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> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Meso

> 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.
        roryirvine 7mo ago
        Once you've worked out a good way to leach out the tannins, acorns actually become a really useful food. There are a variety of possible methods - boiling, prolonged immersion in running water, or repeated mashing and rinsing cycles. The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability. Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth. They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.
  - underlipton 7mo ago
    The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations. E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-centers/news/reviving-indigenous-practice-clam-gardening https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...
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.

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.
        roryirvine 7mo ago
        Once you've worked out a good way to leach out the tannins, acorns actually become a really useful food. There are a variety of possible methods - boiling, prolonged immersion in running water, or repeated mashing and rinsing cycles. The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability. Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth. They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.
- underlipton 7mo ago
  The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations. E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-centers/news/reviving-indigenous-practice-clam-gardening https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...

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.