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Original post by Mithrandir Read a paper once that indicated that the native americans never invented the wheel because they never had a need for it. They didn't have any pack animals such as horses or bulls to pull things, and therefore never bothered to invent it.

they also had a pretty abundant waterways that probably worked to the detriment of the wheel. I have no source for that, but it makes sense knowing the long distances and various places that can be covered using almost exclusively waterways in the US.

While there are plenty of reasons for Native Americans to have a slower rate of technological advances, it would likely have reached a tipping point eventually and their advances would accelerate. I wouldn't even know where to begin on how long that would have taken though.

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Original post by Talroth Quote: Original post by LessBread I'm hard pressed to imagine that native Americans would have developed industrialization or anything resembling capitalism given their conceptions of collective ownership. I also don't think would have had any need to either. Why do you need greedy capitalists to develop industrialization?

For starters, the two developed hand in hand.

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Original post by Talroth We see aspects of the foundations of modern industrial processes in North America before Europeans came, such as assembly line production for harvesting and preserving fish: Group A is in the water to actually catch the fish. Group B takes the fish from the shore to Group C prepping/gutting, Group D takes the gutted fish and preps them for drying/smoking. Everyone helps, everyone eats.

I think you are confusing industriousness for industry.

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Original post by Talroth They also had fairly developed trade routes between other tribes/groups. If they had developed the materials to produce better tools, why wouldn't they use them? Why did they use better tools when they were introduced by Europeans?

I'm not saying they were stupid.

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Original post by Talroth I also don't know where your idea of 'collective ownership' comes from. I can't think of a single culture in the Americas that had truly collective ownership. Many had a different view on land ownership, but we have clear ownership of personal items in every instance I can recall. The closest I can think of is that most groups were more focused on larger and extended families which encourages sharing with and aiding each other.

I'm thinking of land ownership, not personal property. Granted, native Americans were not a monolithic group, but I'm hard pressed to imagine native Americans developing coal fired steam engines, factories for mass production or anything that required strict adherence to a clock. Have you ever heard the expression "necessity is the mother of invention"? I don't think they needed to invent much to live well in their environment. Mith's wheel example is a case in point.

They were already pretty close.

The problem is that history in the United States has been slanted to the Eurocentric view and many fall for it. Even in this thread, comments like "Native Americans were 500-1000 years behind Europe", etc, are ridiculous. In what ways were they 1000 years behind Europeans? Guns?

Europeans at the time had very crude guns. In the time it took to prep them for a shot, someone could fire off 3 or 4 arrows, stab them, knock them out, etc. They were not guns like we have now by any means.

And why don't you all look at the evolution of the gun and read on the records of the first gun...had nothing WHATSOEVER to do with Europeans.

Let's not forget ancient Egypt (black africans) who were inventing, creating, dreaming, long before any of this took place. We can trace ideas for common things that we use today all the way back to ancient egypt.

Anyways...when I look at history, I see a steady progression with contributions from all over. No one group did all of anything.

/rant off

:)

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Original post by OneThreeThreeSeven They were already pretty close. The problem is that history in the United States has been slanted to the Eurocentric view and many fall for it. Even in this thread, comments like "Native Americans were 500-1000 years behind Europe", etc, are ridiculous. In what ways were they 1000 years behind Europeans? Guns? Europeans at the time had very crude guns. In the time it took to prep them for a shot, someone could fire off 3 or 4 arrows, stab them, knock them out, etc. They were not guns like we have now by any means. And why don't you all look at the evolution of the gun and read on the records of the first gun...had nothing WHATSOEVER to do with Europeans. Let's not forget ancient Egypt (black africans) who were inventing, creating, dreaming, long before any of this took place. We can trace ideas for common things that we use today all the way back to ancient egypt. Anyways...when I look at history, I see a steady progression with contributions from all over. No one group did all of anything. /rant off :)

Thank you for mentioning this. We also must remember that Europeans would still be chasing each other in kilts and loincloths if not for the Romans.

You have the great architecture of Egypt, the Persian Empire, followed by the Greek Empire, followed by the Roman Empire, which led to the subjugation of Europe, especially Western Europe, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the subsequent skirmishes between European nations and in parallel the Golden Age of Islam. Not to mention the acquirement of gunpowder from China and discovery of derivative calculus from India hundreds of year before Newton.

If Native Americans had all this going for them, they'd be just as industrial as we are.


note: i may not have all the timelines correct.

The calculus that we know today is not even the same form of calculus discovered by Newton, let alone the same calculus discovered by an Indian from before then. As far as I'm concerned, Riemann is the father of the familiar calculus. Not only did he help formulate the modern limit-based version, but he then used it to completely turn our notion of geometry on its head. Newton was pretty smart yeah, but Riemann was a demigod.

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Original post by superpig That said, their reverence for the "natural" state of things is effectively a direct resistance to change; as such I'd expect them to have made progress a lot more slowly than cultures in which human achievement was more valued than nature.

I'm no expert in this field, but this strikes me as a pretty big generalization. If anything, I would suspect that this attitude is a reaction to subsequent European expansion, rather than any ingrained element of the pre-columbian cultures. Before they were ravaged by diseases brought by the smattering of fishermen and traders who plied the waters off what's now Canada, the north-east supported a pretty large population, organized in farming villages, with established trade networks; they certainly altered nature to suit themselves, and the "major" civilizations in Mexico and Peru made more significant alterations.

An interesting, though farfetched take on the subject can be found in The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. I don't know how grounded it is(obviously the time-traveling is out there), but Orson Scott Card's entertaining. It is worth noting that, to defeat the Aztecs, Cortez had allied with the rival tribal federation of the Tlaxcalans, so its not like a couple hundred Spanish mercenaries and adventurers rode in and slaughtered tens of thousands of Aztecs by themselves...

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Original post by EricRRichards Quote: Original post by superpig That said, their reverence for the "natural" state of things is effectively a direct resistance to change; as such I'd expect them to have made progress a lot more slowly than cultures in which human achievement was more valued than nature. I'm no expert in this field, but this strikes me as a pretty big generalization.

I think you're maybe right, in that it hasn't much to do with resistance to change. I think it has more to do with the respecting the laws of Nature that relate to the availability of slowly renewable resources. Just because the First Nations didn't know how to express the logistic function in terms of fancy pant symbols, they sure knew it to be of critical importance. What's really scary is that the majority of Western civilization still doesn't understand this law, or the ultracatastrophic consequences that arise when it is ignored.

Just look at the population graph of a family of sexually active rabbits, starting in the Spring. The ratio of alive vs dead rabbits skyrockets at first, and then eventually levels off in the Summer/Fall. It levels off because there are only so many carrots to be eaten, and only the strongest/quickest rabbits get to eat, which I hope is intuitive to everyone. Unfortunately, if the rabbits are so stupid as to eat ALL the carrots before Winter is over, then the ratio of alive vs dead rabbits will quickly settle to precisely zero because there's nothing left to eat. Stupid pig rabbits, if only they had known the concept of restraint, and saved some of their old carrots, then they would have lasted long enough to see the next Spring and its batch of yummy new carrots.

I'm only kidding about the rabbits being stupid enough to eat all of their carrots like little pigs. Rabbits really aren't that stupid. Only humans are.

[Edited by - taby on December 19, 2010 8:49:01 PM]