adsfdsklf wrote:
Forgive me for my ignorance of the flora/fauna of ancient Africa. I must have missed class that day.
Your theory seems to be that cultures will only "rise" so far as the environment allows or dictates. You cite the indigenous Africans and Australians as examples.
How do the Native Americans fit into this theory? With all the bounty of North America -- yet stuck in primitive state.
The Americas were the last habitable continents to be populated by men. For cereal grains, there wasn't as much variety as there was in the fertile crescent. Sure, America grows plenty of wheat today, but it wasn't there when the Native Americans arrived. The plants they were able to domesticate had to planted individually, unlike wheat which can be planted much more efficiently, and didn't provide as much nutrition as other grains.
As for fauna, all the large mammals that might have been domesticated went extinct in the Americas shortly after the arrival of humans, with the exception of the llama/alpaca in the Andes, which was domesticated. Despite the lower availability of cereal grains and large mammals, there were signficant settled societies in the Americas, notably in the Andes and in Mesoamerica, Mesoamerica being one of the few civilizations cited as having independently invented written language. There was also some more extensive farming going on in the Mississippi Valley.
But there was both a lower frequency of the factors that led to settled society in Mesopotamia, and by the time humans arrived into the Americas, people had been living in the Fertile Crescent for ages. Again, this isn't my theory: Jared Diamond has popularized it (and I subscribe to it). I think he has a chart that shows the grains and potentially domesticated animals native to the different parts of the world, the approximate dates of humans arrival into those areas, and the time frame it took for settled society and writing to develop. I loaned my copy of his book out so I don't have it with me now.
With the Americas, Europe had huge advantages in possessing guns (thanks to the Chinese invention of gunpowder), steel weapons and armor, and horses for mounted attacks and quick travel over long distances. And it's clear the people of the Americas weren't stupid. The Spaniards marveled at the beauty of Tenochtitlan, and the Sioux were skilled adopters of both horses and firearms on the plains of the midwest. But the biggest factor as to why Europe obliterated the Native American societies was because of small pox. Humans in the Old World had a history of close occupation with domesticated ruminants, which is likely how cow pox gave way to small pox. By the time the 16th Century rolled around, small pox had gotten around so that there was some level of immunity in most people. But because there were no domesticated cattle in the Americas, that never happened, which is why the death toll was so high when small pox was introduced by Europeans (both accidentally and later intentionally in some cases). It's conjecture, but I believe it wouldn't have been a wholesale defeat of the native peoples of the Americas had it not been for small pox. That was a far more lethal tool than muskets or swords or horses.
I recommend you check out his books. Not everybody agrees with his conclusions, but they I think they follow well.