Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
How did your professor take that?
CA....
Then why isn't SanFran the center of the universe?
One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course [...]
Oh, well maybe that's why.
They 'killed' for protein and put on a nice dinner show.
Interesting post (#42). I accept your criticism of the word "need." It has been many years since I read Marvin Harris, but I think that he (or someone else) indicated that the Aztec agriculture was inadequate. I "need" to revisit the research..... Relavent in a way now since the professors of Aztlan want to revisit [sic] their paradise on California etc.
He'd probably been out hunting with his Vice-Chieftan.
This is just another great article popping the PC bubble of Rousseau's primitive lovelies. The Left really are the nancy-boy pacifists who would get us all killed by their delusional thinking. Thank God for Bush, Cheney, Rummie and boy would we need some more Pace's and a few Pattons thrown in.
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I couldn't agree more.
Steyn continues to belt these out of the park...
IMO, science, wonderful as it is, often contains far more speculation that we'd like to admit.
Great point. I wonder if Rove shared that tidbit with La Raza when he met with them?
I can't believe La Raza and like minded people want to go back to that? And Che? Puh-lease. They can go to Cuba or Venezuela and become workers for the state. It would be quite an eye opener. It's a shabby excuse to try to impose some kind of socialist revolucion on us. But, shhh, we aren't supposed to know that.
The Clovis overkill hypothesis is that human hunters arrived in America about 12,000 years ago and promptly killed off all the large mammals.
Two major problems:
1. Evidence is growing all the time that humans have been in the Americas for much longer, as far back as 20,000 or 25,000 BP.
2. A great many other animals went extinct at the same time, including ones unlikely to be hunted by people, implying that there were other causes involved.
I have a very open mind on the subject. Something happened then, and humans moving in may have been a part of it, but they are probably not the whole story.
Agree that the idea of "native Americans" living in harmony with nature is hooey.
If Hobbes and Steyn were contemporaries, Hobbes might have quoted Steyn.
I'm sure there are some hard people all around us, but the Frontiersmen and Indians of that era were the definition of hard.
The Aztecs ate the "sacrifice" victims because they needed protein. Antropologist Marvin Harris writes of this. Aztlan.
And for the 'mystical' properties - the different parts gave them strengths. It wasn't just the famine issues that came later. And the sacrificing in such massive numbers, I've read 20,000 at some 'festivals' (checking for source, also was taught this in school), was surely more than those present could feast upon and dwindled the local 'supply' forcing them to travel further to conquer more people to fuel the insatiable sacrificial fires.
Columbus decided to keep what he found secret, writing a secret letter to the Pope. The Pope endeavored his church to save the savages' souls.
Which they did. They weren't perfect either, but the massive, 'sacrificial' bloodfests were brought to a halt. I was taught this in Catholic grade & high school, as well. Ironically, it is absent, or told in very different ways, from my son's textbooks, same school system.
Then I came to this passage:
We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain.
The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
Suddenly, I realized Steyn had said everything he needed to about Lebenon... Though I wish he had included Hindu and Buddha as well, just to round it out...
Actually, you need beans, maize and squash - and if you had a bad harvest on any of 'em, or otherwise couldn't get all three, you were in bad shape.
Human meat was a luxury item, reserved for the upper class, and commoners could advance in rank by capturing it for 'em....
Thank goodness for Cortez.
Living in harmony? I don't know if I'd call it that, either. Many nations certainly were very knowledgeable about their surroundings and frugal with their supplies. But that probably had as much or more to do with sustaining life (food, clothing, clean water, medicines) and safety (travel light, avoid war or be able to spring an attack), as it did with living in 'harmony' with nature.
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