Dave L Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Bet you wish you guys had invented gunpowder first
> - then it would be us Europeans trying to get land
> rights for a tiny bit of Native American dominated
> Europe LOL.
>
> That's what it comes down to - the gun.
>
> Dave L

Nope, guns had very little to do with it.

The diseases Europeans introduced killed a hundred more times Indians than guns did.

And look at the Chinese, they invented gunpowder BEFORE you did (there are even indications that knowledge of their invention difused along the silk road until it reached Francis Bacon....)..... which didn't stop European invasion & colonializing of much of Asia. No, it was the fact that the Asian population was just as resistant to the introduced diseases as Europeans were, that constrained & eventually threw off the European yoke.

Look at the Maori, they figured out how to make gunpowder (& were proved MORE than capable of stealing or buying ample guns from the English invaders) & were absolutely INSANE fighters (who could literally live OFF their enemy, as well as the countryside itself)..... but still lost the majority of their lands. Reason? Introduced diseases decimated their numbers below the point of effective resistance. The only reason that they didn't lose everything, was that invasion was LATER than it was for the Americas (was after European hygiene started improving), involved a longer trip (less easy for lethal diseases to get there without killing the entire ship), and didn't also involve massive imports of African slaves (carrying all sorts of tropical diseases to spice up the mix).

Cortez conquered Mexico using lances & swords MORE than the primitive guns of his day.... largely because smallpox first killed half the Aztec (leaving the survivors weakened, and ruining their economy), and then subsequently decimated his Indian allies (allowing Spanish conquest of THEM).

You know, it's funny.... I've sometimes wished that the hyperdiffusionists WERE right. Because *IF* all these Old Worlders *HAD* visited the Americas over the last few thousand years, all the major Old World diseases would already have been introduced (rather than just T.B. & syphillis on a limited basis) & we'd have variously evolved genetic resistance or developed medicinal cures for them.

And then, with FULL numbers present to resist.... instead of Spanish attacking already half dead Indians, & Puritans moving into coastal Algonquian "ghost towns", and resisting tribes losing half their numbers to disease every decade or two.... With fully functional tribal societies & confederacies to combat invasion..... instead of scattered survivors in a once densely populated & organized Florida, an Amazon so depopulated that it's advanced earthworks & agriculture & once high population ENTIRELY ESCAPED NOTICE BY EUROPEANS until the 21st century, an Inca Empire ravaged by smallpox & having just lost it's emperor AND his heirs & thus consumed in civil war.... Instead of all that....

.... Europeans would not have conquered the Americas, would not have committed genocide, would not have burned all those codices, would not have lost to the world all that medicinal knowledge. And we'd not be facing our current ecological meltdown caused by massive unrestricted import of invasive species (if there is a hell for ecological idiots, that 17th century colonial cretin who had his mother mail him a packet of seeds for "all the familiar WEEDS of England" is no doubt burning in it now).

As for Native Americans invading Europe? Sorry, wouldn't have happened. There was no historical imperative pushing them that way, their culture wasn't geared toward that sort of thing, there was no economic motive..... and even if they'd wanted to, Asia & Africa would have been standing first in line.

Eh, right there is proof enough. MONGOL ARMIES invade Europe.... MOORISH INVADERS land on north Mediterranean beaches.... but neither one "dominates" much of Europe for all that long. The Moors came closest, with a goodly chunk of the Iberian Peninsula... but it took them longer to conquer it (disease situations being equal, and all that) than it took the Spanish & English to conquer the entire New World. And they didn't wipe out the natives, and got booted out eventually.

Nope, gunpowder or technological advantage alone (the Mongols had a MAJOR advantage in military technology & tactics) counts for little.

If Europeans hadn't been unwashed & disease riddled & vermin infested, they'd have never been able to do what they did.

Ah, if only soap had been invented earlier.... and been included as the 11th Commandment.... or as one of Jesus's stricter admonitions.

Kenuchelover.