Bro goes "look at all these european inventors" and then points at none of the "lesser races" in the same sense.
When you're done gawking, the Scots were inventing shit at a point in time where they were still seen as something of a lesser race.
It's almost like knowing history helps.
i can understand where you're coming from here, but native americans also have this same issue despite not having any of those issues. they simply never developed the things the Eurasian continents did.
They actually have several. The pack animal problem is endemic for almost all of the area save the Andes, which means it's not really that shocking the Incan Empire was the largest geographically, and aside from a Viking voyage that didn't seem to do much and some apocryphal trips that may or may not have happened, isolation is still in play with respect to China's invention sprees or Europe's perfecting of ideas. Europe in particular is the best-possible-start in this IRL game of Civ.
south americans had reached roughly ancient egyptian levels of tech, with considerably less metallurgical skill, and north american natives were on par with african natives. prior to worldwide trade, and in other european island nations, these things still evolved. the norse built massive boats and traveled to the new world before anyone else.
Metallurgy is one of the big tech gates, and while the resources can exist, the resources existing in a way that can be used by the average person is another question entirely. A forge isn't exactly a simple idea, you need a lot of perfecting of the method. A relatively peaceful society won't have much reason. Europe is historically not a peaceful continent. Wars or the threat of wars were relatively frequent since the collapse of Rome, so it's important to highlight that trade is not the only reason you want interconnectedness in your perfect Civilization start. You also want a lot of empires existing nearby each other to get in arms races. The Americas generally didn't have that, so naturally societies never had a reason to coalesce into much more than tribes. As The Ugly One said... Greece was not a land of peaceful farmers, perfecting the phalanx was effectively necessary so Persia doesn't steamroll your bumpkin ass.
a motivated society can complete almost any project. africa's horrifically bad living conditions even compared to other places in the world during the colonial era and prior should have been a HUGE motivator to try and find new land,
Conquest is a blessing and a curse.
The curse part is that your culture/civilization/tribe/whatever are not in control over their own destiny. By the time Britain shows up with the Maxim guns, it's already over. Ideally, you learn from the conquerers and go from that. That's what largely happened with the ancient Britons getting conquered by Rome.
If you're talking about why they didn't leave earlier... Africa is naturally geared to basically trap you. You can't sail the rivers, the continent's a giant plateau meaning most rivers have huge falls that make river travel a foregone conclusion. You can't really sail the seas, there are few natural harbors and let's keep in mind we're starting with no preconceived notions, so no sailing knowledge for anyone. Which leaves the Sahara, which is a logistical nightmare of its own. Crossing that is extremely dangerous, even moreso than staying in Africa, and you have to actually stock up for the trip using your hunter/gatherer, barely any tech methods. This is why isolation from developments is such a compounding effect.
how can one explain this lack of african empirical drive, when even compared to the native americans who were also plentifully provided for by nature they were completely sedentary?
The sheer degree with which Africa as a continent is not conducive to travelling ANYWHERE cannot be understated enough. If you were born in Sub-Saharan Africa in the year of our Lord 1254, you're basically either trapped there or committing to an all-but-suicidal trip across the Sahara. Wanting to travel is entirely fair... you're looking at a continent where travelling one country over is something of a lifetime achievement for caveman, so you need to develop out of being a caveman... with nothing coming to you to spur that. Uh oh.
the very fact that they could not comprehend the idea of being hurt from a distance even though they already had spears is not a positive indicator of inherent intelligence.
Right ballpark, wrong field. Bullets actually hurt less than the spears and didn't exactly leave behind visual feedback of what just hurt them, just that there's a hole there, it hurts, and red stuff's leaking out, so they figured they'd just keep charging and end the source of the pain. Dum-dum bullets are a rudimentary thing to achieve a hollow-point effect, so the bullet gains a lot more stopping power. It wasn't just about pain, but actual knock-you-off-your-feet-from-impact effect. I cannot stress enough how many preconceptions need to be dropped to get at their level here. It's not that they didn't comprehend pain, it's that when you shot them, they had no conception that a bullet exists and that's what ripped through them. Now is an appropriate time to point out that old sci-fi quote about sufficiently-advanced science looking no different than magic.
japan was basically completely isolated from the entire world before the last 400 years, only really being invaded. they did not have trouble with almost all of these concepts, up to and including having invented their own ranged weaponry and advancing it. it wasn't a gun, certainly, but they also immediately understood the concept of guns when introduced to them, and there are no records of the japanese thinking about guns as the africans did.
Several invasion attempts by the Chinese and Mongols say otherwise. Japan was isolationist, but would have been aware through obvious sea-lanes of what the Chinese were generally doing. You want that magnitude effect, you're looking at the US sailing iron-clads up Japanese harbors as a more proper comparison. There's also time periods in Japan as a wider country where infighting led to factional wars.
india managed to maintain and utilize the british infrastructure given to them. as much as i hate giving credit to pajeets, they did at least manage to keep most of their raj infrastructure in working order until they knew how to build new ones.
They also had a lot more demonstrable contact with the outside world, and an Indian empire with more than regional ambitions is not exactly unheard of either, so they pass the cultural development test on this. Ancient China did a lot of work inventing for the world.
south africa's white people were the only ones capable of that, and they denuclearized specifically so there would not be a black nation with nukes, and now the south africans cannot renuclearize because they don't know how, and can't afford to buy nukes from a nation that does.
Which, if the Afrikaaner literature I've read from them is any indication, is because of tribals even farther north ruining shit for everyone. I'm not gonna contest that South Africa's a failed state. Mandela may have had good intentions, but the country blatantly was not ready, and if I couldn't find enough reasons to hate communism, that played a part in this all as well.
for shit sake, niger is currently trying to litigate a piece of martian rock that they legally let leave the country, but now that it's valued at a high cost, they're suing to get it back saying it was smuggled out.
Almost like they don't have a concept of what rule-of-law is and never really learned one in occupation. It's tangentially related and I'm short on time right now, but Africa having a lot of "sons of the soil," movements in the wake of decolonization did a load of work destroying whatever learning from colonialization could have been done. Another differentiation between them and India is that India didn't give up on all British concepts and moved for peaceable independence instead of something like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. If you think you hate communism enough, you don't. A lot of that nonsense was fostered by commie revolutionaries.
no. none of them could even describe grass or dirt or mud to me in that way. they do not care what things are made of, so they never learn. this stymies their learning in the future.
That's effectively my point here. At no point has this threshold in Africa
ever been crossed because there's enough to not kill you but enough danger to keep all but the most exceptional or lucky people from leaving, and you only had maybe a good 20 year period of consistent and prolonged contact that wasn't broken up by dedicated sons-of-the-soil movements hating on anything foreign. Every other example, something crosses that threshold. Japan knew what steel was, clearing a major technological hurdle. India had at least a feudal grade organization system under the Mughals, meaning they definitely understood the basics of bureaucracy and societal organization. Even the native Americans had systems of rationing when times were tough, and a few tribes did engage in agriculture. So when you have people who never learned, never had a real push to learn, and never had opportunities fall into their laps to learn... what even is our base expectation here? If I'm assuming I drop a cro-magnon man into Africa, I genuinely do not expect him to get much further than he currently is... in fact I think we got the optimist's end of the spectrum, that Africa got any empires at all is a miracle.
As I said though, I'm running short on time. If you want to shoot this to DMs or something so it's not clogging up the chat, I'm down with it.
