From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Sun Apr 14 2002 - 19:20:26 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Curt, Greg, and Mike have constructively added to the
> discussion on Meso-American vs. Middle Eastern development,
> but, alas, we have all been undone by the presence of blanks
> within the charts, and the resulting distortion of the graphs
> when viewed by various email programs. For example, according
> to Curt's chart (as I cut and paste ascii text), it looks as
> though villages first developed in the West at 7000 B.C.,
> which is different from what I gave.
I would like to point out, though, that much of what we 'know' about
western breakthroughs is highly tentative. Western civilizations were
located generally in highly tropical locales, which allows the jungle to
quickly rot, erode, and cover up things, and it seems that in many
locations that there is still much more to find deeper down you dig, and
much is being discovered about sites long excavated. For example,
Tenochtitlan sports little human figurines all over the place, either
toys or religious items or what is not known. What is known is that
these clay figurines were mass produced in identical molds, revealing a
level of abstract industrial thinking that was quite advanced.
Furthermore, because the fingerprints of the workers packing clay into
the molds can be tracked and the genders of the workers discerned, it
shows that these industrialized jobs slowly shifted from domination by
males to females.
The meso-american civilization's primary problems with advancing their
technology is that they were predominantly located in regions bereft of
any appreciable amount of metal ores outside of gold and silver.
Sedimentary plains like that of Babylon, they didn't have a nearby
Damascus to develop metals technology. By the time of the Conquistadors,
some Toltecs were just starting to experiment with iron, though this
large delay was largely due to the middle ages collapse of the Mayan
civilization due to Tangaroa related environmental changes.
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