The Origins of Human Society

That's my thought as well - the just massive influx of pandemics once the Spanairds started colonizing Mesoamerica. One Dominican friar recorded 9 of them in 5 years, each killing off about 10% of the population. The Mesoamerican city states had enough population to overcome that. In North America the tribal societies didn't. Jared Diamond postulates that the village size was just large enough for everyone to get the viruses, just small enough to not survive repeated pandemics, but still the right size so a few people lived to pass them on to the next village over.

No wonder the Christian missionaries ended up having success with the native americans. It must have appeared as if their gods had forsaken them.

Even though it was the Christian missionaries who were the first to bring the diseases.

Much later Wovoka, aka Jack Wilson, started the Ghost Dance movement, and believed himself to have had a vision from God in heaven and that Jesus Christ was to be reincarnated among the native tribes in the late west to save them from colonialism.

Not too different from the Taiping Rebellion, where Chinese leaders who believed themselves reincarnations of Christ led the bloodiest rebellion in Chinese history.

I also wonder how events would have played out without the Great Dying. There were up to 150 million native Americans in all of North America and the Caribbean. It seems even with technological advantages that it would have been impossible to subjugate such a large group forever. If it hadn't been for the diseases, most of us wouldn't be here, there'd be several native nations now after throwing off colonial rule, much like in India.

This number is grossly incorrect. There weren't nearly that many in all the Americas combined, let alone North America and the Caribbean.

According to 2003 and 2005 studies, before Columbus, there were 3.5-7 million in the area of the modern U.S. and Canada, 16-18 million in Mexico, 5-6 million in Central America, and 2-3 million in the Caribbean. So, 26.5-34 million in the area you named.

From your link

Assume, for the sake of argument, that the 34 million figure is correct. Why is it so low? The mortality rate for folks in Europe, Africa, and Asia are such because there were more diseases that wiped out large swaths of the populations (prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Native Americans don't seem to have experienced anything akin to what happened when the Black Death swept Asia, Europe, and Africa). So what kept the populations of the Americas so low by comparison?

We know that humans have been mucking about in the Americas for at least 20,000 years. With more food, and fewer diseases, then they should have developed a larger population that other parts of the globe. Something seems amiss. Was there a plague that hit the Americas we're not aware of? Is there something about the social structure of pre-Columbian Native Americans that caused them to have a lower birth-rate than Europe?

Warfare and sacrifices. Didn't the Aztecs sacrifice thousands of people a year?

112 is the extreme high estimate for ALL of the Americas. Even using that number, there were nowhere near 150 million people in North America and the Caribbean.

The Native Americans didn't develop agriculture like in the Old World. The Ancient Egyptians had complex irrigation. The Europeans domesticated animals. The Chinese cultivated rice. This allowed for the rise of complex societies that could grow so large. The Native Americans (mostly) didn't have that.

In order for that to be the case, the number of people killed during war and sacrifices would have to be far higher than those who died in Europe, etc., due to war, sacrifice, and diseases.

The earliest indications that humans were mucking about in the Americas date to ~20K ago. We've no way of knowing what the total global population of the world was then (we can make some estimates, but it's still kinda spitballing). The population estimates I've seen for Europe (we'll ignore Asia and Africa) for 1491 put it at higher than that of the Americas. Why? If we assume those numbers are accurate (and that might not necessarily be the case), why should a continent with a larger incidence of infant mortality and scarcer sources of food have a higher population than a pair of continents that had lower rates of disease and greater sources of food?

To me, it seems that there's only a few possibilities: 1.) The population estimates for the Americas are off. If so, why? 2.) The population estimates for Europe are off. If so, why? 3.) The mortality rates in the Americas are far higher than what they were in Europe. If so, why?

And?

Except that they did. Remember, 60% of the food crops in the world today are ones that originated in the Americas. The overwhelming majority of the crops were actively cultivated by Native Americans before Columbus showed up, and not ones that were developed by Europeans after arriving here.

Native Americans farmed fish, guinea pigs, llamas, (to name but a few) and the population of Mexico City when the Spanish arrived has been estimated at around 1 million people (the population of London in 1500 is estimated to have been 50,000). Corn (maize, as it's known to the rest of the world), was a staple crop throughout the Americas and fed a shitload of people. Potatoes, unique to the Americas, are a crop that's so nutritious that one can live on them alone. That's why Andrew Weir had Mark Watney growing them in his novel. Before the potato bight hit Ireland, the average Irish person ate little more than potatoes but was seen as being healthier (ie fatter) than folks in England. Some accounts say that the Irish were eating 14 pounds of potatoes a day. The estimates of what Ireland's population were when the bight hit are ~9 million people, presently, it's at 5 million. They're one of the only nations that have a lower population number today than they had in the 19th Century.

We know that the trading networks in the Americas were so extensive that the diseases Europeans spread to the Native Americans in the equatorial regions were transmitted to the rest of the continents before the Europeans had even an idea that they were there. The Native Americans who greeted the folks on the Mayflower when they showed up spoke English because they'd had enough contact with the settlers at Jamestown that they'd been able to pick up the language.

To boil it down, if the population estimates for the Americas are correct, then you have to assume that there were greater pressures on reducing the population than in the rest of the world. Possible, but it seems unlikely to me. Disease rates were lower, and resources (at least in terms of food supplies) were higher, so that should lead to a higher population. Especially if one thinks that wars are primarily driven by a scarcity of resources.

To my mind, it seems that either the population estimates of the Americas during that time are wrong, or the Natives were using some form of birth control to keep their population levels down.

Fair enough, I misremembered the population. The one I saw I double checked, it was 135 million for all of the Americas in 1492, with less than 15 million remaining by 1692. But I certainly have seen lower figures.

I don't think that there can be accurate figures, regardless of what metrics one might use. Too many biases. @Federal Farmer talks about the Aztecs sacrificing people but doesn't mention that the Europeans happily killed Jews and those accused of witchcraft (or other heresy, such as Catharism). What's the body count of the Catholic Church? How does it compare to that of the Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, or other pre-Columbian societies? I don't know.

The best, that I think we could come up with would be extrapolations based upon an estimated population of the Americas around 20K years ago, a lower infant mortality rate (due to a lower incidence of disease), and a higher availability of food sources. Assume roughly the same % of the populations of Europe and the Americas killed due to things like violence, and you'd get a theoretical maximum population level. I don't know of anyone who has done that.

EARLY MAYAN CIVILIZATION WAS FAR MORE ADVANCED THAN WE THOUGHT, SCIENTISTS SAY

This made me think about how we value skill sets. Why should certain skills be valued above others when thinking about a society's abilities? Take an agrarian society, where you have a large population and nobody is starving in large numbers. That takes a lot of work to keep running smoothly. Especially if your territory is over a wide area. If you don't have a rapid means of communication (say horses or sailing ships), it takes a lot of effort to hold everything together.

And remember, most of the food crops people eat have been cultivated for thousands of years. The people who first found wild onions or grass and then carefully selected the plants to the point where they eventually became cultivated onions or some form of grain (maize, wheat, etc.) did so without any idea of genetics, or really even what they might end up with as things progressed. You can't be a dummy and do that. Sure, the skills required for that won't translate over to how to fix a tractor or whatever, but there's some highly sophisticated thought processes going on in the development.

The strength of this book is not in the answers it provides, but the questions it provokes. The one issue that I find particularly intriguing is their assertion that some hunter/gatherer societies tried settling down with agriculture as we know it, but ended up worse off and abandoned it. I think the others were the ones who planted the seed in my mind that far from making the lives of the common people better, the Industrial Revolution subjected workers to conditions that feudal lords wouldn't have tried to impose on their serfs.

I wonder how many of them abandoned it because of things caused by outside groups. There's been a lot of recent discoveries of farmland that were used by Native Americans before Europeans showed up in North America. Apparently, more than we ever suspected, and in a few cases, we think they were abandoned because the population collapsed and they couldn't sustain an agricultural way of life.

In one of James Burke's shows, he talks about why margarine was invented. It seems that hunger was a real issue for French factory workers as they didn't make enough to buy things like butter. Instead of saying, "Hmm. Maybe we should pay our factory workers more." the French figured out how to make beef fat taste sorta like butter and it was cheaper than butter, so they called it margarine, and started selling it to the poor.

Oh, there was definitely wide spread agriculture by native Americans before European contact. There's constant references in explorer's notes to finding areas that were veritable gardens of eden with abandoned villages nearby. Modern anthropologists believe this was native agriculture that had gone to seed for only a few years after the pandemics raced ahead of Western contact. When the explorers and settlers showed up they found areas already established that were able to be reclaimed with far less effort than breaking down a normal wilderness.

That being said, there were numerous civilization collapses in the Americas in precolombian times. Cahokia, Olmecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and the unnamed Mississippian cultures were prominent for quite some time before failing. Numerous smaller empires were destroyed or subjugated by the larger Aztec and Mayan cultures. A shame so much of their history is lost, we are just beginning to understand the scope of the cultures that were here before us.

Just finished reading it, so BUMP.

Link to my review: http://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/book-thread.97346/page-13#post-3470972

Rereading the thread, I do agree with @Tuckerfan on most of his reactions.

China's ancient water pipe networks show they were a communal effort with no evidence of a centralized state authority

I'm reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann and it has some answers to this (I should note that the book was published in '05). It looks like there's good reason to question any population numbers put forth for the pre-Columbian Americas. We can't seem to figure out exactly when people showed up. And not all of this is because we don't have a lot of data. It seems that even fairly recently, what any reasonable person would consider unequivocal evidence that people were in the Americas by a particular date, has been wildly (and irrationally) shot down by certain experts in the field. It's only when people from different fields (genetics, geology, etc.) have pointed out that this or that thing also backs up the earlier date does the majority of those objecting to the idea that humans were here earlier than previously thought, that the those objecting to the idea are silenced.

This isn't the kind of debate you have in circles where, for example, someone finds a tool that looks like an early version of an axe used by an ancient society and concludes that it must be older than the ancient society. This is someone finding artifacts at a depth in the ground where, if it was found out that depth anywhere else in the world, people would naturally say that it probably was buried 14K years ago. For some reason, however, folks refuse to accept just the date, and insist that they need other data before they'll agree that it was buried 14K years ago.

That's kind of important when you're trying to figure out population numbers. Because one of the things that people tend to do when they find themselves in an area that's sparsely populated, is have lots of kids. So, if you know when a population showed up in an area that was uninhabited, you can make estimates of what the population growth might have been.

Something else that the book mentions, raised a question in my mind that I haven't been able to find an easy answer for. It seems that, at least in North America, there was a population collapse around 1000 CE. There wasn't a clear date given, nor does anyone seem to know the reason for it. I can't help but note that this is right around the same time the Vikings showed up. I'm not saying that the Native Americans got wiped out by diseases carried by the Vikings, just that there's nothing in the book (so far, I'm only about halfway through with it) to indicate that this couldn't have happened. There's also collapses roughly at the same time of accounts by Europeans saying that they found themselves shipwrecked in a far-off land and it took them years to make it back to Europe, all of which occurred before Columbus was even born, let alone set sail. No way to know if those stories are bullshit, if they're true, but the folks telling them never were in the Americas, or if they actually did make it to the Americas.

A couple of interesting tidbits I've learned from the book are that European fishing ships were already traveling most of the way to North America by the time Columbus hit the Canaries, so if he hadn't done it, somebody else probably would have in a few years. Another thing is that the trade networks among the Native Americans were so large that the first Europeans to land in North America noticed that the natives had goods that had been made in Europe. This was like 20 years after Columbus first showed up.