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>The Llama is not a very good pack animal, you would know this if you ever looked at one. They are pack animals with carrying capacities comparable to donkeys

• James_K 2y ago
  > Jared Diamond I don't know who that is and have never read any of his work. > Tenochtitlan > Even so, North America had plenty of candidates for domestication that would have made serviceable pack animals Weirdly enough, Tenochtitlan is the rebuttal to this question. Why do you think they built a city on a lake? It's because they didn't have any pack animals so boats were the best way to move stuff around. This is a disadvantage that makes everything else much harder and therefore slows development. > conveniently forgetting that the ancestor of man's flesh-eating best friend is the wolf If literal millions of Native Americans could not domesticate the other animals, but they could domesticate dogs, I'm going to guess that the other animals are harder to domesticate than dogs. You might not feel that this is the case, but your feelings don't stack up to the practical results of a thousands-of-years-long experiment run on an entire continent where these animals could not be domesticated. > Why were these things found in Europe and not Australia? Because Europe has horses and Australia doesn't, and horses cannot swim therefore could not reach Australia. The moon also doesn't have horses for a similar reason. In fact, you'll find that horses only really inhabited areas reachable by horses, until someone put them on a boat and took them to other places (which didn't happen for Australia until quite late). You have this strange assumption that all areas are secretly equal in geography and must be equally hospitable to human flourishing, but this is not true. Europe is more hospitable than Australia, therefore humans flourished more in Europe than Australia. All you need do is assume differences in geography exist and you'll reach the conclusion that humans in more amenable areas are more likely to conquer those in less amenable areas. > Europe's conquests were not a matter of luck or an accident of geography You say this with precisely no proof. The closest you get is saying "other people didn't do it, and Europeans did so it couldn't have been luck". The idea that knowledge is what held other areas back, as opposed to luck or geography, is ridiculous and trivially disprovable. Knowledge exists in equal quantities for all people (unless you believe certain races are inferior to others). The difference between regions is geographical or in fortune, which could include the fortune of having a particularly skilled leader or successful sequence of conquests.
  • lurk2 2y ago
    > Weirdly enough, Tenochtitlan is the rebuttal to this question. Why do you think they built a city on a lake? It's because they didn't have any pack animals so boats were the best way to move stuff around. This is a disadvantage that makes everything else much harder and therefore slows development. They built their city on a marsh because an eagle landed on a cactus and they interpreted this as a sign from heaven. They subsequently conquered the city-states that already existed there. It had nothing to do with considerations surrounding the ease of transport as they were a nomadic people and were initially forced to settle in a marsh on the fringes of the lake. Further, you are getting away from your original claim, which was: "Transport is the backbone of industry and is required for the high degree of specialisation in trades that produces technological advancement." This was not the case for the Aztecs. "Ah," you say, "but we can amend my claim to include analogs to pack animals which facilitate the movement of materials, such as Tenochtitlan's canal system," at which point I would draw your attention to the Cahokia, the Pueblos, the Mayans, and the Olmecs, none of which fit this pattern, all of which formed complex civilizations that soundly refute your claim. > If literal millions of Native Americans could not domesticate the other animals, but they could domesticate dogs, I'm going to guess that the other animals are harder to domesticate than dogs. You might not feel that this is the case, but your feelings don't stack up to the practical results of a thousands-of-years-long experiment run on an entire continent where these animals could not be domesticated. Dogs were domesticated thousands of years prior to the arrival of humans in North America. > Knowledge exists in equal quantities for all people There is no evidence of this whatsoever and plenty of evidence to disprove it.
    • James_K 2y ago
      > They built their city on a marsh because an eagle landed on a cactus I take it you also think the founder of Rome was the son of the god Mars and killed his brother after being suckled by a wolf? > There is no evidence of this whatsoever and plenty of evidence to disprove it. Do you have this evidence? Can I see it?
      • card_zero 2y ago
• andrepd 2y ago
  >I haven't reached a conclusion as to what it was in that approach that led Europe to becoming the dominant power of the last five hundred years 500 years is a blink. Anatomically modern humans have existed for 150,000 years, yet civilizations as we understand them are at most 5000 years old. You are comparing two continents that have been isolated during that timespan, with different geography, diseases, and domesticable animals, and which developed a virtually independent separate history until the 1500s. How can you assert that all of this is irrelevant and that it was pure "Northern European superiority" or whatever that meant European colonialism was successful?
  • lurk2 2y ago
    > How can you assert that all of this is irrelevant and that it was pure "Northern European superiority" or whatever that meant European colonialism was successful? Because the alternative is doing what James_K is doing and claiming that these events were essentially chance developments; that is, that there was nothing endogenous to European civilization (or, perhaps, as you're inferring, European peoples themselves) that led to these world conquests, but that they were instead either just a series of coincidences or a product of the environment. This discussion can get quite philosophical because like I said earlier in the thread, I can't refute historical determinism - I don't know if there is any way that we can really exit the chain of causality and determine events for ourselves, so in that sense, the underlying claim that it's all just the environment (or more accurately, antecedent causes) is correct, but this doesn't tell the whole story. The fundamental question at hand here is if European civilization had anything within it that led to its rise to power. What you, James_K, and decolonialists everywhere are preoccupied with is the idea that if this is true, it must mean that this "thing" (which I will refer to as the European method) originated as a result of European intelligence, or more broadly from its biological characteristics. It is then inferred that this will necessarily lead to normative scientific racism and subsequently a world-homogenizing genocide. There is reason to be weary of these things. They do not refute the notion that the Europeans possessed something endogenous which allowed them to conquer the world. Drawing the conclusion that Europeans did possess this endogenous thing would not validate any normative moral claim; we can only do that ourselves.