Pre-American industrial "evolution"

[adwyn]

As has been poited out already, there isn't any one reason. Technology is in so many ways inseperable from culture, from needs, and from other technologies.

Gunpowder for example; First there needs to be the discovery of gunpowder. Its not that complex, but someone some where needs to mix it together for some reason. And then apply heat or flame to it. And survive. And then do it again and again, which means knowing how they did it in the first place, which eliminates a lot of accidental discoveries.

Great, now one person some where knows how to make a powder that goes boom. Then they need to show it to others who might give a rats a** about it. This rules out most tribal societies, as boom powder doesn't make you warmer or fill your belly.

To transition gunpowder to a weapon, there must be a way of delivering it to the right place at the right time. Guns/cannons are a great way of doing this, but they require the inspiration to do so and the metal working technology as well. Again if a society doesn't have both, then the whole things a write off and they're back to life the way it was.

So lets say a society has 1) Discovered gunpowder. 2) Experimented with it enough to have something useful. 3) Been able to manufacture a firearm.

Now what? Primitive cannons are cumbersome, slow to load, unreliable, expensive, and dangerous. They are generations away from being of use against massed troops in formations, much less a single foe, and even then bows will dominate for a while.

So why do it? In Europe the cannons were not field weapons, they were siege weapons. Their use as a field gun evolved out of the expertise developed in shooting at huge non moving targets. Thus without castles the cannon doesn't need to be developed, which means guns aren't very likely either.

 

[Khayman]

Simply put, such pursuits require permanent settlements, and they were nomadic. Tada.

Actually, there were permanent settlements all across the Americas --- Plains Village cultures in the Missouri River basin, materially rich coastal villages in the Pacific Northwest, the cities of the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, and others. Many of these were complex and sometimes massive settlements. Admittedly, while in North America urban centres were not the rule, most parts of the Old World also exhibited low-density settlement.

Now if we get started on the types of organization in these cultures, well, then that's a whole other can of worms...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I still don't know why we moved on to metal in the first place.

I know trade routes through the fertile crescent were key, but how that knowledge got distributed and why you needed it are a mystery to me. I suppose some people in North America were doing things like copper and gold...

...where's the tin in North and South America? Or near Eurasia for that matter, I know there were sources in England that got exploited by the Phoenicians, but surely there must have been some closer to the fertile crescent.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I still don't know why we moved on to metal in the first place.

It's just more useful in general, holding an edge better and being easier to shape than most stones. Sure, obsidian gets real sharp, but there's only so much you can do to shape it, and it's brittle.

...where's the tin in North and South America?

IIRC, I believe Bolivia has some. There's copper in Michigan, which isn't really that handy.

Or near Eurasia for that matter, I know there were sources in England that got exploited by the Phoenicians, but surely there must have been some closer to the fertile crescent.

Unfortunately, I'm kind of hazy on tin deposits; I know there are some in Cornwall, of course, but I don't know where else in the ancient world has it. It's not an obvious combination of materials, I'd think; I could swear the last History Channel special on metals posited a lucky confluence of tin and copper deposits.

Brad

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Unfortunately, I'm kind of hazy on tin deposits; I know there are some in Cornwall, of course, but I don't know where else in the ancient world has it. It's not an obvious combination of materials, I'd think; I could swear the last History Channel special on metals posited a lucky confluence of tin and copper deposits.

Brad

That's the thing, I mean how lucky do you have to be to hit a bronze age, what would it take to go straight to iron?

Africa had lots of iron work and I've never heard of an African bronze age, did they pick up iron tech or actually skip a step on this one?

 

[mythusmage]

I've run across mention of tin deposits in the Balkans and Anatolia. But, they ran out. It being this shortage that led to the development of iron smelting. And to clay firing with the development of kilns and charcoal to fuel them. A shortage developed, and people came up with a work around.

With a kiln you can get a hotter fire than with an open fire. Same with charcoal. Combine the two and you can get a real hot flame. But, first you have to have the need for such a hot fire, and smelting iron gives you that need. Fired brick and porcelin is a side benefit.

 

[Heretic Apostate]

As someone who has read Guns, Germs and Steel:

Agriculture. The Aztecs/Mayans were not blessed with an overabundance of crops worth domesticating. Corn, for instance, proved exceptionally hard to domesticate (it started out very small, and the seeds were covered in a hard husk). The Aztecs/Mayans only developed three major food crops (corn, squash, and something else, I forget what).

Livestock. The Eastern US natives domesticated the turkey. The Aztecs/Mayans domesticated the dog. The Incans domesticated the llama (the pack animal) and the alpaca (generally, a llama used for growing wool). The southeastern South Americans domesticated the guinea pig. Animals are used for meat, for labor, for clothing material, and for catching contagious diseases.

Geography. Most animals and plants can spread best in an east-west axis, and not so well in a north-south axis. Look at North and South America. They are north-south, and crops that are domesticated in one region might not get enough sunlight in other regions, or too much, or something.

Climate. Mexico is bordered in the north by deserts, and in the south by jungles. Plants and people generally couldn't survive the transition through the hostile climatic regions.

Politics. Why did Columbus, an Italian, get support from Spain? Because that was the third or fourth kingdom he approached with his idea for an expedition. A bunch of small kingdoms will out-innovate a stratified empire any day in terms of innovation. (Heck, the Byzantines bought the secret for "Greek fire," but decided not to buy the secret for gunpowder. So the inventor sold it to the Turks, who used it to conquer Constantinople...)

****************

So you want to posit a middle-ages-level mesoamerican or Mississippi valley or andean culture?

To start, lay out the continent in an east-west axis. Allow a few domesticable animals to survive (e.g., horses were exterminated during the pre-historic era in North America). Have a few large-grain grasses (e.g., a wheat-substitute) around. Allow for large cities, where innovation is rewarded, at least on a case-by-case basis. Have multiple small kingdoms, so innovators can hunt for support.

Those are some ideas...

 

[fusangite]

This morning I feel very good about ENWorld. I was hoping people would dispute various statements that were made on this thread. I got up this morning and ta-da!

Thanks for the observations about iron in Africa. It made, what I deem to be the single most important observation this thread needs: there is no linear set of stages all societies go through. All societies take different paths to different destinations. And all societies borrow from others. The tough time with respect to gaining access to tech that the Nahua and Incas had in the Americas was the lack of proximity to other distinctly different civilizations.

As for the domestic animals thing, the lack thereof was crucial to the development of the civilization in the Mexico Valley. While it is true that the society technically had the technology to do stuff with Chinese chickens and some other animals and did so on a small scale, the most important feature of the Mexico Valley was the fact that thanks to the avocado, people could survive much more comfortably and efficiently on a vegetarian diet. It is the avocado that allowed a population density that could not be achieved by civilizations obtaining their fat from animals rather than plants. And lack of regular proximity to domestic animals is what made the massive epidemics of the 16th century possible.

But again, next to the Mongols, who made better use of horses than the plains Indians? Just because someone has a tech first (e.g. gunpowder) doesn't mean they're the ones who will do the best or most efficient work with it.

And there were truly amazing things technologically that happened in the Mexico Valley. Archaeologists have now unearthed the ancestor of North American corn that people started farming in that valley when Sumer was being built in the Middle East. Its kernels were smaller than those of European wheat and the whole cob was a couple of centimetres long. We can thank the Nahuas for carefully breeding what has become the single most important agricultural crop in the world today, the crop that many Africans have come to believe is an indigenous African plant due to its prevalence.

People have posited various "causes" for the past 500 years of European global hegemony. There is no single cause -- unless you want to count "coincidence" or "luck" as a cause. Many factors combined in many strange and unexpected ways to create the modern world. Asking Euro-Americans why they are on top is much like asking Hollywood A-list actors why they are on top -- they will be full of reasons that they are different from the tens of thousands of acting failures who are equally good looking and better actors. But they have all those elaborate explanations because they want their success to be about how special they are, not how lucky they are.

 

[Rel]

But they have all those elaborate explanations because they want their success to be about how special they are, not how lucky they are.

I haven't really seen anybody here positing that the Europeans and Asians are "cooler" or "more special" as a people than the meso-Americans. My perception is just the opposite: The Europeans were lucky to live on a continent with an east-west axis, lucky to live in an area with larger grain crops, lucky to have better domesticable animals and so forth.

I suppose that you could claim that technology could have arisen anywhere with equal probability and it just happened to happen in Europe. But then there isn't much to talk about after that is there? I think that such technological leaps forward tend to happen most frequently in environments that have a favorable set of starting conditions. I believe that those starting conditions were more favorable in the Old World than in the New.

 

[VirgilCaine]

Among the big reasons was that there were no good domesticable animals of suitable size to add substantial "horsepower" to their efforts. The best the Americas had to offer was the Alpacca. Not a great animal to try and hitch to a plow, particularly in the rocky terrain where they were indigenous.

I read an article in USA Today a few years ago that basically said that whoever has the most resources--most types of animals and grains and such--will get farther faster. Thus, Europe had the most, so they got farther faster.