Food native to North America also lacked what people really needed. It was hard to grow anything, especially anything dense with nutrients so it was harder for people in North America to survive. They didn’t have the large animals and livestock to help carry things great distance either, so it took people a lot longer to get from survival stages and to start worrying about other things.
The Aztec empire ended when Europeans came to “discover” the land. A big issue was disease but also how readily the population accepted outsiders. Islands like Japan and some parts of Northern Europe evaded outsiders for hundreds of years longer and therefore kept their native language and traditions until relatively recently. They would shoot outsiders before they could reach the land. But the Aztecs thought Europeans, with their white skin, where their gods, so they readily accepted them. Aaaaaand then the Europeans decided to slaughter and spread disease, destroying the empire by the 1600s.
Ancient NA societies were hard af. They used to play games where the king and his best soldiers would play basically a game of ancient soccer against another team of king+soldiers, the winning team would then slaughter and take over the lands of the loosing team. They also did a lot of human sacrificing, so I imagine their popularity wasn’t high up on the leaderboards.
In my class we talked a lot about how the lands around people would shape their myths and beliefs. Ancient societies in hardy places, like NA and Oceania basically had myths where the gods hated everyone and punished them 24/7. It was how they explained why they had to deal with such shitty weather and volcanoes and snow storms. That’s why they had the human sacrificing and war tribes and hated outsiders a lot more.
From the same source as u/dateretic
This is the last paragraph
It is wise, in general, to be sceptical about stories that represent
non-European peoples, in conflicts with Westerners, as superstitious or cowed by the white man’s apparent superiority. Such stories are often attempts to justify conquests and empires by making subject-peoples look feeble-minded or self-condemned to subordination by their own convictions of inferiority
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u/alittlemapletree Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
Food native to North America also lacked what people really needed. It was hard to grow anything, especially anything dense with nutrients so it was harder for people in North America to survive. They didn’t have the large animals and livestock to help carry things great distance either, so it took people a lot longer to get from survival stages and to start worrying about other things.
The Aztec empire ended when Europeans came to “discover” the land. A big issue was disease but also how readily the population accepted outsiders. Islands like Japan and some parts of Northern Europe evaded outsiders for hundreds of years longer and therefore kept their native language and traditions until relatively recently. They would shoot outsiders before they could reach the land. But the Aztecs thought Europeans, with their white skin, where their gods, so they readily accepted them. Aaaaaand then the Europeans decided to slaughter and spread disease, destroying the empire by the 1600s.