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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1902432" data-attributes="member: 7240">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.</blockquote>

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