Posted on 01/09/2019 10:35:33 PM PST by vannrox
Awesome post!
That was hard to read wasn't it?.....I thought it was just me.
“And all they asked for was your heart.”
From what I’ve read, Aztec’s were especially fond of sacrificing young virgins....
Planning to be there...we Hernan Cortez embarked, Good Friday... this year.. it will be 500 tears. The arrival of Cortez was the big game changer that year.
I think your numbers are highly exaggerated. You have to be careful; revisionist history is exceedingly easy to find. You should be suspicious if the history is blatantly one-sided (as what you refer to seems to be), or if the numbers are unrealistic.
The natives of this continent were constantly fighting for limited food and resources. They were beset by diseases. The only way this continent could have supported hundreds of millions would have been if they had developed a strong model of cooperation, and more adherence to peaceful coexistance. There are hundreds of millions of people on this continent now, but only because we live peacefully, and have advanced medicine and technology. Had the natives developed a civilization model that could have supported a large population, the Europeans never would have been able to settle here. Had that been the case, the American continents would be more like India or China, with the various trade, business, tourism, etc. exchanges that we have with those countries.
The entire population of the world in the 1500s was estimated to be less than 500 million. That fact alone should make you question those sources that claim that hundreds of millions of natives were slaughtered by the Europeans.
Western diseases killed tens of millions, not Cortez and the like. Not even sure where you get hundreds of millions.
A lie of omission is still a lie.
I use the term "Native American" for c!arity. The term "Indian" is so utterly wring that I avoid using it. The wrongness of that word became especially clear when I visited Fiji, where there is a large Indian population, and an Indian asked me about my dreamcatcher earrings. There was no way I could explain them to an Indian and use the word "Indian" to describe Native Americans.
The problem with what to call them will persist for the time being, I suppose. All of my ancestors have been here since the 1600s, which makes me a native, too.
The missing piece is that the Spaniards didn’t slaughter 90% of the people in the New World.
Diseases brought by them wiped out ten times the number killed in battle, and unlike the Spaniards, these diseases didn’t just target the leaders and native warriors, they killed totally indiscriminately.
A society just doesn’t cohere when 1/2 to 2/3 of the people die of illness, farms don’t get cultivated, crops aren’t harvested, harvests are paltry, and don’t get distributed to population centers.
Nice story.
Irregardless is not actually a word.
In case anybody’s interested:
“There is consensus that the sixteenth-century was a demographic disaster for Mesoamericans. Table 2 displays ten authoritative estimates of population decline for the native population of “Mexico” (or diverse parts thereof) during the first century of Spanish conquest and colonization. Estimates of the magnitude of the disaster ranges from less than twenty-five percent to more than ninety. Three schools or interpretations cluster along this broad band of figures: catastrophists, moderates and minimalists. Catastrophists place the scale of demographic disaster at 90% or more and descry a large native population at contact, exceeding ten, twenty or even thirty million. Moderates detect decreases of “only” 50-85%—disasters nonetheless. They favor smaller populations at contact (5-10 million) but agree with catastrophists on population totals at nadir (1-1.5 million between 1600 and 1650). Minimalists perceive the scale of the disaster as much smaller, on the order of 25%. The principal proponent of the minimalist position, the Argentine linguist Angel Rosenblat, is the catastrophists’ most determined critic. Rosenblat sees a decline of the native population from 4.5 to 3.4 million inhabitants, or 24%, and stabilization beginning within a half century of initial contact with Europeans. It seems to me that the population of central Mexico at contact must have been no less than the minimalist estimate of four or five million and was likely double and possibly even triple that figure.”
From “The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution”, as part of “The Population History of North America”
http://users.pop.umn.edu/~rmccaa/mxpoprev/cambridg3.htm
As others have noted, the posted article was really interesting, but incredibly poorly written.
Ping
But hadn’t figured out the wheel yet?
later read
There were barely "hundreds of millions" of people in the entire world around 1520 when Cortez met Monctezuma. The highest population estimates I've seen for the Western Hemisphere of that era were around 20 to 30 million.
The world population reached one billion around 1830.
There were a few large battles between the early Spanish explorers and established tribes in the New World, but far more died from diseases than from battle.
And land had been fought over in every part of the world throughout human history. There are no innocents in this regard. The Europeans were simply the ones who built ships and crossed oceans to carry on the ancient ways.
If you want “hundreds of millions” of deaths, study the Moslem invasions of India and other nations.
Very good points. That said, the Chinese kept quite good records (for the time). Their population was approx. 123 million in 1200, dropped to around 60 million at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (Mongols, famine, and diseases), and the Chinese population by the end of the Ming Dynasty was near 150 million. Of course, while not having steam power, the Chinese were quite advanced on a national scale in many of the other things necessary to sustain a fairly large population. But even they could not maintain a population over 100 million for long periods, when famine and disease struck, until some further advancements were made...
The best estimates for the pre-Columbian North American population vary wildly, from 2 million to a maximum of 18 million.
“Serving Humans”
Don’t go! It’s a cookbook!
Why? How is someone proud of something they have no control over? I am proud of the the things I have done and the people I have helped. But I do not boast of those things, and certainly not of things I can not take credit for.
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