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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1901030" data-attributes="member: 7240">Sensible argument but unfortunately unsupported by the data. The Mexico Valley, in the 15th century, was one of the most densely populated areas of the planet and Tenochtitlan, the world's largest city with a population of about 300,000. While some regions of the Americas were not that densely populated, Mesoamerica was very highly populated indeed.Many modern ideas about population density pre-1492 come from our observations of the virgin soil epidemics that wiped out somewhere between 50-85% of the indigenous inhabitants. Disease often traveled down trade routes, arriving years or even generations ahead of Europeans.Again, there is little evidence that people in the Americas were less warlike than people elsewhere in the world. While this was indeed an issue in Australia, this really wasn't the case here. The Mayan and Aztec religions had a very high opinion of war indeed and much of the human sacrifice of the later Aztec period was fueled by something called the Flowery War, an institutionalized, ceremonialized war in which civilized nations participated -- functioning like medieval jousting only with a much higher body count.Of course, Mayans and Nahuas (Mexica) had written languages. Although the Franciscans burned over 500 unique volumes of Nahua philosophy, history, astronomy and poetry, a handful did survive. They show a civilization working with sophisticated concepts and engaging in discussions about cosmology, virtue and various other things that low-tech high cultures wrote about in Egypt and Sumeria thousands of years before.The idea that knowledge=tech is a common modern one but historically, has not generally been the case. Take a period like the early medieval ages where the Latin West lost philosophical and cosmological knowledge rapidly while at the same time making some of the most important technical advances in history like developing the heavy plough. -- And nobody wrote about these crucial advances that spread like wildfire through northern Europe.In most literate/literary cultures, written documents are almost never used to store technological information. We're a very exceptional society in that respect.</blockquote>

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