[PzLdr]

What's the surprise? The Cheyenne in the early 18th century were semi-agricultural, and living near the Misssissippi River. They abandoned that, and moved onto the Plains as hunter-gatherers.

[muawiyah]

Not just them. All sorts of people lived within a couple of hundred miles of Cahokia. By the 1600s they lived nowhere near Cahokia.

Two things happened ~ Old World disease arrived and killed off almost everybody who knew how to make a "more modern" society work. Secondly, the horse galloped onto the scene!

Eating steak every day beat the heck out of digging for roots too.

After the arrival of the Old World diseases in on the East Coast, the remaining Indians turned to the semi-industrial occupation of meat hunter. They shot wild game for sale to white folks, giving up agriculture in the process. Some groups did hang onto farming, of course, but most Eastern Indians jumped right out of semi-serfdom into large scale animal husbandry.

So, how did they do that? Well, somebody sold them guns and ammo. Some tribes actually figured out how to repair and manufacture their own rifles to beat the price spread with new imports.

The anthropologists always make the mistake of mistaking poverty for culture.

[DannyTN]

Evolution teaches that men were hunter/gatherers before becoming civilized and that civilization didn't arise until the advent of agriculture, until man started stayed put. It's always presented as a line of progression, it's never or at least rarely is shown going the other way.

In contrast, Scripture tells us that of Adam's first two sons, one was a farmer, and the other raised livestock. Thus the scriptural model has agriculture in place clearly from the first generation.