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> The only survivors

They're not survivors any more than anybody else alive today. And their relatives are still on the best productive land, but assimilated into a different culture.

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Their cultures are (more or less) survivors from a time when their mode of subsistence was the norm even on (most of) the best productive land. We know majority hunter-gatherer lifestyles have been incredibly diverse, but almost all detailed records deal with people on very marginal land that have all been influenced by industrial societies in more or less direct ways, because those were the only ones still available when people started recording them at least semi-properly. Our window into that past is more like a single discolored piece out of a huge intricate stained-glass window. Judging by the impact that indigenous societies and indigenous philosophy from the Americas had on contemporary European thought in the 18th century, it's not a stretch to assume that we've lost a ton of hard-won and almost irreplaceable data on what makes humans function as they do when part of a society and what alternatives to our modern societies work as well or possibly even better.

The histories often talk about empty or sparsely populated lands. Which in some cases is dramatically different to what archaeology tells us. Either the historians were lying, or the diseases spread faster than the explorers. The jungle will quickly claim abandoned settlements, in merely years.

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