I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.

I think about this a lot. How much anxiety do most people feel from the millions of options that are available to them daily, or young adults that are told they can be anything they want, but clam up and choose to do nothing instead.

I immediately thought or Iran.

It’s neat what we do to each other…

Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably destroy the world as we know it, but that's a vague and flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries, societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but humanity would survive.

Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.

There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK.

We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.

Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.

That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer.

I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.

The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared.

IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.

In things like the battle of Cajamarca the Incan lost a battle against the Spanish with 8000 warriors against 150. All the 150 survived.

Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).

> What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.

Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.

They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.

There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand.

Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.

[1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056

they also didn't even invent the wheel

They had agriculture, yes, but they hadn't had it long enough to bootstrap an advanced civilisation before the Europeans arrived.

If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.

It's just objectively true that the Native Americans were far behind Europe in military technology and many other technologies in 1492. The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.

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