They did all of that, without steel or cattle.
Stone Age, my left ass cheek. They were more advanced than the Europeans, Europe just got a lucky spawn.
I am absolutely stealing “Europe just got a lucky spawn.”
Both were advanced, just in different areas.
Yeah turns out metallurgy isn’t a prerequisite for complex society, just certain forms of complex industrial machinery
I don’t think tech levels even matter in the discussion about whether the native american genocide was justified.
Though on the technological question, I’m curious how the conflict with europe would have gone if they didn’t have to deal with the slew of epidemics that resulted from first contact and killed off the majority of people there before the europeans even started looking at the mainland instead of just colonizing the Caribbean islands.
The Inca were figuring out tactics to use against the Spanish and were able to halt their advance several times, but didn’t have the numbers to really push back, plus were just on the tail end of civil war that could have been caused in part by the sickness destabilizing things before the spainish even realized there was an empire there (that wasn’t just their wild goose chase for a city of gold).
Not sure if the Aztecs would have turned out differently, though it probably would have been a longer war and perhaps would have gone hot before they made it to their capital and took their leader hostage. But they did awe him to the point that he thought appeasement would be a better strategy, not realizing they had no intention of leaving.
I’m honestly convinced that the Americas would have eventually repelled the European invaders if the introduced (and intentionally spread) diseases weren’t so devastating. Guns and metal armor are pretty good in warfare and all, but the size of the army required to subjugate millions of people across varied terrain where the invaders are wildly unfamiliar with the land and how to live in it while the defenders have been present for thousands of years, are very familiar with the land, have established warfare traditions, quickly adapt to introduced technologies, and have allied with historic enemies to repel invaders? Does not tend to go well for the invaders.
That wouldn’t surprise me, though there’s both supporting and opposing historic examples for that.
Like the colonization of Africa. While some areas like Ethiopia held out longer than others, Europe took most of Africa without disease. India was also subjugated, as well as Malaysia. I’m not really sure what the story was for Australia, though suspect it might have been more like the Americas.
Or there’s China and Japan where Europe had the upper hand in dealings but weren’t able to essentially make China or Japan colonies under their control.
There were definitely long term colonies in a lot of places, but most of those places are no longer under settler control. The damage to be repaired is huge, and there’s still economic control from a distance going on, but it’s miles different from what happened in the Americas, especially North America, I’d say.
These are the 3 main reasons I think native americans were considered primitives: lack of metal tools (some groups had access to copper and bronze, but none had iron), lack of any sort of writing (writing didn’t extend much beyond central America) and, especially in the warmer places, wearing little to no clothing.
Still, no one in their right mind would ever look at the huge temples and cities built without animal traction and think “Yeah, only a group of primitives would do that”. I mean, when you look at the megaliths of Sacsayhuaman, you immediately think “How the fuck did they do it?”
There’s a 4th: absolution. If you see their societies as having equal right to exist then what was done was a horrific atrocity that specific people are guilty of, often including one’s ancestors. It’s the same with a lot of anti black racism.
some groups had access to copper and bronze, but none had iron
There were a group on the Washington coast that work with iron that washed up from old japanense shipwrecks before any contact of Europeans.
There are also a few Inuit groups who made knives for centuries from a metallic meteorite that landed in the arctic circle.
Isn’t Washington coast on the east side of the continent?
Washington state. The one above California.
Washington state is on the West Coast. Washington DC, the capital city, is on the East Coast.
It’s… not intuitive.
When I was a kid, Washington the state, Washington DC, and the whitehouse all blurred together, and then we learned that the whitehouse burned and was rebuilt, and for the longest time I thought it was relocated… to the state… of Washington… and I believed that for years. I think I figured it out before high school, but it was definitely 7th or 8th grade before I could point on a map where the president sat.
We have Washington state on the west, and DC on the east.
Nope
Nope.
Reading “The Dawn of Everything” really opened my eyes to how much our understanding of Native American culture is entirely driven by White colonial narratives. It wasn’t just everything in this meme, its the consequences of them. These weren’t “tribals” waiting for civilization to come to them, there was a sophisticated and advanced ecosystem of nations here, not always peaceful but rooted in an entirely different world view and systems of interaction than Europe.
To the extent that when NA ambassadors traveled to Europe, they would report back with what barberous and disgusting people the Europeans were, for all the reasons that would sound familiar today: abandoning the sick, old, and poor to die; worshipping wealth and commodities over people and community; pollution; environmental destruction; exploitation; religious hypocrisy; and more.
The “Native Critique of European Culture” is devastating, as further evidenced by how many early colonies “failed” (including the famous “missing” Roanoke colony) because the indentured servants, prisoners, and other folks who made up early colonists much preferred to “go native” than be forced into exploitative labor relationships with the foreign power.
Yeah, it was wild to see how much of what I had been taught was European ideals and ideas were just Iriqouian critiques that Europeans were convinced of. Then later when he gets to talking about how some of these ideas seem to come from the rejection of Cahokia blew my mind again.
That book is fucking amazing and one of my favorite reads by far. It opened my eyes too and got me super curious about the first jesuit encounters with the Brazilian natives in the early 1500s. History as taught in schools is also very “white man brought civilization” and every single one of the natives’ struggles is swept under the rug. Finding these first records is hard for me. I might need to hit up university professors.
It’s the problem of using an skewed system to make Europe the advanced civilization.
I read once that the first sign of civilization wasn’t a weapon. It was a cured broken femur because that means someone took care of the person with the broken leg. So maybe that should be the guide to follow: medicine and healthcare.
We have found signs of trepanation that are surprisingly ancient (before bronze if I’m not mistaken). It shows both a decent understanding of physiology and of technique.
There was no Mayan empire. The Mayas were divided among city-states.
Inka empire then?
OP definitely could have used the Inca empire. Its size far surpassed that of any bronze age state in the Old world.
It was also the largest empire by continuous latitude coverage
Aren’t they one of only two empires that was formed into a narrow line north to south? I’m not saying they aren’t impressive, just that they were only competing with Egypt there.
I did this in True Size Of:
I didn’t include a few northern regions for New Kingdom Egypt, because they were a pain to move with my phone, but I also included all of Egypt which covers a lot of desertic area that probably wasn’t under any strong state control.
Couldn’t find La Paz in Bolivia with the website.
But it should give a pretty good idea.
EDIT:
Ok even better:
But… none of those things actually contradict “stone age”. It might be better to point out that an advanced civilization isn’t necessarily defined by metalworking.
They also had metalworking, it just wasn’t iron and in many cases it made no sense to use metal instead of naturally occurring materials with many of the same properties, like obsidian (you can actually make it sharper than a scalpel). It has disadvantages of course, but so does iron; it rusts and requires a ton of energy to create.
The idea that metalworking is somehow a ‘peak’ of civilization was derived from 1800s anthropology trying to divide societies according to how ‘advanced’ (read: similar to European technological development) they were. In many ways some Indigenous American technologies surpassed European ones: ex, land management. When Europeans were destroying every old growth forest they had, some Indigenous American nations were so adept at land management they managed to have settled hunter-gatherers (coastal PNW). As in, these hunter-gatherers didn’t need to move constantly about the landscape to hunt because they maintained it to be bountiful, and still managed to have population centers of similar size as many European ones.
You’ve also got terra preta in South America, which transformed poor quality soil into soil that made horticulture possible. And as long as we’re in Central and South America, one of the first nanotechnologies is believed to be a paint made by the Maya called Maya blue.
Daily reminder that no one is illegal on stolen land.
It’s mind boggling how many teachers and professors in my life are still all aboard the “they were savages until we showed up” train.
Build me a musket out of obsidian.
Might be possible with bronze, since some cannons were made of bronze
Interestingly enough, I just finished watching The Lost Metallurgy of the Ancient Americas video, and not only were some cannons made of bronze, but apparently the Conquistadors did actually have some Mesoamerican Natives make some artillery for them using native metallurgy techniques and the locally mined copper/bronze the Natives were already making.1
1 Copper alloyed with arsenic forms a sort of bronze, and copper-tin alloys were also used for the bronze best known nowadays.
Wow, that’s a really interesting find!
Even Spain at that time had not produced the metal domestically for centuries, relying on imports from central Europe.
Ironic. I wouldn’t be surprised if more parts of their technological superiority also relied on imports
Then they were in the bronze age, at least technically
Grow a garden that can feed an extended family in nutrient poor soil with a musket. You’re looking at it the wrong way if you’re viewing one as better than the other and not just different technologies.
Okay, build me a diesel powered tractor with tiller attachment out of obsidian.
The other answer:
Okay. points musket at brown people Start tilling.
I’m extremely confused by the thesis of your argument here. What is the point you’re trying to make?
That your hippy dippy “different technologies” take is kind of naive. You sound like a kindergarten teacher handing out participation trophies.
These two peoples with these two “different technologies” fought. Who won?
Might makes right ey?
Seems very uncivilized.
Edit:
So i guess in your world the most advanced creature is a Malaria mosquito.
That your hippy dippy “different technologies” take is kind of naive
Don’t sit here and act like you don’t live as the beneficiary of thousands of years of selective breeding of Mesoamerican staple crops, not even to touch on the medications you take that come from the Americas. I’m talking about them as different technologies because they are, and recreating things like terra preta is an active area of research for current day use. Because, guess what, our current technology that you’re jacking off about sucks ass and relies on dumping a metric fuckton of nitrogen and phosphorous in the form of fertilizer runoff into waterways, creating enormous dead zones.
‘Who can kill the most people with it’ is a very American way of understanding the past or technology in general. You can’t kill anyone with a telescope, that doesn’t mean it’s not a technology.
Technology alone doesn’t win wars. Hernan Cortez only subdued the Aztecs thanks to managing to get several other native groups to join in on an assault against Tenochtitlan. Diseases that were new to the Americas also killed many natives, way more than any direct confrontations. On an funny note, the Australian army technically lost a war against emus, which are large, flightless birds.
Keep in mind that colonial powers always used local groups to keep things “in order”. This was no different to how they did it in African and Asian colonies: find a group that you can bully or buy and ensure they stay in power, for a price.
That just shows that we never evolved past ‘the one who is stronger is the one who is right’, and I really wish we would
Why bother doing any of that shit when you can maintain a productive environment and slit that asshole’s throat while he sleeps?
So many things are just ideas. It’s really fascinating how some ideas can snowball and give incredible power to those in possession of them, while others can be very advanced, yet have minimal effect in the culture’s spread or influence.
Austronesian peoples discovered the fire piston - a very useful tool that necessarily utilizes concepts of air pressure and localized temperature - nearly three thousand years ahead of Europeans. Yet some Austronesian peoples who used this tool were quite literally in the stone age, not working metal.
Ideas are incredibly arbitrary things.
Europeans were using roman numerals and an abacus for accounting until the 1200s. In fact, the number zero was initially banned out of concern for fraud. The Medici Bank was an early adopter of the IndoArab numeral system we use today and it helped them become one of the wealthiest families in Europe.
From the 600s to 1400s we can draw a fairly clear line from Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Fibonacci, Pierro della Franchesca to Leonardo da Vinci.
In the old world it could take centuries for ideas to travel, even if they’re foundational to modern mathematics, physics etc.
A similar story can be told of sugar which was first refined in South Asia, the engineering process travelled through and was further developed in the Arab world during the Islamic golden age and then went to Europe.
Italian merchant republics—primarily Venice—began managing sugar production in Mediterranean colonies like Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily. However, sugar is a land-hungry and wood-hungry crop. By the 1400s, the Mediterranean was running out of timber (needed to fuel the massive boiling vats) and space.
Christopher Columbus lived in Portugal and married the daughter of a sugar estate owner. When he sailed for the Americas, he brought sugarcane stalks from the Canary Islands on his very first voyage, knowing the Caribbean climate was a perfect match for the “white gold.”
The Caribbean offered vast land, tropical rain, and timber. Because the process of cutting, hauling, and boiling cane is so physically punishing and dangerous, European powers scaled up the enslaved labor system to a level never before seen in the Mediterranean, turning the islands into “sugar factories” to meet the soaring demand in Europe.
The profits from sugar were unlike anything seen before. At its peak, a successful sugar plantation could see annual returns of 20% to 50%, far outstripping traditional agriculture or local trade. This led to the founding of institutions like the Bank of England, Barclays and Lloyds. Sugar also provided a cheap source or energy and made caffeine based beverages more palatable to maximize the productivity of human capital in operation of early machinery during the industrial revolution.
“Also, you can just make sugar out of beets.”
Europe, having spent the past ~300 years importing sugar cane as a specialized tropical crop: 😬
Ideas are worth more than gold!
Absolutely. Napolean and trade barriers had an important role in that evolution
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British Royal Navy blockaded France, cutting off all Caribbean cane sugar. The price of sugar loaf skyrocketed. Facing a riotous, sugar-deprived public, Napoleon poured state funding into beet research. He ordered thousands of acres to be planted and offered massive prizes to scientists who could refine the process. By the time the blockade lifted, the industry was advanced enough to compete with cane on a price-per-pound basis.
It’s remarkable how much of human history (if not all of it) is adapting to the circumstances around us.
And also uncomfortable how many inventions came about due to a war…
Yeah, they invented typesetting in China long before Europe, but they had to prepare characters for each run because of amount of possible characters, the letters were pottery, and it didn’t seem like very useful thing so it was abandoned after the inventor’s death.
At least that’s what I heard, it might be a retcon for PR purposes
Not a retcon at all! Though use of moveable type in China did continue past its inventor’s death, it didn’t acquire the same prominence or revolutionize printing the way that it did when invented in Europe.
This reminds me how setting prints letter-by-letter was time consuming, so the printers had common words or even whole phrases ready too. It was called stereotype.
In France they called it cliché…
Well, TIL, still I think it really highlights that some ideas need specific circumstances to create an impact
This reminds me of Connections with James Burke (i only saw the reboot), that explores how breakthroughs have depended on other semi-related ideas and technology.
The ancient greeks had early grammophones, and they ditched the idea because what the fuck you need that for.
I’ve never heard that before, do you know what the device was called or what to look up for it?
Uh, what?
Although it’s nice to have.
I’d prefer to live in a just, egalitarian society on the plains still, don’t get me wrong, it’d just be nice to have metal working if you know what I’m sayin.
Weren’t they hunter gatherers?
Where do you think corn comes from? When is the last time you saw a wild corn stalk?
Which “they”?
Native Americans.
Oh they were all sorts of things before white folks showed up, even more since. The Yupik still hunt and gather. The Aztec had major cities when the Spanish arrived, with Tenochtitlan having an estimated 200,000 people more than twice the estimates for Madrid at the time. Cahokia was an empire that farmed sunflowers and later maize in what’s now Illinois before being abandoned in the Eastern hemisphere’s middle ages. The people of the pacific northwest were mostly fishers because if you’ve got a fuckload of salmon it’s not a bad call. In what’s now Mexico you had a lot of sylviculture.
Maize was domesticated from teosinte in mesoamerica. Beans, tomatoes, squash, and peppers were all grown by many cultures. The inca grew so many potatoes.
Most people were doing a little bit of everything though. Or whatever made sense to them. Many wanted to hunt and gather and chose to not prioritize agriculture over the hunt.
But also, hunter gatherers can do all these things. They can engage in complex politics, build great monuments, develop an interesting material culture, and plenty else. We have evidence of this in both hemispheres.
Oh, like… all of them? Not quite, no. There were about…500 to 600 different Native nations in North America, I think, plus more in Mesoamerica and South America? Across a huge diversity of different landscapes. Some of them were nomadic hunter-gatherers, a few were settled hunter-gatherers, but a very large amount of Native nations were agricultural and either settled in one place year round or had a winter and summer home deal where they transited between the two. A huge amount of foods that are now well established worldwide were bred in the Americas as agricultural crops, including corn, many varieties of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, a number of squashes, and sunflowers. There were several heavily populated urban centers as well – check out the Inca, the Maya, the Aztecs, and in North America the Mississippian Mound Building culture, and the Pueblo culture for examples of heavily populated cities. The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy also were settled agriculturalists, though I believe they also did have substantial hunting and gathering activity (agriculturalist vs. hunter/gatherer is more of a spectrum than a binary choice) and I don’t believe they had population centers that were true large urban centers like the other examples I listed.
Not to mention when the Europeans arrived they found massive cities that had running water, sanitation workers, and a relatively clean way of life.
Tenochtitlan was one of the most populated cities in the world when the Spanish arrived
Which ones?
It’s interesting reading Cabeza de Vaca’s account of living in Texas for a decade. All the natives living on the Texas coast weren’t even hunter-gatherers. They were just gatherers and lived in lean-tos. Meanwhile, 1000 miles south of them was Tenochtitlan, and a bunch of other cities that Bernal Castillo described as grander than those in Europe.
The great Hopewell road and the earthworks videos that Milo Rossi did were absolutely wild, I knew they had magnificent knowledge of astronomy (I can only ever dream of how good their night sky looked, living out on forested plains) but seeing the precision of the earthworks is insane
Yes, but the Europeans had diseases
Where I live there are only two opinions about USA:
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USA is shiny utopia where everyone is rich, and no hardship can be found.
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USA is a dumpster fire no different from Russia or China.
American natives are just a funky idea from fantasy land for both sides.
What’s “a dumpster fire” about China?
Their treatment of protestors or anyone deemed ‘dissident’
Good solar and renewable energy policies though (and fastest developing fusion reactor experiments on the planet)
You can also rent fucking robot legs in China. And apparently silkworm pupae are delicious.
They executed a mayor for hoarding billions in gold and cash in his properties recently. So that was cool. Itd be cooler if they just made him live in poverty forever but still pretty based
Wasn’t it more because his exploitative practices made it so he could hoard all that (potato tomato, I know, but still, I’d call billionaireism with a bit of fraud worse than just the hoarding)
Yes but it is nearly impossible to amass that kind of wealth without corruption and fraud to begin with. Thats why they investigated him. They have a lot of their own problems. Many of which america has too, but thats neither here nor there.
I still think it was a really based way of handling what that parasite did and i think we should investigate and charge every billionaire.
Maybe not capital punishment. Maybe just socialize their wealth and make them a pariah, but they have to go. Our planet literally cant sustain them. Even monkeys know how to take care of a resource thief. I understand the execution, though i dont believe capital punishment should exist to that degree.
I’m quite a fan of the idea that pasing 10mil income/net worth awards them with a “congratulations you won, you have enough to live on for the rest of your life while still leaving money for your kids. Everything you make past this point goes towards hospitals, schools and the country’s infrastructure.” Certificate and a plaque that goes on everything they’ve funded.
Coffin apartments?
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Even if. How does a different state of technological developement justifies colonialis, conquering and genocide?
It doesn’t, unless you’re a colonizing nation, then any justification will do.
There are two significant papal bulls around the time that “allowed” European nations to go and conquer the world to spread Christianity and created the Doctrine of Discovery, meaning that non-Christian civilisations were not actually civilized and should be civilized by force for their own good.
Yeah, but are the people OP is talking nowadays part of a nation currently colonizing native american peoples and do these people need a justification?
It’s not bringing them god anymore, now it’s bringing them democracy.
The colonisation of the 18th and 19th centuries hasn’t stopped, it just gets dressed up in modern 20th/21st century finery.
Some thing that should be taught in all schools from year 1:
The difference between a descriptive and prescriptive proposition.
If iron is the thing that rules the advancement of a culture, sub-Saharian culture were more advanced that European ones. They used iron when Europe was still using copper.
Metal use historically was more a function of fuel (wood) availability than of metallurgical knowledge. Copper (and tin) have low melting points so it’s relatively easier to produce bronze than iron, which needs much higher temperatures to produce. For a long time it was just easier to sail to Wales (an ancient producer of tin) than to round up an enormous quantity of wood.
Speaking of sailing, copper’s named as such because, in classical antiquity (1700-1500BC), Cyprus was the main source of the metal.
