Network of fortified towns indicates Amazon was once heavily populated

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1577310799/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_t1...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_the_Portuguese_C...

1: Narration over pigs in a pen.

2: Narration over a dog pulling a human on a skateboard.

Cats... aren't fully domesticated (well, there's debate). I don't remember the source, but I do remember one study looked at how well dogs and cats dealt with life when humans were removed from the equation. IIRC, dogs are iffy. Sometimes they do okay, but a lot of their behaviors have evolved for cohabitation with humans, so don't work as well when humans are removed and a pack functions purely with dogs. Cats have much less problems, and it was claimed this was because of their only partial domestication.

Another way of looking at it is that being a pet does not infer domestication. I can have a pet rat, rabbit, hamster or one of many different species of bird. That doesn't mean that species is domesticated (it may have a natural timidness that lends itself well to being a pet, at least more than an aggressive animal might). That's not to same some level of domestication may not have been achieved with some breeds of those animals (e.g. rabbits).

Bison are much more problematic IMO for Diamond. The most I've seen on them is that they are surlier than cattle. But it's not like aurochs were cuddly fur friends in the beginning either.

One of the main problems of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it ignores a lot of evidence that is challenging to its thesis. To be fair, some of that evidence wasn't available when the book was first written, but Diamond's more recent comments indicate that he still believes in now-discredited theories (such as Clovis-first peopling of the Americas), and some pieces of evidence are fairly obviously wrong even when he wrote it (such as the fact that most latitudes don't actually have climactic continuity, and the ones that do involve civilizations that were "backwards" for most of history, such as the steppe nomads).

This is the basis of nearly all scientific progress.

Other views of the universe are that everything is a special case and model results are therefore not applicable. Creationism is an example of such a viewpoint.

Even the explanation of how the Old World conquered the New World falls flat, because (for example) the Spaniards could not have conquered Tenochtitlan were it not for their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies, and, even then, the battle was not a slam dunk.

The real answer is that the growth of political power tends to be on the basis of a transitory superiority in some regard (usually, but not exclusively, military weaponry). Europeans happened to have had their time to shine in the first era to make intercontinental empires possible. I guess you'd call that "luck," but that ignores the fact that there are deeper reinforcing situations in political, cultural, and socioeconomic spheres that cause small advantages to become big ones.

Now, luck and other alternative causes.

Any process in history on the scale of western European dominance is necessarily a sample of one, so describing a sequence of events is the only way to work with it. Whether that sequence of events seems lucky or not is irrelevant. Indeed, a "lucky" confluence of many factors is often required for a particular large scale shift to occur.

The only time you can talk about luck or chance usefully in history is when you have many similar situations, and a few of them come out quite differently for some reason. Empirically, we say that those are "less likely," but that is a way of summarizing things.

And you are leaving aside culture. If we accept that the general set of behaviors and approaches of a group differs from other groups, then that's a vital component of any historical description or explanation. Why, when the Maori obtained firearms, was one of their first acts to go massacre a nearby island's population, while when the Hawaiians got them, the result was a war of unification? Any explanation of that is going to involve cultural differences.

How western Europe went from being a backwater with, as Jared Diamond would put it, less "cargo" than much of the rest of the world up to the 15th century to having more is very complicated, and much of it involves culture.

Unless you're talking about somewhere farther south? I know the Huron who were based around present day Toronto were almost strictly farmers.

Since that battle occurred fairly late (378 AD) it wouldn't be in the least surprising that the barbarian "hordes" had learned how to fight in a more coordinated, tactical manner than a mob rushing the legions.

I also recommend Empires of the Atlantic World by J.W. Elliot. Although the book is broad-ranging and not focused exclusively the causes of depopulation, it presents details of how Spain viewed inhabitants of the New World in the same way as it did those of territories it had recently conquered in Europe: as vassals who would provide the labour, while the conquerors sat at the top of the social hierarchy and pursued the consolidation of the conquest and extraction of resources.

From this perspective, the subsequent depopulation was not the intended goal of the conquerors, although they indeed caused it through disease, wars against resisting groups, and disasterous attempts at improving the agriculture system to fit European models.

One example. In the area I grew up in the US, millions of acres of virgin forest were stripped (but not cleanly) within a century. This expedient, wanton and careless destruction also largely destroyed the means of 'self-determination' for tens of thousands of natives - oftentimes forcing them into dependence on meagre handouts. Never mind the cultural disruption.

    Abstract. The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, -a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.- There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492.

You can read The Conquest of the Inca by John Hemming for an account of how disease affected the Inca before the Spanish invaded.

You can also read just about any history of Plymouth Colony to know that the settlers found an empty harbor to settle in. Accounts of Plymouth Colony like yours frustrate me because you imply that the settlers had to massacre people in order make an initial settlement when the massacre you refer to happened seventeen years after the initial settlement and comes from an incident where natives for fought alongside settlers. This is because the Plymouth settlers were initially welcomed by local tribes hoping to use them as support against their enemies.

This is why I bring up the universality of violence and empire. Oftentimes when people talk about colonialism as something that was done to the natives, as if the natives had no agency or understanding of their own. It reads like a sort of benevolent racism but I think that what's really going on is the replacement of one oversimplification with another.

Violence is not just a part of European and a few other civilizations but a part of humanity generally. This is important to understand. You can't treat the conquest of the Americas like it was some sort of aberration or the result of something specific to European culture that can be rooted out. This is a broader condition of humanity generally. So no, I don't think that modern gun violence has anything more to do with the conquest of the Americas than it does with the conquest of Babylon by Assyria.