>>14325190Quality post overall, well worth the read. I don't understand the shade he throws at Amerindians agriculture though. The natives of the Americas successfully domesticated numerous crops, and in at least some cases succeeded in creating urban population centers supported by agriculture. Of course they never became as socially advanced as Europe or Asia, but a few isolated pockets were arguably capable of comparable acts of human coordination. Their megalithic stone structures speak to that much.
Honestly I think a few thousand more years of warfare and development in the Americas could have seen an Indian civilization comparable to pinnacle western or asian civilizations arise. Some of them were already succeeding at the basic prerequisites, forming powerful military states with capable logistics. Given more time they would have done more conquering of each other, gotten better at it each time, developed more technology to aid in it, developed more powerful social structures to better organize manpower as a weapon, and generally just evolved into more capable people. In the process of creating a civilization, man applies a domesticating selective force to himself, altering his very being. The act of creating and maintaining civilization is eugenic.
For man to domesticate himself in this manner takes time. Particularly when it isn't being done deliberately, accidents of fate can set the process back millennia. And some parts of the world the circumstances seem to have the human population stuck in a tarball, constantly losing ground as fast as they might have gained it. The manifest reality of these dynamics is that some populations are smarter than others because some have been more successful at creating structured societies and waging wars. Geography, climate, natural resources and proximity to other groups of people are all fertilizer in the garden of civilizations. Civilization is domestication, and domestication made us smart.
