Kracus wrote:Yeah but can you shoot a fucking horse into a fortified village?
Goddamn it's annoying how you so often completely miss the point.
EDIT:
- horses don't transmit human disease (quickly)
- they had no catapults
- the Mongolian thing sounds incredibly familiar doesn't it. Except that one was actually documentated.
IE you are confused.
I didn't miss your point at all. I'm just saying if you're going to siege a fortified area you're usualy going to toss large objects at them, and by this point they knew about biological warfare. And I just googled it and did see a few articles about catapulting bodies into inca cities so perhaps it wasn't horses (or maybe some places it was who really knows? ) but they definitely did use that tactic against them. In mutiple fashions which was my original point about the disease thing.
Not neccessarily how they did it but the fact that they use it as somekind of non war statistic. Like dying of a disease isn't our fault... we just won't metion we gave it to them... So I think you're missing my point.
And Chunk yeah I know what you mean but obviously they don't just catapult 1 dead horse, you would be talking like a hundred or so... not so easy to clean up and not really healthy overall after a couple days.
you are on about those little shit indian villages yea ? with like, 2 tents, a fire, maybe a stick?
and how did these sieges actually work ?
i mean i know if you threw a few hundred horseys into a castle its gunna cause a bit of grief
but into a village ? all they would have to do is bury them in the normal place they bury horses, or burn them, or someshit.... i cant see a siege happening on an indian village.... just a stand off ?
[color=red] . : [/color][size=85] You knows you knows [/size]
I'm not sure if you heard Chunk but those inca/mayan guys used to build fucking PYRAMIDS. So yeah... maybe they had a little more than a couple tents and shit eh?
Foo wrote:To put that in perspective, that's about 1/3rd of the US population today. With all the big cities and dense housing districts. We're talking about a population which was largely nomadic at the time, also.
It just doesn't fit within the realms of likelyhood.
but you have to remember that we really dont know shit about anything.
I agree with Foo. It isn't very likely to have 100 million people living in America. Remember, there was very little domestication in the new World. I believe the llama was the only large mammal, and that was used primarily for transport. In terms of grains and whatnot, there was corn, beans, but the extent of its spread was very limited to central america.
So basically, you don't have the food infrastructure to support a population that large. That's why most of the North American natives were hunter/gatherers and thus small nomad tribes. You can't have millions of indians moving around gathering seeds.
There was another thing that happened in North America, when the Spanish came to the southern part of the U.S. They brought horses with them, which the Native Americans didn't have, so they stole them and used them for waging war on their neighbors. This also took a toll on their population.
But why were there so many more diseases in Europe than in America?
I can only think of one reason: There were a hell of a lot more people.
Edit:
And saying that technological advancements had nothing to do with europe taking foot in the new world is pretty retarded since we have accounts of Conquistadors slaughtering Indians like *something that gets slaughtered a lot*.
Europe was also a very dirty place compared to pre-Columbian America, and the Americas were highly isolated from that disease environment. Europeans didn't fare too well in Africa either, but the difference is that Europeans there didn't suffer from highly communicable airborne viral diseases like small pox. They died mainly from things like malaria. There was some defense against malaria--quinine and such--but no defense against small pox at the time.
Nevertheless, I would be interested in knowing the percentage of indians who died versus the percentage of europeans in africa who died from disease in the first 50 years after Columbus. I bet both numbers are similar.
They also pitted tribes against each other. Everybody hated those Aztec motherfuckers. If the Indians wanted to own the colonist when they first landed they could have done so easily. I think they were welcomed. Its said that they thought cortez was a god, but i dont think its a fact.
Remember that America was vastly different than Europe. There weren't any roads to haul cannons down. The enemy knows the terrain, and they rely on guerrilla warfare rather than volleying in line formation.
I remember learning about this shit. There was an insane amount of native Americans killed off by disease rather than warfare. That's what fueled the Atlantic slave trade. Not enough injuns to enslave.
I dont remember specifics, and of course there are different theories, but the lack of Indian "participation" in the triangular trade was not a result so much of pure numbers, but of racial hierarchy and indian resistance. I think Europeans saw Indians at a higher position of social development. (H&G->Agriculture->Commerce) On the good old "civilization scale," many Indian groups held fairly high positions. As Kracus pointed out (feature that...) some built pyramids and many were agriculturalists.
Which is ironic because many West Africans were brought over to South Carolina because of their rice growing skills and resistance to malaria. (That's where good ole Uncle Ben comes from).
So I think you're missing my point.
