How about Europeans simply pwn Native Americans? Hehe, just kidding.



Personally I think one of the chief reasons was contact with other cultures; beit in terms of culture, language, economy, military, techology (!) etc.

Europe is linked to Asia and Africa, and therefore has/d plenty chances to learn and/or adapt according to the peoples they met. If you go through history, European knowledge is for a large part a pile-up of inventions from other cultures: the wheel is a Sumerian invention, Arab numbers (which allowed for mathematical processes that were largely impossible with Roman numerals) came from India (heh), the compass and gun powder from China, and so forth.

Because every culture/people has its own 'basic ground' it gets complacent after a while: basic values and ideas are mistaken for fundamental truths, thus -for a large part- taking away the incentive to rethink the situation and come up with new ideas. But, when faced with other cultures who ALSO have their own 'basic ground' that is very likely to be different from each other, ppl can assimilate the immideately awesome inventions (like the wheel). It's remarkable that there are very few revolutionary inventions that were 'invented' simultaneously in two parts of the world, which somewhat sustains my blabbering here.

In whichever way, cross-cultural contact is THE main catalyst for any sort of advancement. It is the key to thinking outside the box; that box being your own culture and mind set. And the outside that of the others. Evolution is a slow process that leads to very different results in every culture; but when one culture meets another it's like 'dudes! This gun powder is awesome!'...while the Chinese culture probably spent ages building up to discover it, it's readily available for any other culture that comes into contact with it. It's likely that they never would have found it (or not in the next hundreds of years) on their own, as they started from a different base and thus also have a different chain of events.

To ask why the native Americans developed so slowly is the same as to ask why there are tribes still living in the deep rain forests with nothing but a hut and a wooden stick: because they were isolated. When Europeans started colonizing North America, the native Americans picked up things like gun powder, rifles, etc. really quickly and even used them against the 'invaders'. Can you imagine that? A people whose military force consisted of bows, knives, stick and arrows suddenly picked up this technological advancement. All that because they came in contact with a new culture which had already assimilated so many inventions from all parts of the (Eurasian) world that it had rapidly outgrown them. The native Americans didn't have much to offer to the invaders though, so they were considered a nuisance rather than a people.


Anyhoo, hope I wasn't too chaotic. I am a firm believer of what I just said. And all that's also the reason why it's imperative to have good trading contacts with the other factions in Civ games.


My mouth is bleeding with my wisdom tooth gone, bleh. Not hurting too much tho, both this and the pulling. The dentist did say I have freakishly big teeth and roots, so I have a big gap in my upper mouth cavity that needs to fill with blood, harden and grow shut.

Humans don't usually (except in warfare and such) compete directly as animals do. But if people have an easy life they are less stretched to provide for themselves, I mean that warfare is a great example of development look at weaponry and the offshoots of them. But if you put any animal in a Zoo like enivronment (including humans). They are unlikely to struggle and find new ways of getting food.

war is the single greatest spur to human development.

Antibiotics are a direct result of WWII. So are M&Ms. Two of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. A little less tongue-in-cheek, the development of aviation was war-driven, as was the development of computers (at least the first ones, for code-breaking), radar, sonar, the entire space program (cold war, but real war motivated), and who know what else I'm missing.

Anyway, the man that wishes for a world with no war is wishing for a world with no major strides in technological advancement. How many of today's technologies were initially spurred on to development through department of defense funding? A whole lot.

But do we still need war for that? Governments used to be the biggest spenders on science, but the technology industry is nowadays bigger.
Boeing used to have the advantage of having a military branch with new tech to port over to it's commercial aircafts, but nowadays that's the other way round.