Aboriginals.

Gbear wrote: »

It was equal in Roman times and promptly left behind when the Roman empire collapsed.

It wouldn't have mattered if the mongols were overstretched. The army that was destroying everything in their path was pretty small. It was an expeditionary force rather than the totality of their power.

They didn't need to hold Europe to change history. They just needed to destroy it, like they did to Europe's "rivals".

Counter factual histories are largely bollocks, designed to be unfalsifiable. In this case its pretty easy. Britain wouldn't have been touched. France would barely have been touched. As for Germany and central Europe the 30 year wars destroyed 30% of the population of central Europe on, and the black death destroyed 30% of the European population beforehand. Europe recovered from both. Unless any of this could be proven to stop the discovery of America, or the scientific revolution it's just whistling in the wind.

Australian Aboriginals basically never achieved the Neolithic Revolution. This is important because all of our technology, our culture and civilization is a product of this - for all but the last ten thousand years or so, humanity was semi-nomadic hunter gatherers, just as the Australian Aboriginals were/are.

With the Neolithic Revolution we (Eurasia) got farming. From that came permanent settlements. Then civilization. Writing. Technology. And so on.

The genetic differences are also largely down to this. We handle alcohol better, because we learned to use it to purify water and thus after thousands of years we literally bred to deal with it better. The Australian Aboriginals did not (and are not alone - East Asians discovered boiling purified water and thus have a similar intolerance to alcohol). Conversely, the development of writing has meant that our memories are not as developed as those of Australian Aboriginals, who never having developed it rely upon spoken passing down of information.

And before we get any romantic notions about them living in some sort of harmony with each other and the environment, remember that hunter gatherers don't completely destroy the environment because their numbers are low, otherwise they consume and don't produce - that's the reason they tend to be nomadic; they move on when they've depleted the local resources. And as to harmony, it's estimated that up to 25% of Aboriginal males were killed in tribal warfare up to the arrival of Europeans, so not exactly peace-loving either.

British colonization was devastating to the Australian Aboriginals; they were systematically pushed off their lands and forced into the more arid desert regions and treated as sub-humans or worse still in some cases all but exterminated (as in the case of Tasmanian Aboriginals) and to this day remain as second class citizens in Australia. As has been said, they have a right to complain.

Having said this, it was inevitable. It was inevitable that they would come in contact with the wider World. It was inevitable that they would face cultural and resource pressures from external forces and migrations. People tend to forget that this is the way of things; after all the Celts were not the original inhabitants of Ireland either.

If there's one truth of evolution is adapt or become extinct and so far the Australian Aboriginals haven't done a very good job at the former. They certainly have a right to complain, but complaining isn't going to help them in the long run.

did some environmental damage with their hunting technique of burning areas of brush and forest to drive animals out.

I was sure that they burn areas of brush in order to limit the damage of any naturally-occurring bush fire

Also, this topic seems to have gone off track. Instead of addressing the "real story of the modern Aboriginal" and whether they're poor or drunk, you're all talking about how developed their hunting methods were when the Europeans arrived and the history of genetic differences between different races

kylith wrote: »

Don't forget that the country was (as it still is) mostly desert.

Like Egypt? Or Mesopotamia?

TBH, Australia is a huge country - a continent. It also has swathes of land the size of Western Europe that are arable and were populated by Aboriginal populations prior to the Europeans arriving, so using the desert argument isn't very compelling.

Thought they used bush fires to rejuvenate growth.

might do too. I just heard the damage limitation reason a number of times while there

When the Aborigines arrived Australia would have been much more densely vegetated/forested. They used a hunting technique that involved burning the forest to flush out game, leading to massive deforestation.

ok but Aborigines have...what...a 20,000 year history in Australia? No doubt their methods and reasons changed in that time (I#m pretty sure the reason nowadays is damage limitation) and, as I said before, isn't this thread supposed to be about modern Aborigines?