Individuals who use wheeled transportation as a benchmark for measuring civilization fail to take the natural environment into account. Suitable draft animals did not exist in the pre-contact Americas. [1] The two largest animals -- bison and llamas -- aren't readily domesticated to pull carts or chariots.
Terrain was another factor that discouraged the development of wheeled transportation in the Americas. European new to North America often found their wheeled wagons inappropriate for the land they were trying to cross. Frequently they traded this clumsy transport for American Indian forms of transportation – the canoe, snowshoes and toboggans. Indigenous people throughout the Americas used runners to deliver communications. The Inca built a road system that included suspension bridges for their runners.
Failing to consider the environmental context in which American Indian science arose is not only superficial scholarship -- it is racist scholarship.
Note:
- Horses, though extant in parts of North America, may well not have been abundant and widespread enough for native human populations to widely opt to domesticate them.
The genus Equus, which includes modern horses, zebras, and asses, is the only surviving genus in a once diverse family of horses that included 27 genera. The precise date of origin for the genus Equus is unknown, but evidence documents the dispersal of Equus from North America to Eurasia approximately 2–3 million years ago and a possible origin at about 3.4–3.9 million years ago.
Following this original emigration, several extinctions occurred in North America, with additional migrations to Asia (presumably across the Bering Land Bridge), and return migrations back to North America, over time. The last North American extinction probably occurred between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago (Fazio 1995), although more recent extinctions for horses have been suggested. Dr. Ross MacPhee, Curator of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues, have dated the existence of woolly mammoths and horses in North America to as recent as 7,600 years ago. Had it not been for previous westward migration, over the 2 Bering Land Bridge, into northwestern Russia (Siberia) and Asia, the horse would have faced complete extinction. However, Equus survived and spread to all continents of the globe, except Australia and Antarctica. (Source)
There is also the matter that Native American culture and religion may not have condoned domestication. To the extent that the cultural/religious mores played a role, they must be considered independently of individual or ethnic intellect. To wit, observers some five-hundred years from now may very well look at our and preceding eras and construe that the actions we have undertaken due to our theistically driven cultural mores distinguish us as less intelligent than are other coexistent cultures that have no such theological foundings and constraints on the nature and extent of activity they undertake or don't undertake.
the whites were making big gun ships/high tech wagons/high tech trains/etc
the NAs were living in the stone age
Life is so much better now that the white man is here.
No corruption, crime, drug abuse, murder, rape, wars, hatred.
Oh wait. We have all of that.
Hope your happy.
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are you saying the NAs were inhuman--they never did any of that??
Of all the North American Indian tribes, the seventeenth-century Iroquois are the most renowned for their cruelty towards other human beings. Scholars know that they ruthlessly tortured war prisoners and that they were cannibals;
the Iroquois were not alone in these practices
David Scheimann
.....the NAs raped/murdered/hated/etc .......
what are trying to say??
the whites had the superior technology/etc ..fact...fact ...
Do you honestly believe that when we got here and screwed over the natives we were technologically more advanced? What - just because we had guns?
Believe it was some timely sarcasm directed at those who believe the white man is somehow more civilized.
We ain't, and prove it on a daily basis
we were not more advanced??
big gun ships/more advanced metal-iron applications/horses/firearms/etc
it's undeniable--obvious....you must be trolling
timely sarcasm?? that just means he thinks I MUST be racist/hater/etc
it was a reply to my post
I never said anything about the whites being more civilized---I said advanced technology
just like the blacks --EVERY white is a RACIST
no--YOU/etc have it wrong !! as I've stated before---most people/MSM/modern Hollywood/etc make out the WHITES as being the ONLY ''uncivilized''/racist race
it is the WHITES who are labeled and castigated as the ONLY evil race
this is more than obvious in the MSM