DCF Refugee Internment Camp

[Speaker to Animals]

Never pushed them to extinction as a means of genocide though did they?

[Montegriffo]

True enough, but genocide. We were just as bad with our smallpox blankets. Humans is shit.

[TheReal_ND]

That probably happened once and got blown out of proportion. Lately I've been hearing theories that whatever wiped out the bulk of Natives was going around before Europeans ever got there.

[Montegriffo]

That probably happened once and got blown out of proportion. Lately I've been hearing theories that whatever wiped out the bulk of Natives was going around before Europeans ever got there.

Theories? Like races are different. Whatever races are.

[TheReal_ND]

Race is the classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, ancestry, genetics or social relations, or the relations between them.[1][2][3][4][5] First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race began to refer to physical (i.e. phenotypical) traits. The term was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense,[6] starting from the 19th century, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.[7][8]

The New York Times' former science editor on research showing that evolution didn't stop when human history began.

A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.

New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.

http://time.com/91081/what-science-says ... -genetics/

I'm not that familiar with it but the theory goes every 500 or so years America becomes a very bad place to live. From what I remember there is a theory that the Natives were already contracting a virulent disease that wiped out entire civilizations such as the Mississippi Valley Civilization and various Aztec principalities before white man even stepped foot in America with their own diseases. But like I said I'm not familiar with it more than tangentially.

[Speaker to Animals]

True enough, but genocide. We were just as bad with our smallpox blankets. Humans is shit.

Tales of genocide in North America have been greatly exaggerated. There were not that many people living here. This wasn't like Mexico, Peru, or the Amazon. The places with an indigenous civilization were run by those same people only a few hundred years after Spanish conquest. Mexico is the Latinization of the name the Aztecs called their nation, for example. Their name for themselves was Mexica. Their coat of arms you see on some of their currency is also an Aztec symbol. Aztecs are still running the place.

You even can see a difference between southern Mexicans (who are more like short Mayans) and the northerners (who are like the taller Aztecs).

Bolivia, last I read, was majority indigenous. Not just Quecha with some European blood mixed in, but full-on Quecha. Because of the medicine, science, and agricultural technology brought by Europeans, the indigenous people in the Andes surpassed what it supported before contact.

A cursory search for population estimates in North America gives us a really tentative guestimate of around 10 million prior to first contact. The number of indigenous people just in the United States right now is about 5.2 million. Another 1.4 million live in Canada. Almost 7 million right now. And probably growing.

And they can feasibly grow in population to numbers far exceeding what could possibly have existed here before contact.

Personally, I remain unconvinced there were even 10 million indigenous people in North America (not including Mesoamerica). Maybe if you dial it back a few more centuries to around 1000 AD you could argue that, when there existed an extensive culture throughout the middle of what is now the United States, building cities and whatnot. But they went extinct before we got here, and I am pretty sure the Vikings didn't do it.

[Montegriffo]

Interesting, both of you, thanks.
Yay, I got post 777, that's cool.

[Speaker to Animals]

Race is the classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, ancestry, genetics or social relations, or the relations between them.[1][2][3][4][5] First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race began to refer to physical (i.e. phenotypical) traits. The term was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense,[6] starting from the 19th century, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.[7][8]

The New York Times' former science editor on research showing that evolution didn't stop when human history began.

A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.

New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.

http://time.com/91081/what-science-says ... -genetics/

I'm not that familiar with it but the theory goes every 500 or so years America becomes a very bad place to live. From what I remember there is a theory that the Natives were already contracting a virulent disease that wiped out entire civilizations such as the Mississippi Valley Civilization and various Aztec principalities before white man even stepped foot in America with their own diseases. But like I said I'm not familiar with it more than tangentially.

It mostly fucked up the people in the Andes, with maybe some fallout in Mesoamerica. There were definitely mega droughts in our west that lasted many years.

You can see it happen in Andean civilizations quite easily. There exists a cycle of civilization in their history. All the little civilizations in the area would collapse right around the same time, which can be pinpointed to a mega el nino. So you would see the Moche collapse, the Wari collapse, Nasca, etc. --- all around the same time. They were destroyed by a decade of drought and a decade of torrential rain. The cultures persisted by transformed in the dark ages that followed. They reemerged as new civilizations loosely corresponding to what came before. The Wari were the predecessors of the Inca. The Moche were the predecessors (I think) of the Chimu.

There exists no analog in our civilization's history. The closest thing western civilization has to this event happened deep in the bronze age. This happened at least twice that I have read about.

Mesoamerican collapses were rarer, not so final except for the Olmecs, and not at the same time. Whatever happened here was not nearly as devastating as what happens in South America.

[Montegriffo]

What was the one Diamond wrote about in GGAS? Cicho valley or something, he claimed climate for that one collapsing.Maybe it was in Collapse?

[TheReal_ND]

Been a while since I read that but I'm more familiar with the Norte Chico civilization from the Ancient World podcast. They were a fishing community that grew gourds and other plants for fishing with. Eventually they moved on after a brief period where they were expanding into other areas. Climate or barbarians could both be explanations. I spoke with a Brazilian that linked me to studies that demonstrated the more war like of tribes had the capability of traversing from northern Brazil all the way into Argentina. I think in the Norte Chico's case iirc, the prevailing theory is that while the climate was dry, it eventually got too dry. But climate change also effects fish migration as well.