“The natives north of Mexico” The Mayans were not North of Mexico.
He is correct- in what is now USA the various native civilizations did not have any true written languages that we know of.
True, my eyes just read the Mexico part and slid over the “north of”
I still think if the dinosaur hadn’t went extinct there would never had been mammals that evolved into that neanderthal neighbor of yours.
No cave men, no neanderthals, no which ever came next, no homosapiens or no modern humans, and none of that other stuff would have happened.
It’s all moot.
The K-Pg extinction is hardly something that “happened in our species” though, is it?
I think it is. We woulda been dino chow. No time for other evolving would’ve happened had they been around.
Running for your life takes alot of time away from invention and exploration.
It took a gigantic event to clear them out. There would’ve been no living with them on the planet. IMHO.
String.
Yes, they were. And though some of their practices may be considered sadistic to us, so was western civilization at the time.
It’s ironic that this is coming up in the context of Columbus…They were such savages! They were raping, and murdering and putting into slavery…oh wait no, that was us
Also of course we know that many groups were in fact peaceful and had no such practices, as Columbus himself wrote:
AIUI destruction of libraries was part and parcel of the Conquistadors game plan, (along with tearing down temples and other structures in order to use the stones to build cathedrals) and what we consider “books” were codices inscribed on animal skins, which would not have stood the test of time unless maintained. I’ll have to look for some references from the Spaniards records, but I recall there are descriptions of the burning of these places of knowledge. It’s hard to imaging the Aztec or Inca not having a record-keeping system - they had taxes, and conscription, and architecture, and guilds.
Oops: Edit: you are referring to the USA, so probably correct.
– you know, that’s a pretty good candidate.
I still think language is a better one; but string’s very important.
I remember being amazed when I was taught how to twist fibers so the string or cordage holds together. The guy who thought of that was a genius.
There were plenty of mammals when the Dinos ruled the earth. Just small ones.
Well, its hard to condemn Columbus for his evil slavery when those two civilizations were based on slavery- and human sacrifice.
If Columbus was wrong in that (and he was) then those were doubly wrong.
Since the American Civilizations were in decline before Columbus, it is just possible that they had some form of writing that was on bark or something else fragile, so nothing survived.
Yes you can. If you’re on trial you don’t get to say “Hey, there are other evil people” and get exonerated. That’s not how anything works. So yeah, I condemn his actions and I condemn human sacrifice as well.
Also, you doubly ignored the content of my post. Firstly, Columbus and his men didn’t merely enslave, but they murdered, mutilated etc.
And secondly, not all people of the americas were sacrificing children, as Columbus himself wrote; he found some groups to be the most peaceful he had ever encountered, including compared to Europeans. That’s right before Columbus and his men started chopping off hands and mauling them with their dogs for not meeting the mining quotas.
Frankly, I don’t understand why people have such an issue with a realistic accounting of Columbus as well as a more nuanced view on the various native american people.
History is very brutal and people made great feats of bravery / self-sacrifice / ingenuity that built the modern world. All this can be true. There’s no need to paint everything black and white and invent rosy, but blinkered, national origin myths.
That’s true, Columbus was not a Good Guy. But what I meant is if you castigate Columbus and Endorse the Aztecs, you are being hypocritical.
Yeah, there were peaceful peoples in the Americas- but not the only two surviving Civilizations- which by and large conquered, enslaved and often sacrificed every peaceful tribe they could reach. The islanders he found were peaceful only because the Aztecs etc couldnt get to them.
Which I didn’t. But thank you for at least acknowledging that Columbus wasn’t a good guy.
…or indeed because the Europeans couldn’t get to them, until they did.
In any case, I’m not following your logic here. The Arawak weren’t really peaceful, it was only because they hadn’t been victims of a genocide yet, therefore it’s OK that Europeans came and committed a genocide? If this isn’t the argument, then what is it you’re trying to say here?
No, no and no.
The Arawaks may have been peaceful- but if the civilizations that existed pre-columbus had been able to get there, they would have been conquered and enslaved, Nor is what the Spanish did okay. However, it also was not unusual for that period. Pretty much everyone was nasty and brutish, except for a few isolated peoples, protected by their isolation. The Portuguese etc were every bit as bad as the Spanish.
But @Beckdawrek is correct in speculating that humans probably would not have evolved, if the K-T extinction event didn’t occur. The dinosaurs would have most likely continued to rule the Earth for millions of years, adapting to the changing climate and geological conditions. New species of dinosaurs may have evolved to fill the ecological niches left by those dinos that did go extinct. Some might have developed more complex behaviors, like sociality, communication, and intelligence.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the dinos would have eventually been replaced by the mammals anyway. But, it’s extremely doubtful humans would have entered the scene by now, or ever, if they were.
Humans are part of the primate lineage, which is a branch of the mammalian lineage, which is a branch of the synapsid lineage, which is a branch of the amniote lineage, which is a branch of the tetrapod lineage, which is a branch of the vertebrate lineage, which is a branch of the animal lineage. Each of these branches was a major event, unlikely to have occurred as it did without the K-T event.
I believe this to be true. Intelligence, maybe not. If they couldn’t pull off higher intelligence in 165 million years, it doesn’t seem like that’s a survival strategy they needed.
Unless they had to get smarter to compete with those pesky little mammals.
You say it so much more intelligently than I did.
Good thing T-Rex didn’t eat all the mammalian species you evolved from.
Where did you get the idea that there were only 2 civilizations in the Americas in 1492?