Christopher Columbus coming to America is the most significant thing to happen in our human species

In My Humble Opinion
121

Ben Franklin did discover that lightning is a form of electricity. He did nothing with that discovery. Apart from that he was a mere tinkerer. Most early American “science” was this same sort of thing. By that time Isaac Newton had already invented calculus and discovered gravity, Antoine Lavosier disovered the role of oxygen in combustion around that time, Robert Hooke disovered micro-organisms.

Certainly the Founding Fathers were some clever guys. But none of their plantation-labor-saving trinkets ever approached the scientific importance of anything that was happening in Europe at the time.

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Eating more consistently, maybe. But not eating overall better. Hunter-gatherer populations generally had better nutrition than early farming populations; or a lot of relatively recent farming populations, for that matter. This is identifiable in the bones. I’ll try to find some cites – I have this information from conversations with a physical anthropologist, but it undoubtedly came from studies which have been published.

I suspect the shift had to do partially with not having to travel; because old people, ill people, and people right around childbirth have trouble doing so. I don’t suppose people then felt any happier about having to leave Grandma behind than we would now.

Yeah, it wasn’t a sudden shift but a gradual one. Lots of people had mixed systems including gathering, hunting/fishing, and encouraging growth of selected food plants. And people who were still moving a lot often did indeed have food storage – gathered grains, dried berries, smoked meats/fish etc., left buried in various fashions to be returned to as the group moved around their territory.

And then the next thing that happens is that the specialized military is used to drive the neighbors out of their hunting/gathering territories, and/or to force them to settle down and raise transportable foods, because that city needs more agricultural land to feed all those people.

Force is often needed, because the gatherer/hunters often weren’t miserable and starving (at least before they were driven into the least fertile areas) and didn’t want to become farmers. Not everybody “thought it was great.” There are still people now fighting desperately to be able to continue to live in other ways.

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No, they had long-term storage of preserved meats. and other foods.

I think this represents a misunderstanding of how many prehistoric HGs lived. The herd-chasing big-game hunters were only a subset of HGs. That wasn’t the model in Jōmon or Pacific North West or Californian Native American cultures.

Not the ones in resource-abundant places where they could permanently settle. Sedentary HGs were a thing.

We also know that some gave it up again.

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My understanding is that agriculture won out over hunting and gathering mostly because farmers have more kids, and take the land from the hunter-gatherers over generations. And that few people actually decide to take up full-time agriculture. (As distinct from cultivating a few gardens.)

125

This is the Cain and Abel story and probably the grain of truth (heh) that generated the fable.

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The most significant cultural event in human history was the invention of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prior to that the mass of western humanity simply endured. Science opened up humanity to the universe of discovery and began the removal of the yoke of religion. Columbus was, at best, a participant.

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Firstly no one (on this thread at least) is claiming Columbus arriving in America is momentus in a good way. It goes without saying it’s not momentus like the discovery of Penicillin it’s momentus like the Nazi occupation of Europe.

But you don’t get Cortez, Pizarro, de Leon, and Coronado without Columbus. He’s not some innocent butterfly who’s wings caused a hurricane, he was the first murderous, oppressive, Spanish invader who directly led directly (by his political relationships and by inspiration) to other murderous, oppressive Spanish invaders. And you can divide worldwide human history into “before murderous, oppressive Spanish invaders arrived in the Americas” and “after murderous, oppressive Spanish invaders arrived in the Americas”. That definitely makes Columbus arrival absolutely a contender for most significant event in human history.

I’d agree many of those are more momentus but they aren’t really “a thing” IMO. Most of these are slow gradual changes that happened in innumerable places over hundreds of thousands of years. I.e. you can’t say “on 1st July 2345bc at 9am Bisal Amaruk invent writing”

128

The television remote control. I can’t imagine going back to the olden days when I had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV.

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One of the earliest known cities, Çatal Höyük, was a city in Anatolia from approximately 7,500 BCE to 6,400 BCE. There’s something like 18 levels to the site as they kept building on their own rubble. The evidence for agriculture is scant on the lower levels but increases as you get to the more recent levels. You’re right, the lifestyle of a HG society might be radically different based on their envioronment.

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The series of disasters around the end of the Younger Dryas (climate change, megafauna extinction) that pushed humanity out of its hunter-gatherer equilibrium.
Second place: the movable-type printing press.
Third place (or higher, it’s still ongoing): the Turing-complete computer.

131

Comparatively few people have heard of a failed pre-Columbus expedition:

in 1485, presumably with the committee’s expert concurrence, the King authorized two Portuguese, Fernao Dulmo and Joao Estreito, to try to discover the island of Antiilia in the Western Ocean. This expedition was to be at their own expense, and they would be hereditary captains of any land they discovered. But they promised that after they had sailed west for forty days they would return home whether or not they had found any islands. We know no more of that ill-fated expedition than that they set sail in 1487. And that, unlike Columbus, they made the mistake of setting out from the Azores, in the high latitudes where the strong westerly winds made their expedition nearly impossible.

-The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin

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Sure of course, but why is it better than being a HG or nomadic herdsman? Those are the reason why agriculture survived and the other ways did not- except a few tribes deep in jungle, etc.

He invented the Lightning Rod. That was critical, because many saw Lightning as God’s wrath, but then sinners homes with rods didnt get hit, while churches without rods did.

True.

Nonsense. I listed one of the ways. Some HG (by no means all) depended upon prey animal migrations.

Which usually had agriculture too.

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The word “Some” is conspicuously absent from your point.

Not the places that had sedentary HGs. Agriculture came to those places later.

For sedentary HGs, it wasn’t that they needed vast open spaces. Not when their primary “prey” was acorns and chestnuts, or the salmon came to them. The G part of HG provided way more of the calories than the H part.

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Language is useful, agriculture is yummy, and tools are neat, but as a species we never would have been able to construct and maintain healthy large cities, run complex societies, develop complex technologies, extract and refine natural resources at scale, or understand the inherent workings of the natural world without mathematics beyond basic arithmetic. Algebra and analytic geometry, calculus and differential equations, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, model theory, et cetera are all crucial things that distinguish us from even the ‘advanced’ animals, allowing us to describe production, distribution, and transportation of perishable and durable goods in a repeatable manner, and to govern over large societies. The development of advanced mathematics paralleled and facilitated social, medical, and industrial development beyond the “tribal knowledge” stage, and despite the revulsion many people have for the subject as an academic pursuit, it underpins virtually everything you use and every interaction you have today. Of course, math has also allowed us to tunnel vision our way into implementing highly polluting and harmful technologies and then justify them in economic terms without consideration for the ‘externalities’. So, it is not only significant in making us successful but may be key in letting humanity dig its own grave. So it goes.

As for Cristoforo Colombo, he was an irredeemably terrible human being who brought slavery back to Europe even though nobody was really asking for it (Ferdinand repeatedly ordered him to stop bringing natives back to Spain), abandoned many of his men, disfigured and executed many of the Spanish colonists for minor disagreements, used his mangled interpretation of the Christian Bible (or what little he knew of it) to justify his actions, and was generally a terrible human being in every essential way. While he was the first southern European to discover the Americas, and more crucially, the one to show how readily it could be exploited for profit (mostly sugar and molasses; having never actually landed on the continental Americas, he barely brought back enough gold or silver to cover the financing). His biggest legacy, other than accidentally stumbling onto Hispaniola and then managing to navigate his way back, was in the genesis of what would become the Triangle Trade.

This is not only far from “…the most significant thing to happen in our human species”, it is essentially all of the worst of human impulses somehow jammed into one contemptible figure who by dint of good posthumous PR mostly by American Puritans became a celebrated figure of a grand and largely fabricated mythology. The (re-)discovery of the Americas was essentially inevitable (as was the apocalyptic plague that happened due to wide contact between Europeans and the American Natives), and the plunder of riches and resources a natural consequence of human conquest, but its significance is overstated by people who proclaimed that Pax Americana was “The End of History”, as I’m sure the Qing, Macedonians, Mongols, Romans, et cetera believed as well.

Stranger

135

Instantaneous communication. The telegraph - followed by the telephone and radio. Messages that took days/weeks/months to reach the recipient could now be received instantly. For example - the Battle of New Orleans was fought a few weeks after a peace treaty had been signed (War of 1812), since the news of peace hadn’t arrived. Thousands of lives could have been saved with faster communication.

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It makes it both easier, and more necessary, to conquer one’s neighbors and put their lands into yet more farm fields. It makes it easier to sustain highly heirarchical systems.

That doesn’t make it automatically better for people’s lives. Again, HG peoples, as well as people using mixed systems, often fought desperately (and some still do) to be able to keep living in those ways.

I’m a farmer. I love farming. But that doesn’t make agriculture either innocuous, or The Only Right Way To Live.

137

Correcting a marginal piece of superstition does not even remotely qualify as “critical”.

138

Guessing “the most significant thing to happen to the human species” is a mug’s game because so much turns on the definition of “significant” and “human”. Plus the interdependency between different events.

For the fun of playing the game, there are 3 things I might suggest:

  1. Surviving the mid-Pleistocene bottleneck. Genetic evidence suggests that the worldwide human population was reduced to ~1000 individuals about 900,000 years ago. Obviously that’s a pre-requisite to everything else, so passing that test was probably the most significant thing that ever happened to us.
  2. Apart from mere surviving, the development of cooking. By increasing the nutrition we could extract from the environment, we were able to develop bigger brains, which led to everything else that distinguishes us from other apes.
  3. Apart from surviving and eating, the development of writing. This created the basis for trade and systemic allocation of resources that helped farm villages grow into cities and civilizations.
139

This right here is pretty good synopsis as to why Columbus’ arrival in a America is a contender for most significant event in human history. He wasn’t just some indirect cause of the cataclysm that followed in half the globe, he was the start of it, the conquistadors that followed him were directly influenced by him.

The fact he was a scumbag is unarguable, but not remotely an argument against it being significant. Again everyone on this thread is in agreement it’s significant like the Nazi occupation of Europe not significant like the invention of Penicillin.

And while I agree mathematics (and the other things proposed) could be more significant it’s not “a thing”. It’s a whole bunch of things that happened 100s of years apart in completely different cultures all over the globe. Columbus’ arrival in the Americas is a thing, that happened October 12, 1492. You can absolutely draw a line at that point and say things were very different (and much much worse) for huge sections of the globe after that line than before it.

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I’m in board with these things. Which may have taken more than a moment in time, but are well defined things nonetheless.