5 ms·

> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security

by tyre 7mo ago

> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations. It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.

delta_p_delta_x 7mo ago
> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history. What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
- AJMaxwell 7mo ago
  The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared. IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
  - alsetmusic 7mo ago
    So a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower technology and a lack of farming.
  - Auracle 7mo ago
    I never understand the “lack of animals to domesticate” angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama and alpaca. More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…
    - t-3 7mo ago
      Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.
      - eru 7mo ago
        Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden. In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.
        pfdietz 7mo ago
        In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not suitable for domestication.
        t-3 7mo ago
        Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.
        eru 7mo ago
        I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them. I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.
- hax0ron3 7mo ago
  That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer. I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
  - actionfromafar 7mo ago
    It’s impossible to tell. If it had taken decades or a century longer because their numbers were higher, they might have had time to start up their own production of technology.
  - surgical_fire 7mo ago
    Around 90% of the people died of plagues. It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues. Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.
    - OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
      There's some speculation that Syphilis may have been a new world plague. The first major outbreak was a couple of years after Columbus returned, but figuring out when the first ever case was has proven more difficult.
    - hax0ron3 7mo ago
      I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then it's possible the Native Americans would have remained unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of the equation completely, I think the Native Americans would have been conquered, simply because of the great European advantage in technology. But the conquest would have looked more like England's colonization of India, and many more of the native cultures would probably have had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology, like India's cultures did, rather than just going extinct.
- riffraff 7mo ago
  In things like the battle of Cajamarca the Incan lost a battle against the Spanish with 8000 warriors against 150. All the 150 survived. Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).
  - tehnub 7mo ago
    I just read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
    - riffraff 7mo ago
      Well, yeah, and if you keep reading about it, the whole rest of the campaign has the same tenure. Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc. The scale of this is absolutely insane.
  - vasco 7mo ago
    Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000 men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.
  - avadodin 7mo ago
    > the Incan didn't fight at night! To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.
  - circlefavshape 7mo ago
    You're missing a zero. It was EIGHTY thousand, not 8000.
- junofan 7mo ago
  There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand. Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider. [1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056
  - alsetmusic 7mo ago
    > we happened upon them That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
    - alsetmusic 7mo ago
      Stupid people may not be able to read sarcasm. I figured HN would have enough internet literacy, but maybe not.
    - zirgs 7mo ago
      Yeah, someone would have started to cross the oceans eventually. Europeans happened to do that first.
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK. We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy. Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
  - mock-possum 7mo ago
    > There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?
    - mkl 7mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Retric 7mo ago
    1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire. Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
- ywvcbk 7mo ago
  They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.
  - t-3 7mo ago
    American agriculture was very advanced for the time and the crops and ideas developed transformed food and agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and resistance to smallpox.
    - actionfromafar 7mo ago
      Isn’t there indications that even large parts of the Amazon is in actuality planted?
- eru 7mo ago
  Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.
- mr_toad 7mo ago
  > What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists. They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.
melagonster 7mo ago
The Inca Empire had crazy plant breeding techniques.
- poisonarena 7mo ago
  they also didn't even invent the wheel
  - ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
    The wheel isn't that useful if you live on terrible terrain and have nothing to drive it with.
    - poisonarena 7mo ago
      llamas and alpacas
      - t-3 7mo ago
        Not great beasts of burden. Barely better than dog with travois, arguably worse than having an extra human to carry things.
      - ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
        Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the breeds they used back then. Either way, better than nothing, but definitely no horse.
    - Auracle 7mo ago
      I live on a hilly plot and use a wheelbarrow or cart all the time in the summer.
  - Aefiam 7mo ago
    they did invent the wheel, they just didnt use it for transportion.
alsetmusic 7mo ago
[flagged]
- hax0ron3 7mo ago
  It's just objectively true that the Native Americans were far behind Europe in military technology and many other technologies in 1492. The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.
  - alsetmusic 7mo ago
    > The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages. They did. Natives didn't have agriculture: > It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late. The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.
    - hax0ron3 7mo ago
      He wasn't claiming that the Native Americans didn't have agriculture, he was claiming that Native Americans didn't develop large-scale agriculture as early in history as Eurasians did, and as a result had less time to develop the kinds of technologies that are enabled by having large-scale agriculture.
    - kelnos 7mo ago
      Commenter upthread said they "did not invent it quickly enough", as you quoted, which is not the same thing as "did not invent it". They just meant that the Native Americans invented it later than the Europeans did, such that the natives had less time to develop advanced (military) technology.
      - alsetmusic 7mo ago
        Do you really think that a process that was discovered repeatedly throughout the world was thousands of years behind on one side? Edit: We're talking ~10k years difference.
MyHonestOpinon 7mo ago
The Americas were always going to be behind Euro Asia due to the shape of the continents. Going North-South you get big changes in climate and thus agricultural techniques and plants. Civilizations in the Americas could have spent thousands of years in a grow and bust cycle and never reach a similar level of development as the old continent.
- hax0ron3 7mo ago
  The East-West thing probably does confer an advantage, but it might be overstated. I'm not sure that the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesopotamia and Europe was actually any smaller than the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesoamerica and North America.
surgical_fire 7mo ago
Er, Aztecs and Incans definitely had agriculture. They actually had highly complex societies. What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and so on.
- jstanley 7mo ago
  They had agriculture, yes, but they hadn't had it long enough to bootstrap an advanced civilisation before the Europeans arrived. If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.
  - AngryData 7mo ago
    What do you mean they didn't have an advanced civilization? They had city densities above the best in Europe and their gold work put European goldsmiths to shame. They had the abacus, pain medications, aqueducts, armor, dams, beer, gold plating along with sintering soldering and lost wax casting, roads, the concept of zero in mathematics, advanced astronomy, plumbing, the suspension bridge, multiple unique writing systems, and tons of food preservation techniques. That is a far cry from some dudes tieing rocks to sticks.
  - vessenes 7mo ago
    Friend, this is just not true. Thousands of years of large sophisticated governments and civilizations in what is now Mexico and farther south. Its reductive to the point of being completely wrong to think of the Americas in this way. Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded. Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.

by tyre 7mo ago

delta_p_delta_x 7mo ago

> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history. What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

AJMaxwell 7mo ago
The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared. IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
- alsetmusic 7mo ago
  So a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower technology and a lack of farming.
- Auracle 7mo ago
  I never understand the “lack of animals to domesticate” angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama and alpaca. More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…
  - t-3 7mo ago
    Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.
    - eru 7mo ago
      Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden. In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.
      - pfdietz 7mo ago
        In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not suitable for domestication.
        t-3 7mo ago
        Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.
        eru 7mo ago
        I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them. I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.
hax0ron3 7mo ago
That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer. I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
- actionfromafar 7mo ago
  It’s impossible to tell. If it had taken decades or a century longer because their numbers were higher, they might have had time to start up their own production of technology.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  Around 90% of the people died of plagues. It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues. Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.
  - OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
    There's some speculation that Syphilis may have been a new world plague. The first major outbreak was a couple of years after Columbus returned, but figuring out when the first ever case was has proven more difficult.
  - hax0ron3 7mo ago
    I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then it's possible the Native Americans would have remained unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of the equation completely, I think the Native Americans would have been conquered, simply because of the great European advantage in technology. But the conquest would have looked more like England's colonization of India, and many more of the native cultures would probably have had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology, like India's cultures did, rather than just going extinct.
riffraff 7mo ago
In things like the battle of Cajamarca the Incan lost a battle against the Spanish with 8000 warriors against 150. All the 150 survived. Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).
- tehnub 7mo ago
  I just read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
  - riffraff 7mo ago
    Well, yeah, and if you keep reading about it, the whole rest of the campaign has the same tenure. Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc. The scale of this is absolutely insane.
- vasco 7mo ago
  Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000 men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.
- avadodin 7mo ago
  > the Incan didn't fight at night! To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.
- circlefavshape 7mo ago
  You're missing a zero. It was EIGHTY thousand, not 8000.
junofan 7mo ago
There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand. Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider. [1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056
- alsetmusic 7mo ago
  > we happened upon them That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
  - alsetmusic 7mo ago
    Stupid people may not be able to read sarcasm. I figured HN would have enough internet literacy, but maybe not.
  - zirgs 7mo ago
    Yeah, someone would have started to cross the oceans eventually. Europeans happened to do that first.
jandrewrogers 7mo ago
There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK. We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy. Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
- mock-possum 7mo ago
  > There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?
  - mkl 7mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- Retric 7mo ago
  1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire. Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
ywvcbk 7mo ago
They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.
- t-3 7mo ago
  American agriculture was very advanced for the time and the crops and ideas developed transformed food and agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and resistance to smallpox.
  - actionfromafar 7mo ago
    Isn’t there indications that even large parts of the Amazon is in actuality planted?
eru 7mo ago
Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.
mr_toad 7mo ago
> What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists. They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.

melagonster 7mo ago

The Inca Empire had crazy plant breeding techniques.

poisonarena 7mo ago
they also didn't even invent the wheel
- ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
  The wheel isn't that useful if you live on terrible terrain and have nothing to drive it with.
  - poisonarena 7mo ago
    llamas and alpacas
    - t-3 7mo ago
      Not great beasts of burden. Barely better than dog with travois, arguably worse than having an extra human to carry things.
    - ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
      Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the breeds they used back then. Either way, better than nothing, but definitely no horse.
  - Auracle 7mo ago
    I live on a hilly plot and use a wheelbarrow or cart all the time in the summer.
- Aefiam 7mo ago
  they did invent the wheel, they just didnt use it for transportion.

alsetmusic 7mo ago

[flagged]

hax0ron3 7mo ago
It's just objectively true that the Native Americans were far behind Europe in military technology and many other technologies in 1492. The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.
- alsetmusic 7mo ago
  > The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages. They did. Natives didn't have agriculture: > It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late. The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.
  - hax0ron3 7mo ago
    He wasn't claiming that the Native Americans didn't have agriculture, he was claiming that Native Americans didn't develop large-scale agriculture as early in history as Eurasians did, and as a result had less time to develop the kinds of technologies that are enabled by having large-scale agriculture.
  - kelnos 7mo ago
    Commenter upthread said they "did not invent it quickly enough", as you quoted, which is not the same thing as "did not invent it". They just meant that the Native Americans invented it later than the Europeans did, such that the natives had less time to develop advanced (military) technology.
    - alsetmusic 7mo ago
      Do you really think that a process that was discovered repeatedly throughout the world was thousands of years behind on one side? Edit: We're talking ~10k years difference.

MyHonestOpinon 7mo ago

The Americas were always going to be behind Euro Asia due to the shape of the continents. Going North-South you get big changes in climate and thus agricultural techniques and plants. Civilizations in the Americas could have spent thousands of years in a grow and bust cycle and never reach a similar level of development as the old continent.

hax0ron3 7mo ago
The East-West thing probably does confer an advantage, but it might be overstated. I'm not sure that the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesopotamia and Europe was actually any smaller than the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesoamerica and North America.

surgical_fire 7mo ago

Er, Aztecs and Incans definitely had agriculture. They actually had highly complex societies. What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and so on.

jstanley 7mo ago
They had agriculture, yes, but they hadn't had it long enough to bootstrap an advanced civilisation before the Europeans arrived. If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.
- AngryData 7mo ago
  What do you mean they didn't have an advanced civilization? They had city densities above the best in Europe and their gold work put European goldsmiths to shame. They had the abacus, pain medications, aqueducts, armor, dams, beer, gold plating along with sintering soldering and lost wax casting, roads, the concept of zero in mathematics, advanced astronomy, plumbing, the suspension bridge, multiple unique writing systems, and tons of food preservation techniques. That is a far cry from some dudes tieing rocks to sticks.
- vessenes 7mo ago
  Friend, this is just not true. Thousands of years of large sophisticated governments and civilizations in what is now Mexico and farther south. Its reductive to the point of being completely wrong to think of the Americas in this way. Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded. Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.