Posted on 08/17/2005 11:43:12 AM PDT by Between the Lines
I recognize that guy from the Leonard Nimoy documentary.
Not the first time I've been called twisted.
You remind me of this: Chief: White man stupid White: how so chief Chief: in old days woman keep house clean, do all the cooking, clean all the game, gather all the wood for fire take care of kids. Men hunt and fish, have get together in the sweat house. White man tries to "improve" on this???? Stupid.
Why not? In a world of isolated populations there are bound to be different levels of development.
In earlier years the Chinese were centuries advanced over Europeans.
Even as Cortez arrived in Teotehuacan, the city out-shone any city in Europe, in size, public utilties, wealth, cleanliness, and beauty.
Too bad that they were not genetically diverse enough to be able to deal with the diseases that came with the Europeans, or that they had not developed sea-faring first. History is full of accident.
One has to accept that contact between the new and old world would have taken place at some point between 1492 and, say 1850. It matters not when it happened; what is important to realize is that whenever it happened the result was preordained. Disease would wipe out the Indian populations with no intent to do so by the Europeans. This would have happened even if the Americans had first gone to Europe, as they would have taken the diseases back with them.
That's how the diseases were spread through out the Americas in the years after first contact, to populations that had no idea of the existence of Europe, 'white" men, or ships.
Like this takes away all the harm and pain of the past in their minds.
Well, if calling something "claptrap" is venom, then there's a lot of poison flying around FR.
I may be sensitive about this issue because there are a lot of Ward Churchill style hate-the-white-man revisionists out here and I can see some of their standard myths in this piece. These people are not harmless, they want to re-write American history and enforce their own political correctness code. Some have resorted to violence and intimidation to achieve their goals.
Not true. Wheeled toys have been discovered in Mayan ruins dating to the B.C. era. It does appear they never used wheels on a larger scale for vehicular travel for some as yet unknown cultural reason. Maybe the Mayan Kings preferred being carried on the shoulders of slaves on wooden platforms. Why they apparently didn't use wheeled vehicles to carry loads over their PAVED highways is indeed a mystery.
They're not gone, you just don't see them. There is a difference. Come on down to the Casino and bring lots of cash and I will show you a few.
One might profitably aske the same question about the Africans. There were a lot of them, and they were very far behind the Europeans, too. There doesn't seem to be any reason to assume that technological progress has to go hand in hand with health and cultivation.
No agriculture? the next time you eat a tomato, potato, any kind of bean, any kind of corn, pineapples, papaya, squash and pumpkins or smoke tobacco (there are way more than this but this makes the point) remember it came from the Indians.
I haven't read Diamond's book, but isn't that part of his assertion, that people who could cultivate crops and had domesticated animals-- oh maybe that's it. But aren't buffalo domesticated now? So he says, I think, that such people would have time to smelt metal and develop stuff.
The essential development in the West and Asia, as opposed to the pre-columbian western hemisphere and Africa, by which western societies and Asian societies excelled and eventually dominated, was the development and widespread use of written languages.
Through written languages and their widespread use, knowledge and experience could be transmitted to multitudes in the younger generations, without those younger generations having to engage in the personal experiences, or demonstrations of personal experience (apprenticeship), by which such knowledge was originally acquired. Because of written languages, and their widespread use, knowledge itself could grow, diversify and expand faster than the simple rate of the human life cycle. Traditional cultures have some examples of high knowledge achievments. But it is written langauge and its widespread use that facilitates the broad application of higher knowledge, creating greater knowledge expansion and use.
There was no ability for African or Western Hemisphere traditional cultures to compete with those who had widespread use of written languages - no matter what else happened.
See I told you so. See post 33.
There was some speculation that it was a member of the Ainu. This is a group of more Caucasian-looking people who are currently found in northern Japan. The analysis of the bones was stopped while the ownership was decided in the courts.
Interesting that they would not use them for transport. Maybe the existence of large numbers of slaves was the answer as you hint. There was so much "slave power" available, making their jobs easier through use of machines (like wheels) never occurred.
Of course, if they had used machines the results might have been relics more impressive than the Mayan ruins discovered to date. Slave labor in Egypt/Greece/Rome accomplished a lot with machine assistance.
An interesting theory I read some time ago stated that geography made the difference. The Eurasian land mass offered a East-West belt of temperate climate that stretched nearly unbroken 12,00 miles from the Atlantic coast of Western Europe to the Yellow river basin in China. The climate similarities over such great distances allowed very dissimilar cultures to trade and pick the 'best' of other cultures, even very distant ones.
The Western hemisphere, OTOH, is orientated North-South over a similar distance, but with very drastic climate changes as one moves further along, making for less trade and interaction between cultures.
Makes some sense to me.
Since they had slaves, I wonder if they ended up having to pay reparations, then the resulting bankruptcy and starvation killed 'em off. /sarc.
Although it's not spelled out in detail in this article, there is in fact a fair bit of serious scholarship that points to a much more robust and sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization than has been heretofore believed.
This is interesting stuff, if you can take off your political blinders for a while.
I agree with your statement. There's a lot of interesting work going on. I'm on the GGG ping list and have read a lot of it. Perhaps because I have been reading in this area is the reason I find the notion of a 100,000,000 strong Native American population that had cleared most of the forest for agriculture preposterous. On the other hand, if you're aware of archaeological evidence in support of that thesis, I'll gladly retract my criticism.
To be fair, the statement was Could these continents have held, as some assert, as many as 112 million people?
IOW, the estimate is that there may have been as many as 112 million people spread across both North and South America.
Given what we know about the very large scale civilizations in Central and South America, the number doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.
I'd agree with you that it's not believable when applied to North America only.
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