Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There was a great deal of diversity amongst native American people, some were hunter gathers, others build permanent settlements and pursued agricultural societies. Some were male dominated others were matriarchal. Either way, the thread expresses knowingly or not a consistent theme ethnocentric belief that the world could only be a better place as a result of the wonderfulness of white europeans. Of course this is why non-white, non-europeans are so quick to remind white europeans that not only have many of there wondrous advancements been as much a bane as a benefit, the history of europeans isn't exactly all that different from their "less" developed brethren.
There is some of that point of view, that without Europeans the most recent occupiers of the land would be suffering their own failures. Maybe they would be. But I see plenty of the la la land philosophy too. If no Europeans had come, it would be paradise, with the tribes at peace, and the land much like it was then.
The problem with this was without europeans they were already making constant war with each other, which is how the plains tribes ended up displace on the plains. The larger more powerful tribes dominated the major resources. They use burns to clear vast areas of land. They acted pretty much like Europeans had acted between Rome and the modern age.
And they are not even native. They are descendent of the last wave of settlment which poured down into the americas from the north. It is believed the previous wave was of different origion and generally wiped out by the last wave.
Lets be really fair and let them be human beings, just like the Europeans were human beings and as both were capable of acting quite badly when it served their needs. Us and them won't achieve anything but the promotion of the great steriotype.
Here's the premise...what if North America (including Canada, of course) had never seen the arrival of Europeans. The sole inhabitants of the continent remained indigenous people.
Given that, how would our world differ from today? How would it be the same?
An interesting premise. There are a whole series of alternative history stories, you can search for them at your local library. A series I like was SciFi - by Thomas Harlan - Wasteland of Flint, etc. - see
He posits an Aztec/Japanese coalition & various allies rising to hegemony over the World, & ultimately over human spaceflight. He didn't lay out exactly how that happened, I assume something like the Chinese not turning their back on transoceanic exploration & their integration of new shipping/trade routes into their existing tech/political base, resulting in an Industrial Revolution taking place there & carrying on into the New World, & then storming Europe.
It's a brilliant series, well worth reading. I had hoped he'd continue to spin out the alternative future history.
America (the Americas, North and South) without European influence would look pretty much like it did in 1491.
Domestication (of both plants and animals), language, technology - these were all several thousands years behind the advances made in various areas of the Old World. The further back along the timeline of such advances one goes, the slower and more gradual change occurs. It has barely been 500 years since Columbus sailed - that simply is not enough time for much substantive change to have occurred.
The dominance of certain groups would have changed, but that's about it.
On a side note, for an excellent discussion on why Eurasia (and not the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa or Australia) gained advanced technology first, I recommend Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
Well, the New World gardeners/botanists were geniuses - compared to their Old World counterparts. If you doubt that, try to live for a few days without potato, corn, chocolate, cocoa products. It's nearly impossible - we use potato and corn-derived products in many secondary products - sweeteners, emulsifiers, carriers, and on and on. We feed corn to our food animals - whether they're geared up to digest it properly or not, it's cheap.
A potato crop will sustain a family - with some added protein. That's not true of many other crops.
I would not dispute that corn and potatoes had an immense effect on the stability of the European food supply, nor that their derivatives have made a huge impact on industrialized food, but to imply these foods somehow bailed out Europe or that European agronomy and agriculture was somehow undeveloped or crude, is just silly.
The potato, like Old World grain crops are largely just staples, calorie extenders that allow civilizations maintain a huge surplus of calories to feed their underclasses. Staple crops tend to replace more nutritious horticultural strrategies that rely on a diversity of crops, and thus nutrients, which while won't support a larger population, make for a healthier smaller population, and one that is a lot less likely to suffer from the disadvantage of a blight on a monocrop.
Also, if you want to suggest New World plants with real nutrition that added positively to the range of European diet, I would suggest the tomato, beans, and squash over those starch crops, anyway. That said, I do like potatoes and corn, but their real 'value' is no more than wheat, i.e. empty calories to maintain the masses.
I would not dispute that corn and potatoes had an immense effect on the stability of the European food supply, nor that their derivatives have made a huge impact on industrialized food, but to imply these foods somehow bailed out Europe or that European agronomy and agriculture was somehow undeveloped or crude, is just silly.
The potato, like Old World grain crops are largely just staples, calorie extenders that allow civilizations maintain a huge surplus of calories to feed their underclasses. Staple crops tend to replace more nutritious horticultural strrategies that rely on a diversity of crops, and thus nutrients, which while won't support a larger population, make for a healthier smaller population, and one that is a lot less likely to suffer from the disadvantage of a blight on a monocrop.
Also, if you want to suggest New World plants with real nutrition that added positively to the range of European diet, I would suggest the tomato, beans, and squash over those starch crops, anyway. That said, I do like potatoes and corn, but their real 'value' is no more than wheat, i.e. empty calories to maintain the masses.
My view isn't particularly Euro-centric. I was following the thread - my opinion - see http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/E...tany/page5.php is that the New World botanists did a much better job of domesticating plants than their Old World counterparts.
From the URL above:
"For many foods which we now enjoy and rely upon, we must thank the people of the Americas who domesticated or discovered them. Many of our everyday foods originated in the ancient New World. Of the world's top 26 crops by tonnage, eight originated in the Americas. A third of United States crop value depends on foods that were first grown in the Americas. Without food crops from the New World, Indonesian satays, Indian curries, and even pizza would be unrecognizable. Let's look at some of the incredible variety of foods from the Americas and their impact on history."
As I recall, Europe's recovery from the waves of outbreaks of the Black Death relied upon broadening the base of food plants - and thus the Columbian Exchange was an important part of that broadening. Empty calories to maintain the masses has an ugly sound to it - especially if you and yours are part of the masses.
North America would probably still be the way it was 500 years ago. It hadn't changed much in the preceding 5000-10000 years, so why would it all of sudden start then? When was Europe in a similar state? Even before the Romans, northern and central Europeans had developed trade and worked metal. Their buildings in 500 BC were as good as the North American Indians in 1500 AD. It's as if the Indian ancestors migrated to the Americas and just kept on living the way they had since their beginning.
Indian culture was no more peaceful than European culture. But while war may have stimulated invention in Europe, in the Americas people seemed to fight each other in the same ways they had for millennia. That's why Cortez was able to conquer the Aztecs, among America's most advance tribe, with around 100 men. Even though the Aztecs could muster 10,000 or more men.
Central America might have become depopulated as a result of the Aztecs insatiable need for people to sacrifice. Already when Cortez appeared, tribes that were victims of the Aztecs were near the point of unsustainability.
Modern Indians are descendants of the people who replaced the pre-Clovis peoples, who may have arrived in America 3000 years earlier than they did. Europeans then replaced the Indians for the most part. These human migrations happen throughout history and continue today. Africans are moving into Europe through Sicily, Italy and Spanish Morocco. When populations are under pressure in their own lands, they move to others. If the natives aren't strong enough to fend them off, they succumb.
After a generation, the offspring of English and French immigrants to North America were taller and heavier than the relatives they left behind. That's a sure sign that food and other resources in Europe were already too scarce, given the technology available to grow and employ them, for the population they supported.
Cortez was able to conquer the Aztecs because he took advantage of political discontent among the vassal states to the Aztecs. He marched on Tenochtitlan with a huge Tlaxcalan (and other allies) army (see Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.) And of course, the Spanish had steel armor and weapons, horses and war dogs. Gunpowder weapons too - but they were more for show - good shock and awe, not so much for close quarters and single combat. Disease favored the Spanish, in particular - and later English colonization of N. America.
In the early invasive period of European contact, it was mostly menfolk who came to the New World. Therefore - especially among the Spanish and French - the men married - or at least fathered - criollo children. In the case of Mexico, I don't believe there ever were a lot of Spanish women who made the trip to settle in the Americas. Most of the early administrators were Spanish, and their goal seemed to be to make a pile of money and then return to the old country, to settle down and be a somebody.
True, but they weren't as accurate or have the range of the English longbow. The longbow was replaced by muskets not because muskets were better but because they were cheaper to make and easier to use. Anyone could use a musket after a few months training, while a good bowman took years to develop. That the musket was more desirable than the Indians' bows and arrows is attested to the fact that it was one of the most highly sought after trade goods and one the Europeans periodically refused to trade. Both sides knew what it could do. (I'm talking about combat use, not hunting.)
I've heard that Polynesians probably came to America in the outriggers. But these are very limited vessels. They are useless in trade and to transport settlers. I don't know of any Indians that used an alphabet. Their "writing" was more comparable to the Egyptians hieroglyphics that had been supplanted by letters thousands of years ago. Indian histories are oral. They have no written records.
I'm not an Indian expert but it doesn't seem possible that the tools, of all kinds, they had were capable of further development. Without some spontaneous development or exogenous influence, where could they have taken them?
The Aztecs and Maya and Inca had writing systems. The Aztec codexes were hauled off or destroyed by the Spanish and others. The Mayan writing system (like the Aztec) is still in place on buildings, statues, stele, etc. The Inca writing system may have perished with them.
The Maya kept sufficiently good records to develop an excellent calendar, which indicates they also had an excellent mathematics - for celestial observations and prediction.
The Inca developed potatoes into human food, built roads and suspension bridges in the Andes, practiced terrace farming. (See other entries in this thread for references to plants domesticated in the Americas.) The Inca and other tribes/nations were excellent hydrological engineers - their works are still studied. And I believe it's the buildings in Machu Picchu where the massive building blocks are so closely fitted that a knife blade can't be inserted into the joins. The Aztecs and Maya raised pyramids, temples, and both worked extensively with water systems. The Aztec capital was built on a lake, and duly impressed the Spanish on their way to raze that civilization.
If left completely alone I am pretty sure the natives would still be doing what they were when first found. They had absolutely no infrastructure no kingdoms, no sciences, written language or higher learning of any kind. They were still fairly nomadic and basic hunter gatherers for the majority. The closest thing to a "city" were Pueblo Indians or some tribes that built actual structures not just pitched a tent.
Here's the premise...what if North America (including Canada, of course) had never seen the arrival of Europeans. The sole inhabitants of the continent remained indigenous people.
Given that, how would our world differ from today? How would it be the same?
The concept of European explorers (or Asian, or African) somehow never finding the Americas is one I can't wrap my head around. But as explained by others, the Native Americans would have continued to advance. Most likely not as far as our current world, but at the time of European "discovery" the dominant societies already had well established understanding of mathematics, hydraulics (irrigation), and agriculture. Also well-established trade routes with other societies, so any new development could be shared.
There would be must as much deforestation (maybe even more, because back then wood was the ONLY source of fuel) and animal depopulation. They had already helped wipe out the Mastodons using only stone tools.
A much more realistic scenario would be if old Chris C. still sailed the ocean blue in 1492, but the natives did NOT get wiped out by a massively devastating plague. It's documented that the native Americans kicked the Vikings out of North America (they called it "Vineland") many Centuries before Columbus was born, so a native population at full strength could have easily done the same to European settlers. Actually, they did so. There is a reason it took 128 years between Columbus and Plymouth Rock. The plague wrapped up in the late 1610's, so it's no real surprise that the first successful permanent European colony on the continent was founded only a few years later in 1620. They found an "abandoned" Native American settlement with corn (maize) already growing wild in the fields from where the natives planted back when they were alive. Back to the alternate scenario... Native societies would have still traded with Europeans, and may have even been briefly subjugated by them, but eventually the settlers would have been kicked out. Think of actual India, which was colonized by England. Do Indians today look like the English? No? America would be the same.
Seriously, who knows? You can't hypothesize how an entire group of people would fare if another group hadn't invaded their space and killed most of them off. Perhaps they would have had gains in technology....but again, we'll never know.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Teotihuacan!
