Man, this is a fascinating thread. I appreciate that you all are challenging and disagreeing with each other because I would not have learned so much if only one perspective was dominant.
I can't contribute on the discussion of Mexico. I don't know much about it. I did want to speculate, if only to learn how I'm wrong, on a few things I know a few things about. If any of you HBD enthusiasts have a ready response to any of my points, good, help me flush these out.
Quote: (02-18-2017 12:47 PM)Malone Wrote:
Funny thing about that mention about the natives never having seen a horse. Not true!
I went to a dinosaur museum in southern Alberta, in the badlands. Can't remember the name. One of the exhibits was about the North American horse. Apparently it had been hunted to extinction before the white man arrived.
ONE WITH NATURE YOU GUYS.
Your post is a little bit of a distraction. By the time the natives saw a horse for the second time, they had long ago forgotten the horses their ancestors saw and killed off.
And yet, it's an important point. Too romanticize Native Americans gives them both too much credit, and too little credit. They get too much credit for being egalitarian, peaceful, environmental, spiritual, etc. They were not "at one with nature" - anthropologists speculate that they caused the desertification of the American southwest. Where a rich civilization (the Anasazi) had at one point developed, pointing towards some resource wealth in the region that was squandered leading to the collapse of the CIV. Others speculate that the natural state of North America at the time of colonization was only possible because nature had reclaimed land following the depopulation caused by those great plagues like smallpox.
They also get too little credit, because by the time the colonizers had arrived to North America, the population was decimated by diseases that had travelled from Mexico and had also been marinating for a few generations after Hernado de Soto's marauding army introduced the feral pigs to southeastern US. Just like everybody else, the natives found pigmeat to be irresistable and so gladly incorporated those delicious beasts and their diseases into their diet. By the time they figured it out, it was too late. Also, a lot of their smartest leaders would have been the first to be killed or enslaved by de Soto's men.
I do not have a unified theory of why NA intelligence is lower than white (I am only assuming this is a true statement). But as speculation, I offer an alternative theory: the Spaniards would have killed the elite leaders first and allowed their relatively dumb followers to remain as subjects. The spanish didn't colonize quite like the N Europeans did in North America, rather than displace they ruled over the natives.
My own idea on why the Natives didn't advance technology like the Europeans had: Religion. Long before the word Europe was known, it was called Christendom and was united under a common monotheistic religion which seems to be more stable than polytheism. European nobility could invest in their land with relatively less fear it may be burned down tomorrow (unless permission for war had been granted by a pope).
On genetics, this is a very young field, and one of the growing focuses of this field is the interplay between nature and nuture. Times of hardship and poverty imprint themselves on the DNA, becoming nature. I am not the right person to jump in depth on that subject.
Why canoes rather than roads and wheels? Perhaps because water travel was enough. The size of the Mississippi river basin allowed the greatest NA civilization in Cahokia to control a large portion of the US landmass by leveraging the mobility and trade routes of the river. Also, to dismiss as canoes is a little reductive. The Polynesians were able to create a great power with their navy, and the people of the pacific northwest had great war canoes that were much more seaworthy than modern canoes. The Unungan Kayaks were perfectly fitted to their use, and when the Aleuts were vassals of the Russians, they were known to travel in their kayaks as far as California to obtain furs for their overlords. Still, it is clear that European technology including navy was dominant at the time of contact.
I merely bring all these points up to show the other side of the coin: the technologies and empires of Native America are given short thrift because we romanticize them as simple people living in trees and skin huts. Certainly many of them did, but at times, those nomadic natives were subjugated and united by more advanced American cultures.
So what the hell is my point? I don't believe in inherent racial superiority. Why were the nates so bass-ackwards compared to the Spaniards? A lot of factors, but I think circumstances and environment played a larger part. Why were the Romans and Greeks at one time so much more advanced than the rest of Europe? Were they genetically superior or were there other factors? I'm not requesting an answer to that question, it's just a challenge to consider.
