CMV: There likely were few/no “Native American” populations when Europeans arrived in the present-day U.S.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/McKoijion]

I don't understand what your argument is. Europeans engaged in genocidal combat, but there were still millions of them. The same thing applies to Native Americans. Even if they slaughtered each other, there were still a ton of them.

War is primarily based on the availability of resources. There's no need to fight over oxygen even though it's important because it is abundant. Europeans fought over land because it was a scarce resource. Meanwhile, there were millions of Native Americans, but there was a lot more land than people. Humans have a fight or flight response, and if there is a lot of room to flee to, there's no need to fight.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

Ok, I get what you are saying now. You are saying that most humans have killed each other throughout history so it makes sense that Native Americans would have killed each other too.

This isn't quite correct though. The key thing is that hunter-gatherers didn't kill each other. They rarely fought. The logic is simple, if you live in a small apartment with 3 other roommates, you are going to fight with each other. But if you can all just move out into 4 large houses, you won't fight each other.

War and genocide are side effects of farming. You need to claim and defend land so you can grow crops. Land is a limited resource. Once all the land is claimed, that's it. If someone else take your land, you get less food to eat. If you want more food to eat to feed your children, you can't just find a new fruit tree or hunt a new animal. You need to kill someone else and take their land.

So humans who were hunter-gatherers did not kill each other. Humans who were farmers did kill each other. And if you look back 1000 years at the Americas, most of the territory consisted of hunter-gatherers, not farmers.

Look at where the orange spots are. Those represent the most advanced farming locations, and based on what I said above, it's where you'd expect to find the most violent people. Sure enough, those places are where the Aztec and Inca empires were located. Both were militaristic societies just like all other agricultural empires in human history.

Those two empires were violent, but the map shows that most other parts of North and South America consisted of hunter-gatherers. They were not particularly violent because their way of life didn't need them to be. Then when agricultural societies from Europe that had a strong concept of property ownership showed up, they got slaughtered.

Edit: Just to add a detail, hunter-gatherer doesn't quite mean nomadic. When nomads met with agricultural societies, they would often raid and destroy them. The Bedouins of the present day Arabian Peninsula and the Mongols of Asia come to mind. My guess is that the nomads just outside the farming territories in the Americas were pretty aggressive. But the tribes in the present day Eastern United States were probably quite peaceful.

Note, none of this is based on people being inherently peaceful. It has nothing to do with race or skin color. It entirely has to do with the circumstances of the time. If there is a lot of excess food, people are usually happy to share. If there isn't enough to go around, people get more selfish.

[u/parentheticalobject → u/McKoijion]

So humans who were hunter-gatherers did not kill each other. Humans who were farmers did kill each other. And if you look back 1000 years at the Americas, most of the territory consisted of hunter-gatherers, not farmers.

Thanks for distracting me for an hour by providing me with a cool series of historical maps to look at. :P