Did something about the Americas stop American civilisations leaving the Stone Age? A lack of surface copper and tin, perhaps?
there certainly was a lot of magnetite sand scattered around the the US, whether as lose beach/dune sand or as magnetite beds. copper, which is usually rarer, was used (often pure copper that was simply hammered.) and we know bronze was used beginning AD 900-1000, so people knew a thing or two about smelting and alloying.
why it did not become widespread (even in south america which has lots of surface metallic resources takes some explanation not from geologists but archi/anthro experts.
A lot was to do with the lack of any large animals suitable for domestication. No horses, no oxen, can’t domesticate bears. They didn’t invent the cart or the plough because they had no beast of burden to pull it.
There was/is a very large amount of copper, lead and iron available, so it wasn’t that.
Jared Diamond – They didn’t have Guns, Germs, and Steel, and, as Peter Morris said, the reason is that there weren’t suitable animals for domestication as livestock. Also, their only major grain source was corn; whereas, Eurasians had wheat, rice, and several others. Mammoths had been hunted to extinction, and they couldn’t have been domesticated anyway. Bison were not suitable for domestication. Turkey fowl are too small. Dogs are predators, an inefficient source of meat. The Aztecs turned to cannibalism. Again, an inefficient source of meat and difficult to domesticate, for a variety of reasons, including that your neighbors are likely to react very strongly if they think you might eat them.
What about the American bison? And saying that the Bison can’t be domesticated is missing the point. An Aurochs couldn’t be domesticated either, but the cattle that was bred from them could be, it just took many generations.
Jared Diamond talks about this in Guns, Germs and Steel, yes he mentions the Bison and that attempts to domesticate them in modern times have failed, doesn’t that just mean that there hasn’t been enough generations of selective breeding put in?
Maybe I’m being excessively dim, but what does domesticating animals have to do with making things out of copper and bronze?
And the Aztecs supposedly resorting to cannabalism? Aroo?
Aurochs were evidently susceptible to selective breeding. Maybe there’s something about bison that makes them less so. Look at how difficult it is to get pandas to breed at all in captivity.
According to Diamond, the science of smelting ore on a scale that it becomes useful only happens when society is producing enough food calories – in the form of large domesticated animals and mass-produced grains – that individuals can start specializing in order to discover such innovations.
industries (such as smelting metal) requires a lot of materials movement and transportation. but, you can argue that the native americans had other industries such as textile, and farming and trading and that requires transport so you have a point.
a more likely explanation is a that industrial production grows only when demand is growing much faster. you can attack the problem better that way. what are metals for? weapons? there are substitutes and a low level of warfare is not likely to spur development. tools? if the population will survive with rudimentary non-metallic tools then why bother to mine, smelt, cast and forge?
To be able to mine ores, refine metals, and produce useful tools, a society has to produce enough food to support a large number of non-farmers. Livestock is a major part of that – they produce milk and meat directly, and improve a farmer’s ability to plow fields. When every member of society is producing just enough food to subsist on, through their own labor, nobody can devote much time to any other efforts.
Because of how Western man got himself out of the stone age was to invent the wheel, develop agriculture, and then build on that.
But the American population had no horses or oxen. Without a beast of burden a wheel is fairly useless. And without animals to pull a plough, their agriculture was limited.
They were basically stymied at the first step.
Well lacking specific evidence of what that difference between Aurochs and Bison is, I just find this part of Jared Diamonds argument the weakest. There are huge differences between modern domesticated animals and their wild ancestors.
The only true “wild horse” left alive are not tameable either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski’s_Horse
I am not a biologist, but it seems to me that rather than saying a zebra or american bison is not domesticable, that the relevant cultures for whatever reason didn’t invest the long term multi-generation effort in turning them into something that could be domesticated.
Surely, the earliest individuals in these processes had no idea they were investing in a multiple-generation project.
No absolutely, it may well have been for religious reasons, eg see the veneration of the cow in India, which coincidentally was one of the places domestic cattle was domesticated… 10,000 years ago. But surely what they really mean is that over 6000-8000 years in India something like the Auroch (untamable) was gradually turned into something like the modern domesticated Brahman cow by selective breeding.
The same could be done for any of the so called “non-domesticable” species Zebras, Bison, etc, just no culture has ever tried for long enough.
I think Diamond mentions zebras in Guns, Germs, and Steel. (I saw this documentary on Netflix streaming, so I know it is out there.) If I recall correctly, there is something about zebra genetics and behavior that do not lend them to domesticity.
One thing that Diamond mentions about the Americas is that it is tall-and-skinny versus the Fertile Crescent’s short-and-wide. That is, the North and South American continents are roughly the same length as the breadth of Eurasia. However, Eurasia is all more-or-less in the same temperate zone, whereas in the Americas, you enter a new temperate zone every couple of hundred miles or so.
In Eurasia, the things that worked in one part of the Fertile Crescent also worked in other parts of Eurasia as civilization spread east and west. That is, the civilizations didn’t have to constantly reinvent agriculture or animal domestication as they spread out. In the Americas, though, the Inuits had to have a completely different way of life than the Lakota Sioux, the Navaho, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the other civilizations of South America.
One of the basic points of Diamond’s thesis is that when the members of a society must work constantly to keep itself fed, then other aspects of cultural growth cannot take place. It is the ability to have a surplus crop – such as a single farmer being able to feed 3 or 4 families – that allows other outlets of discovery to take place.
Also, agriculture is hard: it’s typically adopted only after you’ve hunted down all the easy megafauna, a development which occurred earlier in Eurasia. True, the Iroquois, the Incas and others were practicing agriculture at the time of the southern European’s first encounter with the New World, but they had not been at it for thousands of years.
Interestingly, after horses were re-introduced to America in the 1500s, some midwestern tribes abandoned farming and went back to hunting.
ETA: The incas used gold for domestic uses, so they had technically left the stone age.
Just to continue the Diamond-fest, according to him the Americas were well in their way towards a metallurgic society. They mastered the easiest ones, gold, silver and copper. It was only a question of time.
Someone I know on another forum said this about the Tarascan. “They were the odd man out… Culturally, technologically, and linguistically. Their culture doesn’t follow the normal Mesoamerican format. They were on the cusp of heralding a Bronze Age in Mesoamerica. And the closest language related to theirs is in South America.” He said they were pretty advanced in terms of metallurgy, at least compared to the rest of the area. They were using bronze for weapons, rather than just gold/silver for decoration.
Is there any merit to that?
Anthropologist Marvin Harris has persuasively argued that the apparen veneration of the cow in India is really the result, not the cause, of its utility as a source of food (dairy products), source of power and traction (calves, which grow to be oxen or bulls), and fuel (dung). See his books Cows, Pigs, War, and Witches and The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig. In essence, he argues that cows are “sacred” and preserved precisely because they are so valuable. Diamond mentions him, but all too briefly IMHO.