The last Incan suspension bridge is made entirely of grass and woven by hand
slate.com
slate.com
In fact, the Incans did know about wheels, it's just that wheels are considerably less useful when you don't have any large pack animals to pull things. It's an accident of geography, and the article would be better off without the vaguely racist opening about how the "primitive" Incans were able to do amazing things with fibres even though they never "figured out" this other stuff.
Arguing over technological superiority or lack thereof has absolutely nothing to do with race.
Would it be racist to say that cavemen were primitive because they lacked the steam engine? No, it's merely acknowledging the fact of their state of technology. And it should be noted, primitive in this sense exists on constantly shifting sand: Americans from 1776 were primitive as well. Saying so is not racist.
By our standards today, George Washington was killed by medical malpractice, having been bled to death. It all sounds so barbaric by comparison to what we take for granted now. I'm sure our chemotherapy of today will sound like primitive barbarism tomorrow.
Wiki says "The term is generally no longer used in mainstream writing as it is widely considered racist and many groups, including Survival International, have campaigned to stamp it out. The term continues to be used in everyday speech among older inhabitants of former colonial powers and by far right groups, particularly those with a white supremacist ideology."
Many (most?) US-icans from 2013 are unable to grow their own food, find clean drinking water, build tools and shelter, hunt, fight etc. Primitive is a judgment against the technology or skills required to survive in the world you inhabit on a daily basis. So if it is has racist undertones and is entirely non-descriptive / non-meaningful.. why use it?
Edit: In response to child comment (thanks), to make clear I was referring to the parent comment, not the article. It was the characterisation of 'superior technologies' and 'primitive' people I was responding to.
The Incans did not have the wheel (when we refer to people having the wheel, we mean with an axle). They used wood beams to roll things around, but that's not a wheel. As far as I know, the only group that had the wheel in the Americas were the ancient Mexicans.
Further, devices like wheel barrows and carts are incredibly useful with or without pack animals. Doubly so if you had the incredible manpower that the Incans had where you can easily just use humans to pull them instead of pack animals. Wheels aren't just for hauling things around either, it is hard to express how incredibly useful potter's wheels has been for the last five thousand years.
The Incans didn't not have the wheel because they wouldn't have found it useful. The Incans didn't have the wheel and axle because it wasn't an obvious invention.
All evidence points to the wheel in the "old world" (ugh, I hate that term) being invented in one place at one time. It wasn't obvious. It wasn't simultaneously invented by hundreds of people across Europe, Asia and Africa. It was simply copied everywhere and Europe, Asia and Africa were fortunate enough to be connected.
I think it's important to approach history/art-history of ancient cultures with a health dose of skepticism - especially ones that didn't have a written language. These academic fields sometimes promote theories that are based on rather wild speculations.
Give uncontacted peoples (say the Sentinalese) a few thousand years and they would eventually die out or develop. What is a bit sad is that the world is converging into one basic level of development that limits diversity; e.g. beyond just fibre, the Incans had stone building technology that we have no idea how to replicate.
These bridges were intended to be temporary, whereas stone or metal bridges are intended to be permanent. You are comparing apples to oranges.
The new bridge and the old bridge are actually the same bridge, just made with different materials.
One references location ('the bridge that crosses the river over there'), the other pertains to the physical composition that makes every thing unique (the bridge made of those specific fibers).
It'd be like claiming the different people that inhabit the same house over the span of 100 years are all the same people, because they're all humans. They're all people, and they all inhabited the house ('the people in that house'), but they in fact possess different unique identity.
There has been a mayor of New York since the mid 1600s, though the individual fulfilling that role has changed regularly.
Similarly, there has been a bridge on this stretch of gorge for some time, though the expanse must be replaced regularly.
It's more like a house blown over in a hurricane. It gets rebuilt, but the land and foundation and some other infrastructure might be re-used --it's still not the 'old house' --it's the re-built house.
"How many gas stations are there in _your city_?"
"How would you determine how much rain falls in Washington State in a day?"
If it was the same family or if they shared a few genetic markers that distinguished them from other peoples in the area... then you could say the same people had lived at ________ area.
And yet I haven’t heard of famines in the past few years – which, given Europe’s history before ‘modern technology’ came along, should happen every now and then with the older methods.
Certainly modern agriculture does have some drawbacks, and with an appropriate set of priorities, you can probably claim that it is worse than what we had 200 years ago, but it works surprisingly well at feeding seven billion people while at the same time only requiring a tiny fraction of said seven billion people to actually be employed in agriculture.
Sigh, not this crap again. I bought a book in Arequipa or Cusco back in 2004 or so that described in detail a large amount of quipu that had been found in the area. Just reading the Wikipedia article would have been enough for this author to debunk this Incan mythical nonsense. It's pretty widely settled now that quipu are a system for counting and bookkeeping and is not a writing system in the sense that it translates words or sounds into written equivalents. E.g. you had to know that red knots represented mules and yellow ones baskets of corn (it's obviously much more complex than this). It's still a writing system and indubitably very useful and ingenious for and of the Incans, but we do know a bunch about it.
If I hadn't misread I would have been impressed by the bridge.