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Why didn't Mocteczuma go to Spain? Or, why were the Europeans so much more technologically advanced than the Indian civilizations they conquered? I

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Why didn't Mocteczuma go to Spain? Or, why were the Europeans so much more technologically advanced than the Indian civilizations they conquered? I. Human Evolution A. Africa (Here is a map of Africa, the oldest Homo sapien fossils have been found in southeastern Africa) *400,000 years ago Homo sapiens were beginning to evolve in Africa *The environment they lived in could only sustain about 2000 calories per individual per day *This is very important because the carrying capacity of an environmental setting determines how large a society can be and ultimately how technologically advanced a society can be *For early humans this meant that the body of each person had to be composed of biological parts that did not consume in total more than about 2000 calories per day *Each species in the African environment including humans had to choose between alternative body capabilities and functions while staying near the 2000 calorie limit; those that didn't do this had to either leave that environment or die *Some animals evolving in Africa selected large outer features; such as large leg muscles, or a large jaw, or overall large bodies *These features allowed these animals to use power to maintain access to resources *Others species selected specialized digestive tracts that allowed them to digest a wide range of hard to breakdown foods, which allowed them to eat things that others animals could not *Homo sapiens selected for large brains; yet their brains ended up consuming so many calories that their other body parts had to become smaller and therefore less calorie intensive *This then left humans without large outward physical features, so they couldn't overpower other animals by shear, individual force to gain resources *This also meant that humans developed a smaller, relatively simplistic digestive system; and without a powerful digestive system humans became limited in what they could eat *But these problems didn't become insurmountable obstacles because humans learned to use their large, complex brains to build shelters to protect themselves; create weapons to defend themselves; develop processes for predigesting (cooking) their foods before eating; and they learned to live in groups to ensure the survival of their helpless young *All of these behaviors arose directly from biological needs; yet as time went on different groups began to meet their biological needs just a bit differently *Today we call these variations in how humans go about meeting their biological needs culture *All humans eat, so we call eating a biological trait; yet different human groups go about the process of eating in hundreds of different ways, so we call how humans meet their biological need for food a cultural trait *Comparatively, there is no one correct culture; all cultures that meet our species' biological needs are equally good and correct *If cultural traits are maladaptive they will not last long as the humans practicing them will either die or find their lives so unfulfilled that they will abandon those maladaptive practices *This tremendous adaptability allowed humans to move into a wide range of environmental settings, yet soon the large brain that made them so adaptive began to cause problems *One of the greatest, immediate problems was not even under conscience control: how to deal with the now very large heads of human fetuses *This was a problem due to the fact that the selection of a big brain coincided with humans achieving an erect posture (standing upright) *As humans stood upright the pelvis shifted forward to balance the upper and lower body *With this forward shift the pelvic opening became much smaller, meaning that the birth canal in females was becoming smaller at the same time that the newborn baby's head was getting much larger *To accommodate this change human females began giving birth to premature infants and other humans began assisting during birth to help move the baby's large head out of the mother's body *Even today such birth assistance is still very important as Human females are the only animals who regularly die during childbirth if unassisted *Yet, selecting for premature birth meant that, when compared to other animals, human young arrived in the world almost completely helpless *Premature birth meant that the human brain came equipped with few fully developed, innate behaviors *They can't cling to their mothers, they can't walk, and they can't feed themselves *But with humans living in large groups as a way to compensate for not having defensive features, many adults were available to provide additional infant care *So, instead of arriving with innate traits, human babies come ready to learn; ready to develop the behaviors that will give them a survival advantage in their particular environment *Humans who grew up in forested areas learned early how to climb and how to detect predators among the trees *Humans who grew up near bodies of water learned how to swim and capture water-living plants and animals *Humans who grew up in deserts learned to protect themselves from the sun and to find animals adapted to the arid environment *Not only did human babies come ready to learn how to adapt to their particular environment, but they maintained this capacity for learning throughout their lives, which enabled them to move to a different environment at any time in their lives *This last trait is what ultimately allowed humans to use their big brains to circumvent evolution itself *For instance, instead of having to wait for natural selection to produce humans with fur to be able to move to colder environments, humans simply figured out how to make clothing and then moved into colder climates *Eventually humans learned to live in almost every environment Mother Nature could imagine (Modern humans thought Las Vegas was not suited for full-time living until someone invented air conditioning) *At about 70,000 years ago, as the African environment became more crowded and dryer, some groups took advantage of this adaptability and moved north B. Spread of Humans *First humans went into the Mideast, then Asia, then Europe *They had a huge geographical region to spread across *By about 45,000 years ago the Pleistocene ice age began and ocean levels dropped as the water froze into glaciers *When this happened a land bridge opened between what is today Siberia and Alaska *This land bridge is often called the Bearing Land Bridge or even Beringia *As of right now land bridge migrations of humans are conclusively documented and point to independent waves of human migrants arriving in the Americas as they followed large herds of animals *It is thought that these migrations occurred between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago *Most current speculation revolves around the time when humans first arrived in North America; there are a lot of tantalizing clues that human occupation in the Americas is much older than is currently verifiable, but so far archaeologists are still in the investigative phase on this C. 10,000 Years Ago the Holocene Begins *At about 10,000 years ago the Pleistocene began to give way to the Holocene warming trend *The glaciers began to melt, which resubmerged the Bering Land Bridge and isolated the Americas from the rest of the world once again *Along the equator, especially, there was a distinct change in the environment and weather patterns *From China to Spain the climate became warm and wet, which fueled the emergence of a lush and fertile vegetation zone *Humans and other animals were naturally attracted to this region, with what is now Iraq being the most desirable place-hence the name Fertile Crescent *As human hunter/gatherers arrived in this region they soon found that they would not have to travel as much to gain the same, if not more, calories from available food each day *Staying in one place gave them an adding opportunity to develop their knack for observational science *Most likely women, as it was their job to do the gathering, (not because they couldn't hunt, but because they were the only ones physically equipped to breast feed babies and you can't hunt effectively if you're carrying a squalling baby), realized that new plants grew in the areas they used as latrines *Putting two and two together they figured out that seeds planted in fertile soil produced new plants *Once they figured this out, humans gained the ability to stay in one place permanently while meeting their caloric needs with plant foods *The ability to stay put then allowed groups to have more members *As hunting and gathering peoples they had had to limit their population levels for two main reasons: *1. Infants had to be carried for an extended time after birth, hence each mother would make sure she would have only one child incapable of walking at any one time (she did this through celibacy and infanticide) *2. If humans are not actively manipulating their environment they must maintain a balance between the number of calories the group must have each day and the amount of calories available from nature *If they go over that limit, some will starve and naturally reduce the population *Once humans began manipulating their environment, however, they could produce extra calories *This allowed them to settle in one place, which eliminated the need to carry infants *The cumulative result was a large increase in population *The people of the Eurasian equatorial zone were particularly lucky in that not only was their environmental zone large, but it was also home to six of the easiest to domesticate plants D. Sedentary living and its consequences *One consequence of sedentary living was political, while the other was biological *Defined broadly politics is anything that deals with the distribution of power and resources *When humans were living in small, familial hunting and gathering groups biology and politics went hand in hand *Grandparents and parents had power, while children and grandchildren did not *People knew what their role was based on where they fit in the family structure *There was no need for written laws or specialized law enforcers, if your mother told you to do something, you did it or she rightfully punished you *If your cousin told you to do the same thing, however, you could probably get away with ignoring him or her unless they were much older *The only real differentiation anyone had to make was between family members and strangers *Family were okay, but strangers were dangerous as they were competitors under no pressure to share, therefore they had to be kept away from a family's resources *If you wanted to be able to trade with a stranger, you had to first make him/her into a family member through the exchange of sex partners (what comes to eventually be known as marriage partners) *If strangers refused to exchange partners, they were deemed dangerous and driven away *When people settled down and populations began to grow, new problems arose over what to do about strangers living near each other *In hunting and gathering societies, strangers could either stay away from each other or fight *As fighting was costly in terms of human life, avoidance was the preferred arraignment *In growing settled societies, however, it quickly became impossible to keep unrelated peoples away from each other and continual fighting quickly led to chaos *Human brains hate chaos *Using their large, reasoning brain, eventually some group members pointed out the counterproductive nature of fighting (if we keep fighting, eventually we'll all be dead) and suggested other ways to share the environment so that everyone could survive *One strategy for strangers to cohabitate involved the selection of someone that everyone trusted to serve as a mediator in times when physical conflict was about to ensue *Today we call such people: drum roll please...bureaucrats *Yes, bureaucrats are as old as human civilization itself, and no you can't live without them *And as all good bureaucrats do, they created job security by making themselves indispensable for the functioning of their society *Once these people became established as permanent leaders, they then became: government *Each time a society outgrew its current government arraignment, it created something bigger and more complex for handling the new problems that came with increased population levels E. The Rise and Fall of States *Over time some societies grew so large that they could no longer supply themselves with all the resources their members needed *It then became necessary to either trade with neighbors for needed goods, or to simply use force to take resources from those neighbors *The largest societies usually picked force first as the cost of warfare was less per capita for them and the benefits gained were greater than those acquired through trading *Once these large societies learned that they could simply take what they wanted, some began to not only take their neighbors' resources, but to subordinate their neighbors into tributaries (forced taxpayers) *In both the Mideast and Asia this process was replicated over and over and again *Eventually, though, tributary societies grew tired of being abused and decided to join forces to stop their oppressors *Once this happened, from among the victorious tributary states, one usually emerged to begin its own journey to becoming an empire-builder and oppressor *Within western civilization this pattern repeated over and over again: Sumeria, Persia, the Phoenicians, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and Carthage all started out as abused tributaries that overthrew their oppressors, but then went on to become oppressors themselves *Going from East to West the line of empires traveled down the Mediterranean until it reached the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) *When Iberia began its ascendance to statehood and empire builder, there was only one direction left to go: west out into the ocean (Iberians couldn't go east as they would run into former superpowers) F. Biological Consequences of Sedentary Living *The second consequence that derived from sedentary living was biological *After the domestication of plants a long time passed in which the men still had to leave home to hunt for large animals *As the Mideast was also home to four of the five easiest to domesticate animals (herbivorous, herd animals) eventually the men figured out how to get these animals to stay in pens near their homes *Now men could stay at home with their families full time *The unintended consequence of this was that the diseases that made the animals sick, but did not kill them, were now able to jump to humans, and in doing so became lethal *Such as smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis *Each time an epidemic arose, it quickly killed many people, as humans were now living in close contact with each other, disease spread fast *But because the human species is designed to maintain genetic diversity, each time an epidemic hit there were some with natural immunity who survived *Over many generations a more resilient host population, somewhat resistant to new variations of these germs, emerged in Eurasia *Yet even today the influenza germ remains our nemesis with thousands of people dying each year from the flu II. What Was Happening in the Americas? A. Meso America *At about 10,000 years ago the same warming trend that changed the environment in the fertile crescent also changed the equatorial climate in the Americas *The problem was that in the Americas the land mass along the equator was much smaller, which permitted much less migration by humans and greatly hindered their ability to spread out once population levels began to rise *Here is a map of the Americas. The equatorial zone is from the top of Mexico (the southern border of the US today) south to the top of South America; notice how little land there actually is *In the Americas instead of being able to spread out and grow exponentially large, the first sedentary American societies soon used up their environment's resources and had no where else to go, so they had to disband back into small, more mobile groups to allow nature to regenerate itself *Mesoamerica also had fewer plants suitable for domestication and no large animals to domesticate *It took these humans two thousand years just to get corn, beans, squash, and some fruits to grow in forms that would provide enough calories to sustain a sedentary family *And without many domesticated animals, people in the Americas were not exposed to the same lethal, mutated animal diseases *They therefore did not have the opportunity to slowly build up a population with some immunity to those diseases *The sum result of the environmental differences between Eurasia and the Americas was that by 1492 Eurasia had built up its population base and used all its many brains working together to develop writing, mathematics, advanced agricultural technology, communication and transportation technology, and most importantly deadly weapons of war, while American humans were still struggling to just feed their large societies for extended periods *Without nature on their side people in the Americas were at a severe disadvantage; it took their much smaller population base much longer to accomplish the same things that came so easily for the Eurasians *This is why Columbus was able to sail across the ocean to discover the Aztecs as opposed to the Aztec's sailing east and discovering the Spanish *Columbus's environment gave him the ships, experienced sailors, and navigation equipment he needed to guide him across the ocean, while Mocteczuma's environment provided him with none of these things *These advantages also allowed the Spanish, once they arrived in the Americas, to quickly subjugate the Indians and take their resources; less because of their advanced weapons than because of the invisible germs they were carrying, which attacked the never-exposed Indians, and killing them by the thousands *So, why were the Europeans so much more technologically advanced? *Europeans and Native Americans were all humans and all humans have been and still are equally smart and capable of invention, so it wasn't because Europeans were biologically superior *And both Europeans and Native Americans had cultures that sustained them equally well, so it wasn't because the Europeans were culturally superior *What was key to the differences between the human groups was each society's environmental setting; humans are born able to learn from and to take advantage of their environment *But that also means that they can be limited by their environment *European society evolved in a large, lush, and stimulating environment, while Native American society evolved in a small, relatively sparse and limiting environment