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Setting aside the cultural superiority complex: people in North and South America were severely hindered by the lack of large beasts of burden. It's hard to cr

Setting aside the cultural superiority complex: people in North and South America were severely hindered by the lack of large beasts of burden. It's hard to create an industrialized society without them. Even assuming "industrialized society" is the ideal, which, given our multiple ongoing ecological catastrophes, isn't necessarily a safe assumption.

jcranmer 6y ago
Why do you need beasts of burden to develop industrialized society? In terms of agricultural resources, you don't need the plow to effectively farm the land in most of urbanized Pre-Columbian America (the Great Plains are a different matter). Aquaculture is a wonderful supplement--it's suggested that the founding agricultural crop in the Norte Chico region may be a flax instead of a staple food crop, and the early date of its monumental architecture may predate agriculture for food (although this is very much in debate right now). In terms of population, Tenochtitlan achieved a size greater than all but the very largest cities in Europe, and had no issues feeding its population out of the resources in the Central Mexican Valley. It's also not necessary for trade: the vast trade networks of North America are pretty well-documented, and they continue down into the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Indeed, it's been suggested that pottery was introduced to the Mississippians via trade with Amazon tribes across the Caribbean. Waterborne transport makes a lot more sense in the Americas: the Mississippi and its tributaries provides a strong link for much of North America, and of course the Amazon region even today relies almost entirely on water transport. If you look at Andean civilizations instead, the topography makes any form of cart completely impractical, and llamas and alpacas were already domesticated for use as pack animals.
- macintux 6y ago
  Technically I didn't say "need", but that they were hindered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel is one controversial book on the topic. I was thinking more in terms of raw power than agriculture: before we could develop coal-fired industry it was useful to have draught animals to carry heavy loads and drive equipment. Not an expert, but it's clearly a lack, and the correlation between variety of domesticated animals and industrialization is interesting.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    "Why is _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ so bad?" is practically an FAQ on AskAnthropology. https://scihubtw.tw/https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003.00354.x https://scihubtw.tw/https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/what_are_some_of_the_main_anthropological/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...
    - macintux 6y ago
      I said “controversial”. However, in that entire thread, no one is saying that having large, domesticated animals wasn’t useful. I’m not saying Diamond was right about everything, I’m saying it seems self-evident that you can get farther down the technology path, faster, if you have more power available. Animals were a very important part of the power story in pre-industrial times. Where am I wrong?
    - dionidium 6y ago
      I followed the second link and while I can't evaluate all the claims made there (many of which seem to be substantive), there are enough that are silly and transparently political so as to cast doubt on the project of "discrediting" his work. Stuff like this: "Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel." This kind of psychologizing looks pretty silly to me and I'm not sure what any of it has to do with the arguments made in the actual book.
    - idlewords 6y ago
      Honestly these read like a list of political charges that accuse Diamond of saying bad things about indigenous people (which is sort of the opposite of his thesis) rather than a substantive critique of that book. Is there a critical response that goes deeper into the scientific merits of his claims? I found the book an interesting meditation on the connections between land, plants and animals, the kind of society that can form as a result, and knock-on effects from that process (like the dependence of diseases on city living). The level of hostility to this work in the linked reviews seems out of proportion to its alleged deficits.

jcranmer 6y ago

Why do you need beasts of burden to develop industrialized society? In terms of agricultural resources, you don't need the plow to effectively farm the land in most of urbanized Pre-Columbian America (the Great Plains are a different matter). Aquaculture is a wonderful supplement--it's suggested that the founding agricultural crop in the Norte Chico region may be a flax instead of a staple food crop, and the early date of its monumental architecture may predate agriculture for food (although this is very much in debate right now). In terms of population, Tenochtitlan achieved a size greater than all but the very largest cities in Europe, and had no issues feeding its population out of the resources in the Central Mexican Valley. It's also not necessary for trade: the vast trade networks of North America are pretty well-documented, and they continue down into the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Indeed, it's been suggested that pottery was introduced to the Mississippians via trade with Amazon tribes across the Caribbean. Waterborne transport makes a lot more sense in the Americas: the Mississippi and its tributaries provides a strong link for much of North America, and of course the Amazon region even today relies almost entirely on water transport. If you look at Andean civilizations instead, the topography makes any form of cart completely impractical, and llamas and alpacas were already domesticated for use as pack animals.

macintux 6y ago
Technically I didn't say "need", but that they were hindered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel is one controversial book on the topic. I was thinking more in terms of raw power than agriculture: before we could develop coal-fired industry it was useful to have draught animals to carry heavy loads and drive equipment. Not an expert, but it's clearly a lack, and the correlation between variety of domesticated animals and industrialization is interesting.
- tptacek 6y ago
  "Why is _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ so bad?" is practically an FAQ on AskAnthropology. https://scihubtw.tw/https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003.00354.x https://scihubtw.tw/https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/what_are_some_of_the_main_anthropological/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...
  - macintux 6y ago
    I said “controversial”. However, in that entire thread, no one is saying that having large, domesticated animals wasn’t useful. I’m not saying Diamond was right about everything, I’m saying it seems self-evident that you can get farther down the technology path, faster, if you have more power available. Animals were a very important part of the power story in pre-industrial times. Where am I wrong?
  - dionidium 6y ago
    I followed the second link and while I can't evaluate all the claims made there (many of which seem to be substantive), there are enough that are silly and transparently political so as to cast doubt on the project of "discrediting" his work. Stuff like this: "Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel." This kind of psychologizing looks pretty silly to me and I'm not sure what any of it has to do with the arguments made in the actual book.
  - idlewords 6y ago
    Honestly these read like a list of political charges that accuse Diamond of saying bad things about indigenous people (which is sort of the opposite of his thesis) rather than a substantive critique of that book. Is there a critical response that goes deeper into the scientific merits of his claims? I found the book an interesting meditation on the connections between land, plants and animals, the kind of society that can form as a result, and knock-on effects from that process (like the dependence of diseases on city living). The level of hostility to this work in the linked reviews seems out of proportion to its alleged deficits.