One factor for the native Americans (I'm not too sure how good this is) is that there is a lack of either copper or tin. Metal making- altho not too essential for some civilisations (aztecs, etc) can improve a culture since there are certain items that you can't make without metal. I don't know much about the conditions so I'm only postulating tho I might learn more later on in the year.

Okay, not too sure where that came from Myrddin, but an interesting subject none the less.

Infact metals certainly DO have a direct impact on civilisation. One of the many reasons why the ancient Egyptians could never expand and sustain was because of their lack of Iron. Their army was mainly kitted out with Bronze weapons.

As for the native americans that you mentioned, they were even more doomed. Their lack of copper and tin means that they were in poor supply of even Bronze!

As for the Aztecs, lets not even go there. They didnt even have the wheel! All they ever gave to the world was chocolate.

Wich is, off course, one of the greatest inventions of mankind.

sheez...ok...first....

native americans occupied all of Canada down through South America. I can guarantee there isn't a shortage of natural resources. In fact, the incredibly plentiful amount of natural resources is one of the reasons the US is a world power. Abundant natural resources +/= huge manufacturing capacity == massive economic juggernaut and world domination.

Consumerism.... definetely not a good thing. Better than mindlessly butchering each other, I believe, but yea, still not exactly an 'enlightened society'. Possession of knowledge as opposed to, well, possessions, wouldn't be a step up, imo. Honestly, I'm not sure what would be a step up...maybe figuring that out is the first step toward the next cultural revoluation.

Anyway, I have no answers, but some of the posts being dropped are pretty neat. Glad it spurred some conversation.

Point taken on the natural resources thing. But the uiltimate point remains justified. The native Americans didnt have or didnt know how to use copper and tin extensively and so this had proportional effect on their ability to survive as a civilisation.

It is likely that if they didn't have any metal that it could hinder civilisation but on the other hand if there is too much of resources that provides an easy living (remember that agriculture was probably started by hunter-gatherers trying to find a more efficient way to feed themselves in a growing pop) that the culture would stagnate. Evolution of the culture is an important aspect of life.

so basically, too much or too little of a good thing is bad (at least, for cultural evolution)

Competition is great for cultural revolution

Well, I always hear about how great the native americans lived with nature. Assuming this wasn't a bunch of propaganda (you never know any more), perhaps their lack of friction with their environment contributed to slower technical development. Europe fought and conquered their environment. Native Americans lived with it in harmony. Maybe?

How about Europeans simply pwn Native Americans? Hehe, just kidding.



Personally I think one of the chief reasons was contact with other cultures; beit in terms of culture, language, economy, military, techology (!) etc.

Europe is linked to Asia and Africa, and therefore has/d plenty chances to learn and/or adapt according to the peoples they met. If you go through history, European knowledge is for a large part a pile-up of inventions from other cultures: the wheel is a Sumerian invention, Arab numbers (which allowed for mathematical processes that were largely impossible with Roman numerals) came from India (heh), the compass and gun powder from China, and so forth.

Because every culture/people has its own 'basic ground' it gets complacent after a while: basic values and ideas are mistaken for fundamental truths, thus -for a large part- taking away the incentive to rethink the situation and come up with new ideas. But, when faced with other cultures who ALSO have their own 'basic ground' that is very likely to be different from each other, ppl can assimilate the immideately awesome inventions (like the wheel). It's remarkable that there are very few revolutionary inventions that were 'invented' simultaneously in two parts of the world, which somewhat sustains my blabbering here.

In whichever way, cross-cultural contact is THE main catalyst for any sort of advancement. It is the key to thinking outside the box; that box being your own culture and mind set. And the outside that of the others. Evolution is a slow process that leads to very different results in every culture; but when one culture meets another it's like 'dudes! This gun powder is awesome!'...while the Chinese culture probably spent ages building up to discover it, it's readily available for any other culture that comes into contact with it. It's likely that they never would have found it (or not in the next hundreds of years) on their own, as they started from a different base and thus also have a different chain of events.

To ask why the native Americans developed so slowly is the same as to ask why there are tribes still living in the deep rain forests with nothing but a hut and a wooden stick: because they were isolated. When Europeans started colonizing North America, the native Americans picked up things like gun powder, rifles, etc. really quickly and even used them against the 'invaders'. Can you imagine that? A people whose military force consisted of bows, knives, stick and arrows suddenly picked up this technological advancement. All that because they came in contact with a new culture which had already assimilated so many inventions from all parts of the (Eurasian) world that it had rapidly outgrown them. The native Americans didn't have much to offer to the invaders though, so they were considered a nuisance rather than a people.


Anyhoo, hope I wasn't too chaotic. I am a firm believer of what I just said. And all that's also the reason why it's imperative to have good trading contacts with the other factions in Civ games.


My mouth is bleeding with my wisdom tooth gone, bleh. Not hurting too much tho, both this and the pulling. The dentist did say I have freakishly big teeth and roots, so I have a big gap in my upper mouth cavity that needs to fill with blood, harden and grow shut.

I find what you said Ox quite reasonable. However, Myrddin made a point that disturbs me a bit. You said that alot of technological advance can cause the culture of a civilisation to stagnate.

Would you care to elaborate? Im not sure i totally agree.

I think change in culture is closely linked to:

- Military activity.
- Economic well-being.
- Government control.
- Technological advance.

These are all things strongly linked to strategic natural resources.

No I said that if you had a lot of natural resources that are easy to get it prevents a struggle that might produce a new thing. If somepeople adapt to their enviroment (like the rainforest people mentioned as well as the
!Kung San (! is a click of the tongue)) then they will not advance their culture, henceforth stagnation.

I'd like to point out that in my post/view, it's not so much struggle as contact that is the essential catalyst for advancement. Competition/struggle/war is only one aspect of cross-cultural contact, albeit an important one.

I just mean that competition per se isn't really the point: plenty of civilizations that were technologically behind the West had 'struggles' or competition within their own bounds. In S-America plenty of different indian civilzations battled each other, yet that didn't spur any enormous progress.

I much the same vein, the European peoples wouldn't have gotten any further if they all 'competed' with each other within an imaginary prison (preventing contact with other cultures).

The problem is that it is hard if not impossible to make clear-cut distinctions of peoples and cultures for us anymore. in this day and age (internet, phone, tv) we can hardly imagine this. But back in the days, peoples/cultures really did live much more isolated from each other. Bleh Blah Bliiiih. You get the point I hope.

In a way, things like open source software is a 'next step' in human advancement. People from all locations and cultures -that have acces to the internet- can work at something 'new'. It's all very fascinating from a socio-historical pov.

open source (massive collaboration across all manner of boundaries) is the future. How can a company with 30 developers compete with an open-source group that spends no money and has 500 developers in 30 different countries?

Of course, there aren't really 500 developers....but beyond the core developers there's a massively huge group of testers that can isolate bugs and figure out ways to tune code. No commercial software development house can ever hope of having that kind of raw manpower.

The biggest problem is that most people are stupid. If you're unlucky and 490 of those people are morons how just got out of their first c++ class, you're screwed.

Humans don't usually (except in warfare and such) compete directly as animals do. But if people have an easy life they are less stretched to provide for themselves, I mean that warfare is a great example of development look at weaponry and the offshoots of them. But if you put any animal in a Zoo like enivronment (including humans). They are unlikely to struggle and find new ways of getting food.

war is the single greatest spur to human development.

Antibiotics are a direct result of WWII. So are M&Ms. Two of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. A little less tongue-in-cheek, the development of aviation was war-driven, as was the development of computers (at least the first ones, for code-breaking), radar, sonar, the entire space program (cold war, but real war motivated), and who know what else I'm missing.

Anyway, the man that wishes for a world with no war is wishing for a world with no major strides in technological advancement. How many of today's technologies were initially spurred on to development through department of defense funding? A whole lot.

But do we still need war for that? Governments used to be the biggest spenders on science, but the technology industry is nowadays bigger.
Boeing used to have the advantage of having a military branch with new tech to port over to it's commercial aircafts, but nowadays that's the other way round.