Hey folks, What kinds of technology did the pre-columbian
of the Americas master?
Stay tuned to find out about the great constructions of the original people on this land.
If you’re like me, and my channel analytics say you are, you have an interest in what
the the Americas were like before colonization.
As I’ve talked about before on this channel, the indigenous inhabitants of this vast continent
weren’t like the old textbooks say.
Today, with the help of my buddy Soliloquy, we’re going to look at the technologies
developed by American indigenous peoples.
Just a note before we dig in, these inventions might not be solely from indigenous people.
Some of these inventions were either invented in other places independently, or were invented
by indigenous people after the columbian exchange.
That aside, let’s dig in!
We have to begin with some of the most amazing ways indigenous peoples made their homes.
Our first example comes from what would become the South-West United States.
Here, the Anasazi people invented ancient apartment blocks.
One of these apartments discovered, called Pueblo Bonito, shows that this technology
is at least a thousand years old.
This predates the first apartments in the United States by seven centuries.
Some of these apartment complexes still stand strong today.
In fact, some of the Pueblo people in New Mexico, still live in some of these Anasazi
apartment blocks.
Seriously, thousand year old apartments.
We then have to go north, way north, even more north than that.
Excellent!
Yes, the humble igloo is quite a famous piece of architecture.
Arguably the most famous inuit cultural product.
It is a remarkable invention!
The igloo can be built in just a few hours with literally nothing more than the ice that’s
around you, and in the arctic with deadly weather, an impromptu shelter can really come
in handy.
Without any changes, an igloo can keep temperatures above zero, even when it’s brutally cold
outside.
The melting ice on the inside actually refreezes and makes it even stronger believe it or not!
Furthermore, some central inuit people will line the inside of the igloo with animal furs,
raising the internal temperature from about 2 degrees to about 10 to 20 degrees celsius.
For you yankees down in murica, that’s moving from 36 degrees to 50 to 68 degrees fahrenheit.
Another innovative home comes from the great planes of the United States.
This, is a tipi, not a wigwam.
We’ll do wigwams next.
The tipi is a perfect home for the prairie dweller on the go.
If your livelihood comes from following the movements of herds of Buffalo, you want a
shelter that you can put up and take down easily.
The tipi is warm and durable, but its real selling point is that it , can be set up or
taken down within an hour.
A wigwam is a completely different type of dwelling.
These dwellings are found in both coastal areas of modern day Canada and the United
States.
They may be made from simple materials, but these were and are sturdy structures.
What makes them stand out is the simple idea of using bent sticks with material built over
top comes in many different varieties depending on the culture that makes (pay attention to
tense agreement) it.
So much so, that I was able to find about 14 different names for this type of structure
. These were great homes for what we’d call semi-sedentary people.
They did move, but more like once every decade or so, rather than the tipi dwelling people
of the great plains who moved much more often.
The impressive construction projects of the indigenous peoples is not limited to smart
home design, but also includes large infrastructure projects.
People living throughout the Andes mountain range in south America, as well as people
in central mexico constructed intricate aqueduct systems.
People such as the Chimu and Moche used the aqueducts to live in very dry regions that
they might not have been able to settle otherwise.
They also built roads throughout the Andes region that the Incans would later expand
into over 32,000 kilometers ( or 20,000 miles) of road.
These would cross from Colombia over mountains, deserts, rivers, rainforests, and plains into
Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Chile.
This road system allowed for goods, and messages to pass through a growing empire.
All roads lead to Cusco I guess.
This advanced infrastructure allowed for massive civilizations to thrive.
The Aztecs also used aqueducts to keep their imperial capital city of Tenochtitlan hydrated.
At the time of contact Tenochtitlan was home for 212,500 people, making it the fourth largest
city on earth.
Outside of construction, indigenous peoples from across the continents were able to domesticate
a wide variety of animals and plants.
However, they were a little lacking when it came to animals ripe for domestication.
However, they did manage to make a few species work for them.
The Andean peoples in south America managed to domesticate a few local species.
The alpaca and the llama can carry some things, but also provide wool for those chilly mountain
nights.
If they got hungry, somewhere between 11, and 9 thousand years ago, they raised, and
ate guinea pigs.
Not to mention further north different groups domesticated turkeys, and I think many of
us are grateful for that.
North America had dogs, and so a handful of dog breeds can trace their origins back to
indigenous groups.
Mexicans bred dogs into the coyote, mexican hairless dog and the Chihuahua.
In the carolinas, the natives there bred the California dog.
Lastly, up north the Alaskan natives bred the Alaskan malamute.
Since the American continent runs north to south, there are a lot of different biomes,
and a lot more crop diversity than in Eurasia.
Let’s see if I can list all the plants they domesticated in one breath.
Avocado, beans, corn, cranberries, papaya, peanuts, peppers, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins,
quinoa, squash, sunflower, tobacco, tomatoes, vanilla, and yams.
Plants are not an easy thing to domesticate, it sometimes requires years of coaxing to
be something you are going to want to eat.
It involves some fancy sciencey stuff, so I brought over my friend Soliloquy, from the
channel…
Soliloquy, to explain how this process works Compared to modern crops wild plants are small
potatoes, literally small potatoes in the case of potatoes.
But with a little effort, farmers, even ancient farmers can improve a plant's performance.
The basis of genetic change is mutations; random changes to the organism's genetic code.
Sometimes these changers are bad, but other times these are beneficial.
In the case of Darwin’s Natural Selection this benefit is to the organism's reproductive
success in the natural environment; but the selection pressure needs not be natural; man
can meddle with the game - evolution can be driven by artificial selection!
And this is what our ancient farmers did.
With no prior genetic knowledge people simply selected plants with particularly desirable
characteristics, and used these individuals for propagation, resulting in an accumulation
of valuable traits over time.
With modern genetics we have refined this process; by backcrossing we can introduce
specific traits from one plant into another, we can accelerate the rate of mutation, and
use molecular techniques to track our changes at the level of DNA.
But these more advanced techniques are not required to turn small potatoes into a feast
or a practically inedible grass into corn on the cob.
Just the act of selecting your best performing plants to produce the next year’s crop can
slowly create a prized yield to feed a city; and, you might be surprised at how easy that
change actually is.
But, I’ll leave that for the video over on my channel, so you can hit the “i”
or at the end of this video you’ll find it on an end card.
Thanks Soliloquy.
He also made his own video to come out alongside this one on the specific case of corn.
It has come a long way from being an inedible grass, and he has the story right there if
you click up in the corner.
With all these plants and animals, there were a lot of foods to choose from.
The bitter cocoa bean would be harvested by the Mexicans and turned into a frothy drink.
The Europeans would at first think it tasted awful, but with a bit of coaxing they turned
it into chocolate.
The native Mexicans also invented salsa and tortillas before Europeans arrived.
In both Mexico and New England, people would take thick sap from latex or spruce trees
and chew on it, inventing chewing gum at least twice independently.
Nomadic buffalo hunters would need to make their meat last, and be portable, so with
a bit of smoking and drying they invented jerky.
A common food around Canada and parts of the United States was Pemmican, made with whatever
you had pressed and cooked into a bar to make it mobile and energy dense.
I want to finish up this video talking a little bit about rubber.
I mentioned that Mexicans would chew on the sap of the latex tree, but they had another
use.
It was them who invented the ball.
Like the first actual rubber ball.
Europeans who watched them play with them would write strange accounts of how the balls
would leap excitedly when hitting the ground, because they didn’t really have the words
for that degree of bouncing.
Rubber actually had a lot of other uses as well, and information about using it spread
around south America.
This would lead to many different inventions, including the rubber balloon, which was invented
3,700 years ago in the Yucatan.
I hope though that this demonstrates that the Americas were not the primitive foragers
they’re portrayed to be, but a sophisticated mosaic of inventive civilizations that continue
to this day.
I only touched the surface, and will have to mention even more of these inventions sooner
rather than later.
Are you dying for part two of this series?
Be sure to tell me down in the comments.
If you share with some like-minded friends, the avalanche will get me back here before
long.
Thank you all for watching, I’d like to thank these patrons as well as Don and Kerry
Johnson.
I'd also like to thank @LizMacaroon on twitter for sharing my last video.
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