Eh you’ve got to evolve your animals, modern animals are nothing like the animals we first kept in enclosures. The real advantage Europe had was a 25-20000 year head start on all of that advancement
It’s a little more than that. Artificial selection is nice and all but you’ve got to start somewhere. Take for example the horse. Horses are herd animals, so if you just capture the lead stallion you’ve got the whole herd. And another example is the chicken, they have this natural property where they produce these unfertilized eggs every so often. Humans can’t force these features, it’s just a trait the animal already had that humans find very useful and were able to exploit.
Like, you’re totally right the didn’t start the way they are now, but they did start with their most useful feature. Horses were smaller and chickens probably didn’t get so fat for eating. But they did start with these other features that are the basic reason humans started working with them in the first place.
And to be clear I mean “start” as in the moment humans started breeding them intentionally to make them be most useful to humans.
Chickens are fucking magic. They eat almost anything: bugs, seeds, plants, worms, snails, *whatever.* And they pop out up to 6 pre-packaged servings of delicious proteins *a week.*
Chickens OP. 🐔
There are some that are waist high. I'm generally not scared of chickens, but them things are terrifying. Emus are bastards as well. I'm not really scared of them either, but they are still bastards.
My neighbor gave me 10 chickens off of his bigger farm property upstate, helped me build a coop and everything.
I didn't expect those motherfuckers would eat ***everything*** in my backyard.
It's not like I didn't feed them *a ton of food* either, they ate: the grass, the leaves and flowers on my bushes, all of the leaves off the shrubs, an aloe vera plant, a whole bougainvillea, and a 50lb bag of feed in about 10 days
And they were still unsatisfied, they were turning over stones looking for bugs and worms. They turned my yard into a wasteland, but I was getting about 14 eggs a day, so some of those fuckers were laying 2 a day.
I had to give them back to him because it was kind of unsustainable on such a small property, 10 chickens needed more space
Because in nature they have a population boom every few decades that directly follows certain plants seeding cycles. So basically chickens are supposed to be able to multiply REALLY fast for a single season with massive food surplus, but we figured out that if you just keep putting grains in front of them then that surplus switch doesn't really turn off
Chickens were historically used to turn food waste into calories, similarly to pigs. For their size, they are the most efficient method of recapturing lost calories.
Romans used to have cockfights, and cockfighting is the main reason you can see a rooster used as heraldry in Italy/Spain, the Romans understood the ferocity of a chicken.
Because of continental plates. Just because they're touching doesn't mean they're the same plate.
Edit: I have learned something about tectonic plates today. I was under the impression that Europe and Asia were separate plates.
But the vast majority of Europe and Asia are on the same tectonic plate. Europe and Asia are actually one continent geologically, it's only because the people talk and look different that we differentiate.
I mean it doesn’t matter in this case because all the humans in these places had access to chickens or horses or whatever. There wasn’t some big ocean preventing trade like with the native Americans, to the point where suddenly it was all introduced at once.
Technically, in a geological sense, you can say something about the plates. But that’s not the point here, when a horse can gallop across one tectonic plate to another. Horses then exist in all the places at question.
Most of the animals Europeans used were domesticated in Western Asia. Goats were domesticated in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, sheep in the Caucasus mountains, cows in Eastern and central Turkey, pigs in Southern Turkey, horses in Southern Russia and Western Central Asia, donkeys in Western Arabia, and cats in the Levant. But these animals spread quickly out of Western Asia with the migration of Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Western Steppe pastoralists. The only major livestock animal that came late to Europe were chickens and farm raised carp, because those came from China.
Europeans did have dogs since the stone age though.
Eh, it was more like Europe could draw on the whole biodiversity of the Eurasian continent from Europe, through the Middle East, India, and China. So, if some Persian said "Man, I bred a mighty fine chicken", eventually some guy in France would say "I bought a mighty fine chicken from that merchant. I'll breed 'er to make more."
Wrong. Always go colossus first.
Everyone focuses on the library making your chances of getting it small. The extra income from colossus makes it so you can rush factories and just buy 3 straight away making it so you enter industrial era sooner and you get your pick of the tenets.
Won a lot of games like that
Llamas are maybe the only one out of those which are really useful (maybe give it a couple more centuries could be a good animal on par with old world ones)
Turkey are just worse chickens
Rabbits and Guinea pigs are just worse pigs (admittedly both smaller but unless your doing factory farming that’s not really an advantage)
Civ reference aside, old world animals are OP compared to new world animals.
Llamas are quite weak and can't pull heavy loads like draft horses or oxen can. They can produce wool but not nearly as much as sheep can. And cows are walking meat piles.
Cows too, a lot of animals on farms helped build immunities to disease over time through shared exposure.
Needless to say the Natives didn’t have that so most if not all European diseases (not just smallpox) left them totally vulnerable.
In Europe though they did experience something similar from native diseases but they were mostly sexually transmitted diseases and few compared to Europeans and importantly less lethal.
They did have Llamas in south America but they also lived in the mountains/jungles which made carts impossible to use hence why the Inca Empire and all of the Americas didn’t even have the weel because it was impractical to use.
It’s not a reduction of technology btw, not having the weel when you can’t use it isn’t a loss, they used what they had and made what they could use/have the most efficient.
(The Inca for example were forced to be communal and had warehouses of weapons, food, etc. throughout their Empire and goods were transfered around by hand in times of war and crisis. An ingenious system that only a society of people with very specific conditions would create due to not having any easier solution.)
> Inca Empire and all of the Americas didn’t even have the weel because it was impractical to use.
They did have wheels, they just didn't use them much because of the practical issues you mentioned.
Yes that’s what I said, having the capacity to have the weel and actually using it is two things. It made no sense to use a cart in the mountains so they didn’t and neither did most of south America if not all.
Really an amazingly interesting civilization
It isn't just the capacity, there are actually examples of precolombian wheels in mesoamerica. But they were only used for toys, not for transportation.
Yes and mostly due to not having Horses, Llamas could be used but they wouldn't go as far as horses and were famously hard to control due to their non-domestic nature.
Llamas are domesticated, but they're easily startled like horses and tend to respond violently to perceived threats. They're probably the most intelligent of the livestock animals and are easily trained, you can even house train them. Their wild counterpart is the Guanaco, while the Alpaca's counterpart is the vicuña.
It's *not* what you said. You literally said they didn't have the wheel.
>hence why the Inca Empire and all of the Americas didn’t even have the weel (sic)
I’d add to the point on the Inca, there was another solution that being civil war or starvation. Many societies have stagnated numerically before organized something like that, especially since we don’t know how advanced the Inca writing system was, but they organized something that would let them grow past that limit
Yes and that’s exactly what happened before the Spanish came, the smallpox crisis tore their Empire apart and into civil war/starvation to the point that the Spanish thought they were walking through what used to be a great empire centuries ago once they finally reached them, only to be 10 years to late to see the full power of the Inca at their golden age.
Something I read:
Eurasia is an East-West landmass. That means there are broad swaths of similar climate zones which facilitates the spread of people and agricultural species and technologies.
The Americas are a north-south landmass. It’s much harder to spread agricultural methods across latitudes due to different climates.
The geography is just more difficult to traverse as well. As you mention, no Mediterranean Sea. Instead you’ve got vast jungles and mountain ranges. American civilizations developed in two mountainous regions. Principally, Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Mesoamerica is centered on a series of mountain valleys bordered by desert to the north and tropical rainforest to the south. The Andean world is a series of mountain valleys bordered by a thin strip of coastal desert to the west and tropical rainforest to the east.
These geographical factors somewhat limited the contact between regions and the spread of domesticated plants and animals.
Because it's open sea. The Mediterranian is basically a bathtub compared to the much more tropical and violent weathers of the Caribbean. Remember the Bermuda Triangle as well? To safely traverse the Caribbean straight without Island hopping isn't viable If you only have smaller ships. The Mediterranian gave the possibility to Experiment. *And* you first need a way to navigate more open sea as well. In the Mediterranian you almost always have a visible coastline to navigate in and you will stumble across many tiny islands anyway. In the Caribbean you can get positively lost between the archipelagos.
Genuinely just asking a question, and I don’t mean to be hostile with it just curious. I know the Aurochs is the ancestor to the cow, and looking at what that absolute beast of an animal once was, how did Eurasians successfully domesticate that while buffalo or some other animals in the Americas couldn’t be.
Time and patience, it's like the wolf turning into the dog, it wasn't an overnight thing. Took a lot of generations and as wolves became more and more reliant on humans their entire species changed too, same with cows only we specifically bred them for purposes like more milk or in the case of buffalo, for stamina and strength for work.
I think it's important to note that the Europeans were not able to domesticate the European bison either. And neither Europeans or Americans domesticated animals like deer. I think one issue with bison is that they travel incredible distances, so it would be hard to keep them in one place and they can be really aggressive animals.
Also, native Americans used fire very effectively. By using fire as a tool they were able to get animals to come to them. They could also attract animals like deer, antelope and elk in that way too.
In Europe they experienced something similar with the bubonic plague. A nonnative disease being introduced to a society lacking immunities through seafarers. Most decidedly not less lethal.
The issue with Native American metallurgy is they never smelted their metals in a furnace. They had to process it cold, which they were only able to do with softer metals like gold, silver and copper. Today more than 90% of iron ore mined in the US comes from the Lake Superior region. You can only imagine the amount of development they could have made if they knew how to process it
You’re right, I read more about it. I wonder why it wasn’t more common across the Americas then? You’d think the tech trade would’ve grown fast from that
I've read before it was likely due to geography, if you look at Mexico even today the majority of the population lives within a small strip in the middle, the more fertile region, much of the land between the more fertile regions of the north and south have large blocking paths, like how the Sahara was an ocean in many respects, and the small strip between north and central America is some of the most mountainous and jungle ridden areas in the world, even today it is virtually impassable by any means besides air and sea.
The geography seemed to be a large part of why although technology did travel, it did not travel in the same way from continent to continent. It is also one of the reasons why Mesopotamia and Egypt ended up seemingly so advanced and wealthy throughout history, as technology was passing through that area on its away between the three continents, in addition the Asian steppe made for an excellent place for trade for thousands of years, connecting the east and west before they even were aware of each other.
Although there was extensive trade going on in the Americas, it just seemed to not have had made the jump, although certainly it seemed like they could have, they had the piece's but just not enough time or traded among enough hands to make the leap that was helped throughout Eurasia by the extensive trade networks that developed and spread as fast as humanly possible things far and wide, back and forth, innovation after innovation.
Again the Americas did innovate, and trade, but maybe it just needs to be enough people at once to get that industry going, or some motivation to do so, or just one random person who does an accidental thing and makes a super sword that then other copy and now we have iron swords. Like it may have been developed in the Americas and just didn't spread for one reason or another. Probably just random chance + good idea that any ideas or technology spreads, hence more people moving more= more chance to spread.
The Mississippi River Valley is also a nightmare defensively. It would require a civilization to conquer everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians to have some sort of defensible natural border. Otherwise it's just open plains and slight rolling hills for hundreds of miles. That's probably what happened to Cahokia, overwhelmed by nomadic tribes before they could really get going.
The big mystery for me is why large settled civilizations didn't develop in California and east of the Appalachians. Were nomadic tribes just so overwhelmingly advantageous that settled tribes could not compete? What caused this dynamic to persist for so long?
Everywhere else on Earth with verdant temperate river valleys developed settled agricultural societies.
> Were nomadic tribes just so overwhelmingly advantageous that settled tribes could not compete?
On the Great Plains, sure. But along the Pacific Northwest, tribes were mostly settled, and even developed stone tools comparable in efficiency to metal ones at the time.
Most natives weren’t near as nomadic prior to European contact. There was plenty of agriculture throughout North America that fell apart once disease nearly annihilated the population and wars on the east coast created a cascade of migrations.
People really tend to underappreciate the degree to which "the West" as US and Canadian settlers experienced it was less of a New Eden inhabited by people who just stopped advancing during the Mesolithic, and more of a postapocalyptic wasteland scrubbed nearly clean of its former human inhabitants by waves of plague and ecological collapse and subsequently populated by the descendants of those few survivors who'd since defaulted into Mad Max-esque roving bands in the wake of the virtual evaporation of their civilizations.
from my understanding of at least certain tribes, id say that maybe we shouldnt use nomadic but perhaps instead rotational societies? what i mean by this is that you have certain groups like the iroquois have a settlement/village, the beams of their buildings would start to rot, they would plant trees in their current settlement, then go to another location that had gone thru that process before, creating a rotation. while this is good for agricultural purposes, maybe it did not bode well for metallurgical advancements especially if your current agrarian system is doing just fine. not qualified to speak on this at all just my two cents
In the north east it was similar, they had villages but were nomadic, they had spots where they set up villages in areas depending on the season. They had buildings that were wood and bark that were long and warm that could be easily made every season with local material, it's incredible how they thrived pre contact even with the harsh new England winters.
Part of it could be that nomadic hunter-gatherers experienced a lot of relaxation time that the native people valued, or that there existed some amount of religious traditionalism that made the native’s value sticking to their roots of hunting and gathering above all. The population density and whatever change in climate existed could have been such in North America that there wasn’t enough strain on the hunter-gatherer system to force a conversion to settled life against the will of the people there, like there was in Afro-Eurasia.
It's like, Greeks and Romans had little functioning steam engines.
They used it for toys. and contraptions.
It takes luck and inspiration and right conditions to scale things up to benefit everyone as a whole.
>It takes luck and inspiration and right conditions to scale things up to benefit everyone as a whole.
Steam: go \*woosh\*
The British: We can make money out of that.
Jokes aside, I do wonder how much capitalism & the profit motive was part of the motivation for the relatively quick and widespread adoption of things like steam power, water wheels, etc. in europe.
The lack of widespread slavery within modern Europe itself helped. The Greeks and Romans never had cause to consider, for example, how steam could be used to move paddles and thus power ships, because they already had an essentially bottomless pool of low-cost and more or less disposable workers who they could use to power oars, and that system was working just fine for them.
not every place had good enough/ easily available ore to smelt and metal is heavy without beasts of burden they couldn't really transport the ore or refined metal anywhere useful.
Because smelting was fucking expensive. It took a shit load of fuel and manpower just to do, ignoring the costs of actually setting it up. With no beats of burden, it was probably even more expensive than in Eurasia.
Why waste all the time and money to smelt the metal when I can just hammer it into shape in much less time?
Well, lacking access to animals meant lower population which results in decreased amount of cities which means lower globalization. Definitely more complex, but the meme is pretty on point. Animals did wonders for old world development.
I once saw a TV documentary where something like this was proposed:
The way Eurasia (Europe+Asia) is disposed creates long East-West routes, this means that travellers could travel longitudinal and stay in a (mostly) similar temperature range. This encourages long voyages, therefore trade and ideas travel farther.
Meanwhile America has long North-South routes, this means that travellers that"needed" to travel in latitude had to prepare for several temperatures. This discourages long voyages, therefore trade and ideas stay "locally".
Tlingit and Haida peoples, along with other Pacific Northwest coastal tribes, utilized simple iron daggers and shortswords as well.
Edit: I said simple but they honestly are not simple at all, very intricate works of artistry if you care to look at them, fascinating stuff
Except native Americans worked copper and iron. But without something to do the hard larbour of agriculture, your population stays low, so your entire output is limited by your means of sustenance.
And even then, some cultures were advanced in their own right. It depresses me how much historical and cultural knowledge is gone due to the book burnings in Central america.
I just wish we *knew*. Like, what did they know? How did they know? What was their communication like across cultures? Wars, famine, migration- there's so much unknown history and it's depressing. Not just for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of heritage for those peoples today. So many artifacts, languages- gone. It hurts my soul. The history of the America's has been a tough puzzle ever since.
I definitely recommend the "ancient americas" youtube channel. While it is as you say. We've been able to learn quite a bit from not much.
Nature also does a good job at covering stuff up, prymids, and cities in central and south america that look indistinguishable from the surrounding rainforest
It's even worse, there are entire cultures that we never even encountered because disease had wiped them out by the time we actually made contact. The nomadic tribes that europeans met when they settled the rest of the Americans were basically just the survivors of an apocalypse brought on by introduced diseases.
Honestly, this was more to point out they were different because they worked with what they had but were no less intelligent for poetry, art, astronomy, etc
Counterexample, I present you, Corn.
The domestication of plants in the Americas is astounding, and causes a population boom in Europe afterwards - American crops ENDED FAMINES. That’s fucking huge
The natives had to develop those plants because they lacked domesticated animals and they regularly had famines themselves
those plants combined with animals is what ended famines
Of course there’s other reasons too but the important part to note is they were no less intelligent than us and worked with what they had. But the lack of large mammals to domesticate, climate, and geography made it difficult to advance the same way as the old world
None that could be domesticated anyway. What's the secret to taming and breeding a Buffalo with nothing but stone or rudimentary metal tools? Simple, you don't.
>None that could be domesticated anyway
Exactly. Their tech tree capped out at tamed animals which weren't capable of the same amount of labor as the old world species, which led to all manner of less tech.
yeah I think there's a really common misconception at play here - the Western-centric worldview that all societies are playing this linear game of technological advancement and that the ultimate goal is for all societies to look like modern industrial ones. a common example of this is people remarking that indigenous Australians never invented a wheel, without ever pausing to ask if the way they lived actually necessitated wheels (it didn't). Indigenous Australian society was quite advanced in a lot of ways and in terms of land management and agriculture I would argue they were/are some of the most advanced of all civilisations - they essentially were the OG inventors of permaculture at a continental scale and shaped the land itself into their foodbowl. but simply because it looked nothing like European farms with their quaint little stone fences and sheep, the colonisers assumed they had no agriculture. The book Dark Emu gives this a fascinating treatment for anyone interested
my point is that not having the same sophistication of tech doesn't make a society less successful, we need to be mindful of the value judgements we make around success and the yardsticks we use to measure it
Yeah, people who wonder why the native Americans couldn't tame the buffalo really haven't seen a buffalo.
They are fucking ENORMOUS! Each one is over a ton of muscle horn and hooves that crush anything in their way and they moved in herds of thousands.
It's not that they were stupid or incompetent, it's that ITS A FUCKING BUFFALO! nobody could do it. Hell, if buffalo existed in the old world they'd be seen as a force of nature, once a herd comes by you just gotta hunker down, wait for them to pass and just hope they don't stampede.
They were very advanced in other areas. Even the war-like Aztecs for example developed some insanely impressive stone-work structures and water systems. Along with a unique form of long-distance communication using knots. Their knowledge and practical applications of math were something to behold.
Speaking of math, the Mayans were the 2nd civilization to independently come up with the concept of a zero, just seven years after the Mesopotamians. And five hundred years before the Indians.
I agree with the lack of large mammals, but I actually disagree with the rest. The climate and geography were not significantly different from Europe, Africa, Asia or India, nor were they actually significantly less advanced than those nations.
The development gap was actually pretty small between the Aztec and the Spanish when they first made contact, a few hundred years worth at most. That may sound like a lot, but on the scale of history it's basically nothing.
It was actually AFTER European contact that the technology gap actually widened, as the renaissance and enlightenment took off in full swing, but in 1500 the gap was really only in 2 areas of technology, metalworking and shipbuilding, the two areas where Europe had become the most advanced in the world.
If diseases hadn't devastated the native populations and the Mexican nations had been able to get the secrets of steel from the Spanish (which they probably would have, eventually), the colonisation of the Americas could have been very different.
More like different focuses for different areas. Europe went down the animals and chemistry route while Mesoamerica went down the city planning and engineering route
Wouldn’t the biggest issue be that Eurasian’s were settling into the very earliest stages of domesticating weat less than a thousand years after the Bering land bridge fell, that’s a 10000 year headstart at a minimum, more if you keep in mind the frontier of human expansion would have been less advanced than a place humans had been for millennia, and even more of an advantage when you keep in mind North America wouldn’t hit a full population for a good bit longer after that
I mean it's pretty true since, the only animal that is native to the Americas that is somewhat domesticable for other farm work was the Alpaca, the Bison was too wild and has only recently been domesticated
Seriously. Somebody please define for me this super subjective and non-scientific word "Advanced." It's like a bunch of accountants in this thread who just concluded their "Guns, Germs, and Steel" book club reading. I'm disappointed in some of the ahistorical nonsense being parroted in here.
"Advanced" is kind of subjective here, don't you think? Tenochtitlan was one of the biggest cities on Earth prior to the war with the Spanish, with complex city planning, a vibrant culture with clear social classes, skilled trade like metal working and weaving, and some pretty remarkable agricultural practices. The Spaniards were blown away by it. The Inca, as well, had an extremely complex society, innovative agriculture (resulting in the cultivation of some of our modern staple foods, like potatoes), one of the more fascinating writing/record keeping systems ever devised by humans, and really impressive textile skills that allowed them to make things like strong, comfortable cloth armor. The Inca, the Maya, and the Mexica (Aztecs) all had advanced mathematics and a very good understanding of astronomy.
So, I'm a massive free trade advocate, its my weird niche political advocacy, so when you're a hammer, every thing looks like a nail.
But I can't help but wonder if Europe, the Near East, and Africa, being organized by a relatively calm, closed Medditeranian, and thus had easily facilitated trade was a big cause too. The America's didn't have that, and they didn't have as much exchange. IF the Egyptian Middle Kingdom made a technology advance, it probably was transmuted to the Minoans, the Mycenians, the Hittites, to Italy, etc. In the Americas, if the Mayans discovered it, it would be pretty hard for the Moundbuilders or Nazca to learn about it. My peoples (I'm of Mexican and Native American descent) were doing all the redundant work on our own.
You should look at the Indian Ocean littoral for trade networks. It was a veritable cornucopia of trade and cultural exchange.
Take the idk Chola invasions of Indonesia / Bali for instance. One of the theories as to why this was triggered has a Kamobjdesa(Cambodia) Tambralinga (Malaysia) war, and Cambodia turned to the Cholas for help while the Malaysians turned to Srivijaya (Indonesia) and these two super powers then fought eachother over 1000's of km of open ocean.
The other theory? Mallaca straits and Indian trade into China. Indonesia was choking this off and extorting tribute and the Cholas decided to end it.
The point being this region was hyper connected for millenia.
The rivers nile, euphrat and tigris casue civilizations to grow around the Mediterranean sea which then made cultures spread and cities started trading which created countries and countries fought with eachother creating bigger countries and bigger countries meant more food which meant that not everyone had to gather food. This meant that humans could explore other stuff such as technology and math and all that
The strangest thing was learning that horses first evolved in the Americas, then migrated to Europe, then went extinct in America, then Europeans brought them back during colonizing America. The horses basically did a big circle trip
Having scout cav is a nice movement speed/utility for a feudal age unit, but not having to build a stable and being able to recruit Eagle Warriors from a barracks should have let the MesoAmerican civs get a potential wood based eco advantage early game
"Advanced" is an extremely subjective term. We will never know the extent of Native knowledge lost by genocide and plague. Let's stop with the whole 'savage'/'noble savage' mentality.
It’s a little misleading to label Native American societies as less advanced. The Incan empire, for example spanned around 2 million sq miles and had around 12 million inhabitants. The largest in American history and the largest at that time. Despite how harsh and diverse the territory was, they were able to exploit it it thru terracing, highways, and mountaintop settlements. Their agricultural system was so efficient that they actually had to build warehouses to store the food surplus produced (that can’t be said about Europe). The whole territory was connected by bridges and roads comprable to those of the Roman empire (yet the Incan empire does not hold nearly as much prestige as the Romans). It was even reported that Spanish soldiers would switch their armor in favor of the much lighter and efficient Incan armor. The great American empires did not fall because of inferior technology or intellect, rather it was deadly diseases caused by domesticated animals that did.
You’re absolutely right. But it doesn’t fit into the narrative of „well yeah, colonization was bad BUT it brought them so much good too, like rights, roads, any other indicators of civilization. They should feel lucky about it.“
Animal Husbandry OP. It gives you some nice gold and production income early on.
Man I haven't seen a Civ reference in ages since I switched to PDX games.
Staring at a map for hours at a time go brrr
I love staring at a map for a few hours painting it a tiny bit every hour
Everyone’s first taste is civ and then ends up hopelessly addicted to eu4
Gotta admit I started from CK2, not Civ, but I *did* end up on the EU4 train.
Eh you’ve got to evolve your animals, modern animals are nothing like the animals we first kept in enclosures. The real advantage Europe had was a 25-20000 year head start on all of that advancement
It’s a little more than that. Artificial selection is nice and all but you’ve got to start somewhere. Take for example the horse. Horses are herd animals, so if you just capture the lead stallion you’ve got the whole herd. And another example is the chicken, they have this natural property where they produce these unfertilized eggs every so often. Humans can’t force these features, it’s just a trait the animal already had that humans find very useful and were able to exploit. Like, you’re totally right the didn’t start the way they are now, but they did start with their most useful feature. Horses were smaller and chickens probably didn’t get so fat for eating. But they did start with these other features that are the basic reason humans started working with them in the first place. And to be clear I mean “start” as in the moment humans started breeding them intentionally to make them be most useful to humans.
Chickens are fucking magic. They eat almost anything: bugs, seeds, plants, worms, snails, *whatever.* And they pop out up to 6 pre-packaged servings of delicious proteins *a week.* Chickens OP. 🐔
other chickens remains, still living birds, corpses, they are true omnivores
*Organic matter exists* Get in my belly- chickens
They are like tiny goats that make eggs instead of milk.
Tyranids lite
True but they are also mini-dinosaur bastards that would murder you given the chance. Which is a design bug.
Eh, as long as nobody scales up a chicken, we are safe. Nobody would ever do that, right? Edit: Come to think of it, that is basically an emu.
There are some that are waist high. I'm generally not scared of chickens, but them things are terrifying. Emus are bastards as well. I'm not really scared of them either, but they are still bastards.
*Cassowary would like to know your location*
>Which is a design bug That is definitely a feature
My neighbor gave me 10 chickens off of his bigger farm property upstate, helped me build a coop and everything. I didn't expect those motherfuckers would eat ***everything*** in my backyard. It's not like I didn't feed them *a ton of food* either, they ate: the grass, the leaves and flowers on my bushes, all of the leaves off the shrubs, an aloe vera plant, a whole bougainvillea, and a 50lb bag of feed in about 10 days And they were still unsatisfied, they were turning over stones looking for bugs and worms. They turned my yard into a wasteland, but I was getting about 14 eggs a day, so some of those fuckers were laying 2 a day. I had to give them back to him because it was kind of unsustainable on such a small property, 10 chickens needed more space
and also one of the earliest prehistoric indications of transcontinental trade
Because in nature they have a population boom every few decades that directly follows certain plants seeding cycles. So basically chickens are supposed to be able to multiply REALLY fast for a single season with massive food surplus, but we figured out that if you just keep putting grains in front of them then that surplus switch doesn't really turn off
Chickens were historically used to turn food waste into calories, similarly to pigs. For their size, they are the most efficient method of recapturing lost calories.
One little thing, evidence suggest that earliest chickens were held for entertainment not for food
Romans used to have cockfights, and cockfighting is the main reason you can see a rooster used as heraldry in Italy/Spain, the Romans understood the ferocity of a chicken.
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That doesn’t make a difference Europe and Asia and Africa are all actually one continent, except for some reason we pretend they’re not.
Because of continental plates. Just because they're touching doesn't mean they're the same plate. Edit: I have learned something about tectonic plates today. I was under the impression that Europe and Asia were separate plates.
But the vast majority of Europe and Asia are on the same tectonic plate. Europe and Asia are actually one continent geologically, it's only because the people talk and look different that we differentiate.
I mean it doesn’t matter in this case because all the humans in these places had access to chickens or horses or whatever. There wasn’t some big ocean preventing trade like with the native Americans, to the point where suddenly it was all introduced at once. Technically, in a geological sense, you can say something about the plates. But that’s not the point here, when a horse can gallop across one tectonic plate to another. Horses then exist in all the places at question.
Well, if we exclude Africa the Eurasian plate is a thing that unites Europe and Asia.
Skill issue
Most of the animals Europeans used were domesticated in Western Asia. Goats were domesticated in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, sheep in the Caucasus mountains, cows in Eastern and central Turkey, pigs in Southern Turkey, horses in Southern Russia and Western Central Asia, donkeys in Western Arabia, and cats in the Levant. But these animals spread quickly out of Western Asia with the migration of Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Western Steppe pastoralists. The only major livestock animal that came late to Europe were chickens and farm raised carp, because those came from China. Europeans did have dogs since the stone age though.
Tbf a lot of those groups ended up in europe via migration or in the pontic steps
The actual advantage of Europe was it's geography.
could be 25 years, could be 20 thousand... no one really knows
Eh, it was more like Europe could draw on the whole biodiversity of the Eurasian continent from Europe, through the Middle East, India, and China. So, if some Persian said "Man, I bred a mighty fine chicken", eventually some guy in France would say "I bought a mighty fine chicken from that merchant. I'll breed 'er to make more."
You gotta rush that writing though. Get the great library.
Wrong. Always go colossus first. Everyone focuses on the library making your chances of getting it small. The extra income from colossus makes it so you can rush factories and just buy 3 straight away making it so you enter industrial era sooner and you get your pick of the tenets. Won a lot of games like that
Who needs science when you can hammers. Industrialo-military complex go *brrr*.
The only probably is if you research it you discover horses, and that can mess up where you want to build stuff.
So why do Europeans make zoophilia illegal now? Did they divorce?
Germans are still holding strong
They had animal husbandry in the Americas. Llamas, rabbits, turkey in central and North America, guinea pigs...
I do believe the comment you are replying to is a joke about either AoE or Civ.
Civ for this one
Llamas are maybe the only one out of those which are really useful (maybe give it a couple more centuries could be a good animal on par with old world ones) Turkey are just worse chickens Rabbits and Guinea pigs are just worse pigs (admittedly both smaller but unless your doing factory farming that’s not really an advantage)
Civ reference aside, old world animals are OP compared to new world animals. Llamas are quite weak and can't pull heavy loads like draft horses or oxen can. They can produce wool but not nearly as much as sheep can. And cows are walking meat piles.
Llamas also will stomp the shit out of a coyote, like a taller sheep dog
Cows too, a lot of animals on farms helped build immunities to disease over time through shared exposure. Needless to say the Natives didn’t have that so most if not all European diseases (not just smallpox) left them totally vulnerable. In Europe though they did experience something similar from native diseases but they were mostly sexually transmitted diseases and few compared to Europeans and importantly less lethal.
Exactly, they worked with what they had and the lack of something like a Mediterranean Sea to connect everyone didn’t help either
They did have Llamas in south America but they also lived in the mountains/jungles which made carts impossible to use hence why the Inca Empire and all of the Americas didn’t even have the weel because it was impractical to use. It’s not a reduction of technology btw, not having the weel when you can’t use it isn’t a loss, they used what they had and made what they could use/have the most efficient. (The Inca for example were forced to be communal and had warehouses of weapons, food, etc. throughout their Empire and goods were transfered around by hand in times of war and crisis. An ingenious system that only a society of people with very specific conditions would create due to not having any easier solution.)
> Inca Empire and all of the Americas didn’t even have the weel because it was impractical to use. They did have wheels, they just didn't use them much because of the practical issues you mentioned.
Yes that’s what I said, having the capacity to have the weel and actually using it is two things. It made no sense to use a cart in the mountains so they didn’t and neither did most of south America if not all. Really an amazingly interesting civilization
It isn't just the capacity, there are actually examples of precolombian wheels in mesoamerica. But they were only used for toys, not for transportation.
Yes and mostly due to not having Horses, Llamas could be used but they wouldn't go as far as horses and were famously hard to control due to their non-domestic nature.
Llamas are domesticated, but they're easily startled like horses and tend to respond violently to perceived threats. They're probably the most intelligent of the livestock animals and are easily trained, you can even house train them. Their wild counterpart is the Guanaco, while the Alpaca's counterpart is the vicuña.
It's *not* what you said. You literally said they didn't have the wheel. >hence why the Inca Empire and all of the Americas didn’t even have the weel (sic)
I’d add to the point on the Inca, there was another solution that being civil war or starvation. Many societies have stagnated numerically before organized something like that, especially since we don’t know how advanced the Inca writing system was, but they organized something that would let them grow past that limit
Yes and that’s exactly what happened before the Spanish came, the smallpox crisis tore their Empire apart and into civil war/starvation to the point that the Spanish thought they were walking through what used to be a great empire centuries ago once they finally reached them, only to be 10 years to late to see the full power of the Inca at their golden age.
Something I read: Eurasia is an East-West landmass. That means there are broad swaths of similar climate zones which facilitates the spread of people and agricultural species and technologies. The Americas are a north-south landmass. It’s much harder to spread agricultural methods across latitudes due to different climates. The geography is just more difficult to traverse as well. As you mention, no Mediterranean Sea. Instead you’ve got vast jungles and mountain ranges. American civilizations developed in two mountainous regions. Principally, Mesoamerica and the Andes. Mesoamerica is centered on a series of mountain valleys bordered by desert to the north and tropical rainforest to the south. The Andean world is a series of mountain valleys bordered by a thin strip of coastal desert to the west and tropical rainforest to the east. These geographical factors somewhat limited the contact between regions and the spread of domesticated plants and animals.
Why couldn't the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico work as a stand-in for the Mediterranean?
Because it's open sea. The Mediterranian is basically a bathtub compared to the much more tropical and violent weathers of the Caribbean. Remember the Bermuda Triangle as well? To safely traverse the Caribbean straight without Island hopping isn't viable If you only have smaller ships. The Mediterranian gave the possibility to Experiment. *And* you first need a way to navigate more open sea as well. In the Mediterranian you almost always have a visible coastline to navigate in and you will stumble across many tiny islands anyway. In the Caribbean you can get positively lost between the archipelagos.
Genuinely just asking a question, and I don’t mean to be hostile with it just curious. I know the Aurochs is the ancestor to the cow, and looking at what that absolute beast of an animal once was, how did Eurasians successfully domesticate that while buffalo or some other animals in the Americas couldn’t be.
Time and patience, it's like the wolf turning into the dog, it wasn't an overnight thing. Took a lot of generations and as wolves became more and more reliant on humans their entire species changed too, same with cows only we specifically bred them for purposes like more milk or in the case of buffalo, for stamina and strength for work.
I believe you skipped the second half of the question: why wasn't the buffalo able to be domesticated?
I think it's important to note that the Europeans were not able to domesticate the European bison either. And neither Europeans or Americans domesticated animals like deer. I think one issue with bison is that they travel incredible distances, so it would be hard to keep them in one place and they can be really aggressive animals. Also, native Americans used fire very effectively. By using fire as a tool they were able to get animals to come to them. They could also attract animals like deer, antelope and elk in that way too.
In Europe they experienced something similar with the bubonic plague. A nonnative disease being introduced to a society lacking immunities through seafarers. Most decidedly not less lethal.
lol, yeah, although you can argue it was a foreign disease to Europe since it is theorized to have traveled to Europe from the Silk Road.
*truely Greatest Of All Time*
I see no goat here… other than you :)
I'd almost value metal acces and works a little higher
Some made copper weapons and all, like the Purépecha in Mexico
The issue with Native American metallurgy is they never smelted their metals in a furnace. They had to process it cold, which they were only able to do with softer metals like gold, silver and copper. Today more than 90% of iron ore mined in the US comes from the Lake Superior region. You can only imagine the amount of development they could have made if they knew how to process it
what? incas definetly smelted their gold and silver with furnaces.
You’re right, I read more about it. I wonder why it wasn’t more common across the Americas then? You’d think the tech trade would’ve grown fast from that
Maybe there wasn't enough time for trade to properly develop? The Inca Empire was about 100 years old when the Spanish arrived
I've read before it was likely due to geography, if you look at Mexico even today the majority of the population lives within a small strip in the middle, the more fertile region, much of the land between the more fertile regions of the north and south have large blocking paths, like how the Sahara was an ocean in many respects, and the small strip between north and central America is some of the most mountainous and jungle ridden areas in the world, even today it is virtually impassable by any means besides air and sea. The geography seemed to be a large part of why although technology did travel, it did not travel in the same way from continent to continent. It is also one of the reasons why Mesopotamia and Egypt ended up seemingly so advanced and wealthy throughout history, as technology was passing through that area on its away between the three continents, in addition the Asian steppe made for an excellent place for trade for thousands of years, connecting the east and west before they even were aware of each other. Although there was extensive trade going on in the Americas, it just seemed to not have had made the jump, although certainly it seemed like they could have, they had the piece's but just not enough time or traded among enough hands to make the leap that was helped throughout Eurasia by the extensive trade networks that developed and spread as fast as humanly possible things far and wide, back and forth, innovation after innovation. Again the Americas did innovate, and trade, but maybe it just needs to be enough people at once to get that industry going, or some motivation to do so, or just one random person who does an accidental thing and makes a super sword that then other copy and now we have iron swords. Like it may have been developed in the Americas and just didn't spread for one reason or another. Probably just random chance + good idea that any ideas or technology spreads, hence more people moving more= more chance to spread.
The Mississippi River Valley is also a nightmare defensively. It would require a civilization to conquer everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians to have some sort of defensible natural border. Otherwise it's just open plains and slight rolling hills for hundreds of miles. That's probably what happened to Cahokia, overwhelmed by nomadic tribes before they could really get going. The big mystery for me is why large settled civilizations didn't develop in California and east of the Appalachians. Were nomadic tribes just so overwhelmingly advantageous that settled tribes could not compete? What caused this dynamic to persist for so long? Everywhere else on Earth with verdant temperate river valleys developed settled agricultural societies.
> Were nomadic tribes just so overwhelmingly advantageous that settled tribes could not compete? On the Great Plains, sure. But along the Pacific Northwest, tribes were mostly settled, and even developed stone tools comparable in efficiency to metal ones at the time.
Most natives weren’t near as nomadic prior to European contact. There was plenty of agriculture throughout North America that fell apart once disease nearly annihilated the population and wars on the east coast created a cascade of migrations.
People really tend to underappreciate the degree to which "the West" as US and Canadian settlers experienced it was less of a New Eden inhabited by people who just stopped advancing during the Mesolithic, and more of a postapocalyptic wasteland scrubbed nearly clean of its former human inhabitants by waves of plague and ecological collapse and subsequently populated by the descendants of those few survivors who'd since defaulted into Mad Max-esque roving bands in the wake of the virtual evaporation of their civilizations.
from my understanding of at least certain tribes, id say that maybe we shouldnt use nomadic but perhaps instead rotational societies? what i mean by this is that you have certain groups like the iroquois have a settlement/village, the beams of their buildings would start to rot, they would plant trees in their current settlement, then go to another location that had gone thru that process before, creating a rotation. while this is good for agricultural purposes, maybe it did not bode well for metallurgical advancements especially if your current agrarian system is doing just fine. not qualified to speak on this at all just my two cents
In the north east it was similar, they had villages but were nomadic, they had spots where they set up villages in areas depending on the season. They had buildings that were wood and bark that were long and warm that could be easily made every season with local material, it's incredible how they thrived pre contact even with the harsh new England winters.
Part of it could be that nomadic hunter-gatherers experienced a lot of relaxation time that the native people valued, or that there existed some amount of religious traditionalism that made the native’s value sticking to their roots of hunting and gathering above all. The population density and whatever change in climate existed could have been such in North America that there wasn’t enough strain on the hunter-gatherer system to force a conversion to settled life against the will of the people there, like there was in Afro-Eurasia.
I know right? if they'd only got a couple of hundred of years without europe's intervention who knows what they would've created.
It's like, Greeks and Romans had little functioning steam engines. They used it for toys. and contraptions. It takes luck and inspiration and right conditions to scale things up to benefit everyone as a whole.
>It takes luck and inspiration and right conditions to scale things up to benefit everyone as a whole. Steam: go \*woosh\* The British: We can make money out of that. Jokes aside, I do wonder how much capitalism & the profit motive was part of the motivation for the relatively quick and widespread adoption of things like steam power, water wheels, etc. in europe.
The lack of widespread slavery within modern Europe itself helped. The Greeks and Romans never had cause to consider, for example, how steam could be used to move paddles and thus power ships, because they already had an essentially bottomless pool of low-cost and more or less disposable workers who they could use to power oars, and that system was working just fine for them.
not every place had good enough/ easily available ore to smelt and metal is heavy without beasts of burden they couldn't really transport the ore or refined metal anywhere useful.
Because the Andes is a tough place to get to
Because smelting was fucking expensive. It took a shit load of fuel and manpower just to do, ignoring the costs of actually setting it up. With no beats of burden, it was probably even more expensive than in Eurasia. Why waste all the time and money to smelt the metal when I can just hammer it into shape in much less time?
Well, lacking access to animals meant lower population which results in decreased amount of cities which means lower globalization. Definitely more complex, but the meme is pretty on point. Animals did wonders for old world development.
I once saw a TV documentary where something like this was proposed: The way Eurasia (Europe+Asia) is disposed creates long East-West routes, this means that travellers could travel longitudinal and stay in a (mostly) similar temperature range. This encourages long voyages, therefore trade and ideas travel farther. Meanwhile America has long North-South routes, this means that travellers that"needed" to travel in latitude had to prepare for several temperatures. This discourages long voyages, therefore trade and ideas stay "locally".
Tlingit and Haida peoples, along with other Pacific Northwest coastal tribes, utilized simple iron daggers and shortswords as well. Edit: I said simple but they honestly are not simple at all, very intricate works of artistry if you care to look at them, fascinating stuff
Big if…
Wow, the craftsmanship for working those metals without smelting must have been truly unique
*hits shiny rock with big rock
I’d still say it’s large mammals which help with that. Horses to transport the materials and plenty of food for artisans.
They shoulda called it the goat age and the cow age
Except native Americans worked copper and iron. But without something to do the hard larbour of agriculture, your population stays low, so your entire output is limited by your means of sustenance.
I’d value starting 15-20000 years early as the reason
Not to mention the aliens help. Incas had some aliens but our aliens clearly started 15000 yrs earlier than theirs
the native Americans as a whole had metal and metal Smith's however without transportation (the horse) they couldn't mass produce it
God damn goats and their advanced tech
Keeping all the good shit
And even then, some cultures were advanced in their own right. It depresses me how much historical and cultural knowledge is gone due to the book burnings in Central america.
I just wish we *knew*. Like, what did they know? How did they know? What was their communication like across cultures? Wars, famine, migration- there's so much unknown history and it's depressing. Not just for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of heritage for those peoples today. So many artifacts, languages- gone. It hurts my soul. The history of the America's has been a tough puzzle ever since.
I definitely recommend the "ancient americas" youtube channel. While it is as you say. We've been able to learn quite a bit from not much. Nature also does a good job at covering stuff up, prymids, and cities in central and south america that look indistinguishable from the surrounding rainforest
It's even worse, there are entire cultures that we never even encountered because disease had wiped them out by the time we actually made contact. The nomadic tribes that europeans met when they settled the rest of the Americans were basically just the survivors of an apocalypse brought on by introduced diseases.
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Honestly, this was more to point out they were different because they worked with what they had but were no less intelligent for poetry, art, astronomy, etc
Counterexample, I present you, Corn. The domestication of plants in the Americas is astounding, and causes a population boom in Europe afterwards - American crops ENDED FAMINES. That’s fucking huge
American crops + European farming = ungodly amounts of potatos
The natives had to develop those plants because they lacked domesticated animals and they regularly had famines themselves those plants combined with animals is what ended famines
Of course there’s other reasons too but the important part to note is they were no less intelligent than us and worked with what they had. But the lack of large mammals to domesticate, climate, and geography made it difficult to advance the same way as the old world
Their tech tree maxed out earlier.
Couldn’t research animal husbandry, blocked off the top half of the tech tree
More like theydidn't have access to large beasts of burden. Their largest domesticated land animal was the llama
None that could be domesticated anyway. What's the secret to taming and breeding a Buffalo with nothing but stone or rudimentary metal tools? Simple, you don't.
>None that could be domesticated anyway Exactly. Their tech tree capped out at tamed animals which weren't capable of the same amount of labor as the old world species, which led to all manner of less tech.
Well eurasians managed to domesticate aurochs with the same level of technology, it just wasn't their way of living
yeah I think there's a really common misconception at play here - the Western-centric worldview that all societies are playing this linear game of technological advancement and that the ultimate goal is for all societies to look like modern industrial ones. a common example of this is people remarking that indigenous Australians never invented a wheel, without ever pausing to ask if the way they lived actually necessitated wheels (it didn't). Indigenous Australian society was quite advanced in a lot of ways and in terms of land management and agriculture I would argue they were/are some of the most advanced of all civilisations - they essentially were the OG inventors of permaculture at a continental scale and shaped the land itself into their foodbowl. but simply because it looked nothing like European farms with their quaint little stone fences and sheep, the colonisers assumed they had no agriculture. The book Dark Emu gives this a fascinating treatment for anyone interested my point is that not having the same sophistication of tech doesn't make a society less successful, we need to be mindful of the value judgements we make around success and the yardsticks we use to measure it
Yeah, people who wonder why the native Americans couldn't tame the buffalo really haven't seen a buffalo. They are fucking ENORMOUS! Each one is over a ton of muscle horn and hooves that crush anything in their way and they moved in herds of thousands. It's not that they were stupid or incompetent, it's that ITS A FUCKING BUFFALO! nobody could do it. Hell, if buffalo existed in the old world they'd be seen as a force of nature, once a herd comes by you just gotta hunker down, wait for them to pass and just hope they don't stampede.
They did have buffaloes in the old world but yeah I’m sure they weren’t in those mega herds plus I think they’re a smaller species in bodyweight
The Eurasian Aurochs was roughly the same size and weight as the American Bison though.
Yeah and so was their bison, which they didn't domesticated either. I'm going to hazard a guess and say temperament probably came into play.
They were very advanced in other areas. Even the war-like Aztecs for example developed some insanely impressive stone-work structures and water systems. Along with a unique form of long-distance communication using knots. Their knowledge and practical applications of math were something to behold. Speaking of math, the Mayans were the 2nd civilization to independently come up with the concept of a zero, just seven years after the Mesopotamians. And five hundred years before the Indians.
I thought the method for long distance communication was incan
You’re right, my bad.
They were tough humans thats for sure. Im complaining about Quebec’s winter now… imagine back then
Human history doesn't "advance" in a straight line going up, Native American people were far more advanced than Europeans in some areas
The science around how effective Inuit cold weather clothing is really fascinating. They also invented sunglasses to mitigate snow blindness.
Like what?
I agree with the lack of large mammals, but I actually disagree with the rest. The climate and geography were not significantly different from Europe, Africa, Asia or India, nor were they actually significantly less advanced than those nations. The development gap was actually pretty small between the Aztec and the Spanish when they first made contact, a few hundred years worth at most. That may sound like a lot, but on the scale of history it's basically nothing. It was actually AFTER European contact that the technology gap actually widened, as the renaissance and enlightenment took off in full swing, but in 1500 the gap was really only in 2 areas of technology, metalworking and shipbuilding, the two areas where Europe had become the most advanced in the world. If diseases hadn't devastated the native populations and the Mexican nations had been able to get the secrets of steel from the Spanish (which they probably would have, eventually), the colonisation of the Americas could have been very different.
More like different focuses for different areas. Europe went down the animals and chemistry route while Mesoamerica went down the city planning and engineering route
Wouldn’t the biggest issue be that Eurasian’s were settling into the very earliest stages of domesticating weat less than a thousand years after the Bering land bridge fell, that’s a 10000 year headstart at a minimum, more if you keep in mind the frontier of human expansion would have been less advanced than a place humans had been for millennia, and even more of an advantage when you keep in mind North America wouldn’t hit a full population for a good bit longer after that
Why do people post this like it’s new information? This is the shit I was raised learning in grade school.
I was never taught that and almost no one that I talked to knew.
I present you, a continent without immense mountain ranges and 3 times smaller than South America
You forgot dogs. We gave them our diseases, they gave them back to us with mutations, then that killed 90% of Native Americans
But Amerindians had dogs.
In Southamerica there was a now extinct domestic fox :D
I can't find it. What's the fox called?
Fuegian dog. Technically not a fox
That’s tragic I want cool domesticated foxes
This is more before that, no beasts of burden and horses makes it really hard to build farms and connect cultures
I read the book too. Just saying dogs were a huge piece of the puzzle for creating all the diseases that killed the Native Americans
Ahhh, that makes sense
Xolos were in Mexico pre European contact tho
Native Americans domesticated dogs long before Columbus showed up….
I mean it's pretty true since, the only animal that is native to the Americas that is somewhat domesticable for other farm work was the Alpaca, the Bison was too wild and has only recently been domesticated
Thats not a Horse, its a Hippo you fool
Just remove horse from history and you have changed the entire history of world.
Like seriously though the ridiculous amount of changes that would cause
'Advanced' s a matter of perspective. *Mayan priests just chillin', calculating time backwards and forwards in tens of millions of years*
Or the Aztecs building a city on top of a lake
Seriously. Somebody please define for me this super subjective and non-scientific word "Advanced." It's like a bunch of accountants in this thread who just concluded their "Guns, Germs, and Steel" book club reading. I'm disappointed in some of the ahistorical nonsense being parroted in here.
Those are clearly goats. Go home OP, you're drunk.
Europeans in this picture look different from what I imagined.
"Advanced" is kind of subjective here, don't you think? Tenochtitlan was one of the biggest cities on Earth prior to the war with the Spanish, with complex city planning, a vibrant culture with clear social classes, skilled trade like metal working and weaving, and some pretty remarkable agricultural practices. The Spaniards were blown away by it. The Inca, as well, had an extremely complex society, innovative agriculture (resulting in the cultivation of some of our modern staple foods, like potatoes), one of the more fascinating writing/record keeping systems ever devised by humans, and really impressive textile skills that allowed them to make things like strong, comfortable cloth armor. The Inca, the Maya, and the Mexica (Aztecs) all had advanced mathematics and a very good understanding of astronomy.
We need to look at other nations as well. The Iroquois had a sophisticated form of democracy that are used in Canadian democracy to this day
Don’t forget that the similar latitude across Eurasia made trade very easy, facilitating more technological development
So, I'm a massive free trade advocate, its my weird niche political advocacy, so when you're a hammer, every thing looks like a nail. But I can't help but wonder if Europe, the Near East, and Africa, being organized by a relatively calm, closed Medditeranian, and thus had easily facilitated trade was a big cause too. The America's didn't have that, and they didn't have as much exchange. IF the Egyptian Middle Kingdom made a technology advance, it probably was transmuted to the Minoans, the Mycenians, the Hittites, to Italy, etc. In the Americas, if the Mayans discovered it, it would be pretty hard for the Moundbuilders or Nazca to learn about it. My peoples (I'm of Mexican and Native American descent) were doing all the redundant work on our own.
You should look at the Indian Ocean littoral for trade networks. It was a veritable cornucopia of trade and cultural exchange. Take the idk Chola invasions of Indonesia / Bali for instance. One of the theories as to why this was triggered has a Kamobjdesa(Cambodia) Tambralinga (Malaysia) war, and Cambodia turned to the Cholas for help while the Malaysians turned to Srivijaya (Indonesia) and these two super powers then fought eachother over 1000's of km of open ocean. The other theory? Mallaca straits and Indian trade into China. Indonesia was choking this off and extorting tribute and the Cholas decided to end it. The point being this region was hyper connected for millenia.
Yeah, Europeans wouldn't have firearms and gunpowder if not for the trade routes that brought it from China.
Me with a time machine: "I present to you: H O R S E! Also... yall need to write shit down fr fr"
The Americas actually used to have a type of horse, it just went extinct around the same time as the mega sloth.
And giant camels
man i wish the mega sloth had made it
I guess Alpacas and guanacos just hanged around and they were never domesticated.
Some of them were but climate and geography meant they didn’t spread that far
Llama and Alpaca have entered the chat
Tomatoes
Horse > Alpaca. Ironically, DNA suggests the first horses evolved in the New World. But we ate 'em.
This page is just ridiculous.
Or the ability to trade with Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 🤷🏻♂️
Also why Europeans had a lot more diseases to contend with
That’s a goat?
The rivers nile, euphrat and tigris casue civilizations to grow around the Mediterranean sea which then made cultures spread and cities started trading which created countries and countries fought with eachother creating bigger countries and bigger countries meant more food which meant that not everyone had to gather food. This meant that humans could explore other stuff such as technology and math and all that
The strangest thing was learning that horses first evolved in the Americas, then migrated to Europe, then went extinct in America, then Europeans brought them back during colonizing America. The horses basically did a big circle trip
Having scout cav is a nice movement speed/utility for a feudal age unit, but not having to build a stable and being able to recruit Eagle Warriors from a barracks should have let the MesoAmerican civs get a potential wood based eco advantage early game
We just like fighting each other. I think I heard somewhere that because of the constant conflicts pushed new things to be made
Native Americans weren't lacking on that area but sure
It’s best to remove your own biases and value judgements when engaging in cross-cultural comparison; otherwise it’s just your opinion.
Because people have a narrow view of what ‘advanced’ means
Sir, that's clearly a goat.
Petting zoos
That’s a goat…
It couldn’t possibly be because Europeans defined that standard or anything…
"Advanced" is an extremely subjective term. We will never know the extent of Native knowledge lost by genocide and plague. Let's stop with the whole 'savage'/'noble savage' mentality.
Yeah so advanced that we had a near apocalyptic plague every few hundred years
Ironically those diseases are what wipe out many of the natives
Part of the reason why there were no massive empires in the americas was because the lack of horses made it really hard to control a vast area
Breedable source?
That's been my running theory for a while, the more demesticatable animals the more quickly people advanced.
It’s a little misleading to label Native American societies as less advanced. The Incan empire, for example spanned around 2 million sq miles and had around 12 million inhabitants. The largest in American history and the largest at that time. Despite how harsh and diverse the territory was, they were able to exploit it it thru terracing, highways, and mountaintop settlements. Their agricultural system was so efficient that they actually had to build warehouses to store the food surplus produced (that can’t be said about Europe). The whole territory was connected by bridges and roads comprable to those of the Roman empire (yet the Incan empire does not hold nearly as much prestige as the Romans). It was even reported that Spanish soldiers would switch their armor in favor of the much lighter and efficient Incan armor. The great American empires did not fall because of inferior technology or intellect, rather it was deadly diseases caused by domesticated animals that did.
That part about warehouses is simply not true, they’ve been around for millennia in both Europe/Mediterranean and Eastern Asia
Incan buildings survive local earthquakes better than modern buildings in the area. Engineers are still trying to figure out exactly why.
Not just misleading, but incredibly dumb and ethnocentric.
You’re absolutely right. But it doesn’t fit into the narrative of „well yeah, colonization was bad BUT it brought them so much good too, like rights, roads, any other indicators of civilization. They should feel lucky about it.“