people here seeing the adoption of agriculture & sedentary living as a historical inevitability. The shame. That's truly one of the big memes in historical discourse, the idea that everyone is somehow "bound" to pick up the plow and ditch the atlatl.

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You may wish to check this book out, would clear up plenty of misconceptions.

>>62802
>It comes down to agriculture, the lack of calories from easy work inhibits mental processes, hunting is time consuming. Hunting also doesn't lend toward building a structure or inventing. If you're relatively peaceful and just go shoot a buffalo or whatever...where's the need for invention?

The eastern tribes had agriculture and no buffalo. Not every Injun was a plains Injun.

>>59809
The cause of this is european view of the situation. The way groups of humans organize themselves and technology are not inevitable. That is to say if we found another planet with intelligent life that doesn't mean they ever made a television or a democracy(or any particular thing we have that we think is an improvement on the past) They will be doing different things and that doesn't make them simple but if you come with a certain outlook/attitude you may call it that

>>61958
>>61862
I'm not saying its false, I'm saying that is ironic and quite an evil twist of history that the horse went extinct thousand of years ago in the continent that gave birth to them, and that the people living in said continent probably stagnated due to not having horses to begin with, and they were conquered by the people who had said animals.

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>>68325
Says the Graeco-Christian narrative of "progress". Thousands of cultures would wholeheartedly disagree with your statement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_Progress#Criticisms

>>68401
>Thousands of cultures would wholeheartedly disagree with your statement.

Yes, shitty inferior ones.

>>62027
One thing to consider that people haven't really brought up is how much easier the spread of ideas is in Eurasia than in the Americas.

Inventing things independently is really fucking hard to do. In Eurasia, things like bronze and iron smithing, writing, medicine, chemistry, math, navagation and printing were all invented in only one or a couple of spots. But since you have easily navigable terrain: flat, overland territory in central Asia, a calm inland sea and pretty regular rivers in Europe, regular trade winds around India, ect, you have a decent network of information from Korea to Spain.

In the Americas, on the other hand, there's basically isolated pockets of civilizations (that we know about). The Maya invented writing and advanced mathematics, but where are they going to go with that? Are they going to cut through jungle, try to navagate through a labyrinthine network of canyons and desert mountains of northern Mexico and the baijou of Texas and Louisiana to find a nation they've never heard of? The Inca were top notch metalworkers and engineers, they actually did invent the wheel, but in the Andes it was useless other than as a kid's toy. Sure, it would have been useful to the plains Indians to the north, but we have trouble getting across the isthmus of Panama now, let alone on foot back in the 12th century.

Places like the Americas, subsaharan Africa and Oceania certainly lagged behind, but that was because their competitors had the combined intellectual resources of two of the most populous continents on earth. It's perfectly reasonable that they couldn't keep up

>>68933
You'll die with the rest of us once the oil runs dry. My sincerest apologies that you won't get to become a cosmic parasite, since you've certainly got the mindset down even though you're still living on a vibrant planet. Enjoy your daisy games in the sun, Leviathan. The world will swallow you whole, you detestable carcass.

>>60555

they sure liked hot tubs.

>>59833
>this is very /pol/
This is very reddit. Also, your inference is telling.

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>>69612

I think they're either granaries or ball courts. I don't actually know much about the site

>>59955
>But the ones further north, think Canada.

The Haida seem relatively advanced.

>>61588
>anglos

fuck off hispanic

>>70621
Are you retarded?

>>59833
>Also this is very /pol/

srls plebbit ?

>>62116
Which animal the had to do that? Seriously, tell me one that could be tamed and at the same time be as useful as a horse -which also happened to be the greatest war weapon during centuries-.