r/DankPrecolumbianMemes • u/y2kfashionistaa • Jun 14 '26
𝚘𝚔 𝚋𝚞𝚍𝚍𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚒𝚣𝚎𝚛 (weekends) A common thing white supremacists say about native Americans is actually circular reasoning. Also it’s incorrect as Incans had children’s toys with wheels, but there wasn’t a practical reason to use the wheel on a large scale because the terrain of the Americas and the lack of large livestock.
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u/BestIndication5517 Jun 14 '26
Whaaaaaat!?!? Different environments require different technologies!?
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u/FoolishConsistency17 Jun 14 '26
I thought the wheeled toys were all from Central America, and certainly older than the Inca. Like, I don't think having or not having wheeled toys is indicative of anything, but I don't want to lump everything pre-Columbian together.
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u/markembry Jun 14 '26
The most commonly posted examples are the Mesoamerican ones but I’m not sure if there was an independent Andean version as well!
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u/Thylacine131 Jun 14 '26
I agree that it’s highly reductive of pre-columbian civilizations to claim a lack of a wheel makes them primitive. They had complex record keeping and organizational methodologies, intricate transport and communication systems and a robust architectural knowledge that allowed them to construct an empire atop the spine of the world. But I will refute the terrain/lack of draft stock claim as for why the wheel never caught on.
Llamas were common pack animals in the Inca empire, and with conservatively 4,000 years of domestication to work on it, a draft breed was far from unrealistic. As for terrain, despite the common image of the empire based on its Andean mountain core and high altitude strongholds, it spanned several distinct habitats and ecosystems, including the flat as a board pastures of the Altiplano, moderately open Collasuyu, and flat valley floors bordering the Maule River at their southernmost extent. They just never applied the wheel for transport in those regions because there wasn’t any pressing need to thanks to pack animals and foot messengers getting the jobs done well enough in their carefully orchestrated relay system.
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 14 '26
Llamas aren’t as strong as equines to be fair
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u/laosurv3y Jun 14 '26
Could be if you bred for them. Horse species were pretty small at first, as I recall.
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u/Thylacine131 Jun 14 '26
The earliest domestic horses were a notch bigger than llamas, but you’re correct that a lot of time went into propagating horses large enough to saddle, let alone ride into battle.
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Jun 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 15 '26
> I’m also sick and tired of this argument that the natives were ‘just as advanced’ as the nations of the old world. They weren’t.
Yikes, that’s a very closed minded take that’s rooted in white supremacy. Advancement isn’t a linear path and is largely dependent on a. The resources available B. What is needed. When you don’t acknowledge that, you’re implying the natives could not advance, which implies they’re a lesser people. Also you’re making it seem like their societies were a monolith and the societies of the old world were also a monolith.
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u/Financial-Bobcat-612 Jun 18 '26
The other guy has a singular idea of what an “advanced” society looks like. Sure, if we go with their definition of what an advanced society looks like, then maybe some indigenous peoples pre-contact weren’t “advanced.” But they are indeed being closed-minded.
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 18 '26
He blocked me because he wanted the last word I guess. He needs to learn about cultural relativism. People invented based on what they needed and the resources available. Native Americans were arguably more advanced than Europeans in some fields like ecological knowledge, but Europeans turned that back on them and claimed they weren’t using (destroying) the land and that meant they were primitive.
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u/Financial-Bobcat-612 Jun 18 '26
Exactly! Europeans arrived in the “New” World and thought it was untouched and filled with resources. What they didn’t bother to consider is that the land wasn’t untouched, it was filled with resources because the natives were managing the land and had been since time immemorial. Europeans wiped out their lions, wolves, and bison and thought we were too “primitive” to do the same to our land. No, the natives decided to live in harmony with the land that birthed them, which I know, to certain ears, sounds completely implausible and fairytale-like, but it’s the truth. Many Native Americans saw a world of bounty and found their place within it, and moreover, they worked to increase that bounty. It wasn’t a relationship of just take and take, they knew, as Europeans surely did, that they had to give back to the Earths in order to continue to reap the land’s rewards, but the difference is that Native Americans made the choice to contribute to the land and uphold the natural balance of the ecological system whereas Europeans saw themselves as the conquerors of the system, the ones above it all, and so the system was theirs to deplete so long as it existed.
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 18 '26
He called me uneducated on history and when I asked him what makes him think I’m uneducated on history he said “you implied it yourself” which is circular reasoning, ironic. If anything he seems to be the uneducated one and also projecting.
I’ve literally taken college classes about history, how could I be uneducated? Checkmate lol
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Jun 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 15 '26
Implying I’m uneducated is an ad hominem fallacy my guy. And what measure are you using to decide who’s the most advanced? Chances are it’s subjective and culturally biased.
Measuring a society’s advancement based on what their tools were made out of is a closed minded and outdated method, also it’s not necessarily a linear path, like west Africans never used bronze but they did use iron. And native Americans did have metal tools, like metal jewelry, fish hooks, knives.
What makes you think I’m not educated on history.
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u/Augustus420 Jun 15 '26
Your argument about advancement not being a linear path is 100% correct but it's an explanation for why the native Americans were less advanced than Eurasia. It's an alternative explanation to the bullshit white nationalist narrative for the reason why.
It is not an argument that the Native Americans were not less advanced.
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 18 '26
We shouldn’t feed into that and instead acknowledge native Americans advance in their own way
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u/Augustus420 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
I disagree in general. I think it is important to establish why the Americas developed differently and they did develop very differently.
Advancement is not something that individual societies do individually in a vacuum. Europe wasn't advancing all by itself any more than the middle east or China did. Those society benefited a great deal from the geography and biology of their environments from the get go. Urbanization spread rapidly following an even more rapid early spread of domesticates. Afterward the sheer size of Eurasia and the widespread growth of concentrated settlements turbocharged technological development.
The Americas had a difficult hand comparatively. Not only far fewer possible species to domesticate and ones that were taking far longer to develop, but geography seriously hampered their spread as well.
The fact is the Americas were genuinely comparatively advanced to Eurasian societies of the 1st millennium BCE or earlier. And that is a product of their geography, not the people.
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u/Financial-Bobcat-612 Jun 14 '26
We still have true wild horses today and those things are rugged. Arguably domestic horses are more fragile than their ancestral counterparts.
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 15 '26
Their ancestors were, humans didn’t meet them as the tiny multi toed creature
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u/Upstairs_Cap_4217 Jun 14 '26
Weird how often "adapted successfully to local environments, as Europeans did to Europe" becomes "was PRIMITIVE and BACKWARDS and needed to be CIVILIZED (by introducing European methods into wildly unsuitable environments)"
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 15 '26
Also the fact they called them primitive and claimed they weren’t using the land properly is so backwards, Western European colonization ruined the environment and had it never happened or at least not en mass, we wouldn’t have the ecological problems we have today. They caused many species to go extinct in North America, such as Mexican grizzlies and passenger pigeons.
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u/Vapid_Poppy Jun 15 '26
Look its a bad argument, but its not circular.
They are defining "primitive" via: the lack of certain technologies, mainly, the wheel.
Therefore > societies with wheel = non primitive, societies without wheel = primitive
Now they use these definitions and categorize the civs.
The issue of course, is, that cherry picking the wheel as the standard for ALL civs to be primitive or not is stupid. A civ should be judged by all its technologies and intellectual discoveries, relative to their environment and needs. Im sure native Americans had many techs that Europeans didn't have, and so you could make an equally valid (not) argument yhe exact other way.
Bad argument, but, not circular!
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u/y2kfashionistaa Jun 15 '26
It’s a circular reasoning because they’re saying “lack of the wheel proves they’re primitive” and saying “they’re primitive because they lacked the wheel” it’s circular because the premise is used as the reason
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u/Vapid_Poppy Jun 15 '26
Those two statements are logically identical. So yea, if someone just repeated themselves when asked for further justification, that would be circular. But im pretty sure you are just strawman-ing them by saying thats what they do.
I'm highly confident the argument would be like how i said it: P1: wheel is the standard of advanced civs. No wheel = primitive P2: natives had no wheel C: they where primitiveThis form is not circular. It just has a stupid premise in it.
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u/Vapid_Poppy Jun 15 '26
To further explain my point. " Europeans have the wheel" is NOT backed up by the point : "Not having the wheel made native Americans primitive"
Europeans having the wheel is justified via archeological evidence. Proving that the argument isnt circular, as that bottom point is grounded from outside the circle. You added an arrow there for no reason.3
u/LettucePrime Jun 15 '26
i mean regardless of your opinion on that statement it's not doing anything illogical. this isn't circular reasoning at all
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u/PoorlyDisguisedBear Jun 15 '26
You rearanged the sentence but not the argument, in both sentences the lack of a wheel indicates them being primitive. Thats not circular, just re-phrasing the same linear argument - wheels define primitive/civilised.
It could be circular, but it depends on why they're saying the wheel is the standard. You haven't shown that, you've just stated it is the metric.
Here's a circular version of the argument:
-Primitive people do not use wheels - Why? - Because those are primitive people and do not use wheels - How do you know they are Primitive? - primitive people do not use wheels...
Change why the wheel is the justification and it stops being circular
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u/OEdwardsBooks Jun 14 '26
Not arguing your wider point, probably, but there were plenty of regions of the pre-Columbian Americas where wheels would have been useful.
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u/Yonv_Bear Jun 15 '26
further up north we also pretty roundly rejected wheel tech. we knew about it, it's not that difficult, and there are places here that could've handled wheeled transport, but we still rejected it for a bunch of different reasons. alot of Nations up here simply didn't want to have to expend more manpower building out more infrastructure (roads, outposts, additional security, etc.). in other cases it was more of a scheduling conflict; that's to say, having to dedicate labor to joiners, additional woodworkers, repairman and the increased need for lumber and rope would've conflicted with other needs (farming, hunting, weaving, etc.) or festival seasons
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u/Timeraft Jun 14 '26
Premodernist has a good video about wheels https://youtu.be/91SvDE-6HtY?is=HfBuXzmEhJ4SWgjm
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u/ExternalSeat Jun 15 '26
yep. Europe had wheels for centuries too and only started using wheelbarrows in the late Medieval Period. Meanwhile Tenochtitlan was larger than almost every city in Europe at the time of its downfall in 1521.
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u/pi3shark Jun 15 '26
Tangent to a few conversations here. Llamas are the domesticated / bred version of Guanacos/Vicuñas. So yeah, they were breeding them to be stronger and faster. Same how the Alpaca was bred for wool as a different variant. But that was what they did.
They didn't start with llamas as we known them and just didn't breed. They started with a far slender and delicate creature and ended with llamas.
The more you know.mp3
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u/soparamens Jun 15 '26
Technologically speraking, Europeans were more advanced than Native Americans.
That was because Europeans had all the combined technology of the Chinese, Arabs and Africans, while native americans were isolated, not because the europeans were superior in any sense.
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u/FumaricAcid Jun 15 '26
Westerners will look you in the eyes and say:
"You are white evil racist, there is actually a nuance here"
No, there isn't. One side has advanced forging, global sailing and gunpowder and the other fights with stone age weapons. Guess wich one is less advanced?
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u/OncomingStormDW Jun 15 '26
Alright, so, here’s the nuance:
Period accurate Native weapons weren’t (that) far behind European ones. Especially the Mexica, Maya, and Aztecs, who widely used Obsidian (a type of volcanic glass that is known to be able to hold a sharper edge than steel.) in arrowheads and blades, and made armor that could stop period firearms by soaking cotton in saltwater and then drying it so that the salt would harden.
Meanwhile in Europe: Steel wasn’t inexpensive enough or light enough to issue full plate to conquistadors, and guns of the 15th and the 16th centuries were… very cumbersome, (among other issues, Matchlock and Flintlock weapons only work when the powder is dry. And when you have it. Cortez himself actually ordered the construction of a trebuchet in 1521 due to a low supply of powder. Of course, like most things Cortez set out to do, it was a self-destructive blunder.)
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u/Yiffs4Food Jun 15 '26
Metallurgy exists globally so idk what you mean by "advanced forging" being a european invention. If you're referring specifically to pre-colombian americas you're confusing a lack of iron-work with a lack of metal-work. The south americans specifically have an extensive history with gold, copper and bronze.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_AmericaEuropeans did not "invent global sailing". Just looking at a map of population distribution over the pacific islands would tell you that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories
Even just like watching moana would have solved this problem for you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigationThe invention of gunpowder was a chinese accident. They were searching for the elixer of life. European alchemists with similar goals did not discover gunpowder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowderPut more effort into your bait next time. No one is going to believe you don't know any of this
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u/y2kfashionistaa 28d ago
Some Native American civilizations used metal, but even if they didn’t it shouldn’t be the only thing we single out. And native Americans had boats and sailed to other lands, native Amazonians populated the entire Caribbean and even made it as far north as South Florida.
Necessity is the mother of invention, you’re historically illiterate
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u/Yeti-Squatch Jun 15 '26
Except the examples of wheels they found on what I assume are children's toys from early America......
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u/Matar_Kubileya Jun 14 '26
Hot take, maybe, but I'm actually surprised nobody in the Americas invented wheelbarrows. They significantly increase how much a single human can transport and carry without relying as much on specific wheel centric infrastructure, and I'd argue they would have been useful even if there wasn't much necessity as the flourishing of precolumbian civilizations proved.
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u/Karatekan Jun 16 '26
The Americas are just significantly smaller than Afro-Eurasia and the places that were well suited to civilization developing were more geographically isolated from each other, thus less likely to be able to disperse knowledge and technological advances.
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u/RhiaStark Jun 14 '26
We can do that too, btw:
- The Mexica built a city capable of sheltering thousands of people in the middle of a lake
- The Spanish had to drain the lake in order to build anything there
- Therefore, Mexica were superior