But... none of those things actually contradict "stone age". It might be better to point out that an advanced civilization isn't necessarily defined by metalworking.

Even if. How does a different state of technological developement justifies colonialis, conquering and genocide?

I don't think tech levels even matter in the discussion about whether the native american genocide was justified.

All of the above are true, right? They had advanced astronomy, agriculture, ceramics, economics, and systems of government while living in the Stone Age. Their tools and weapons were made of wood and stone, right? Not bronze?

Reading "The Dawn of Everything" really opened my eyes to how much our understanding of Native American culture is entirely driven by White colonial narratives. It wasn't just everything in this meme, its the consequences of them. These weren't "tribals" waiting for civilization to come to them, there was a sophisticated and advanced ecosystem of nations here, not always peaceful but rooted in an entirely different world view and systems of interaction than Europe.

To the extent that when NA ambassadors traveled to Europe, they would report back with what barberous and disgusting people the Europeans were, for all the reasons that would sound familiar today: abandoning the sick, old, and poor to die; worshipping wealth and commodities over people and community; pollution; environmental destruction; exploitation; religious hypocrisy; and more.

The "Native Critique of European Culture" is devastating, as further evidenced by how many early colonies "failed" (including the famous "missing" Roanoke colony) because the indentured servants, prisoners, and other folks who made up early colonists much preferred to "go native" than be forced into exploitative labor relationships with the foreign power.

Also the Old Copper Culture of the Great Lakes area! The area has a lot of natural workable copper deposits that are pure enough to be shaped with campfire level heat and stone, not requiring the intensive smelting techniques that were required for metalworking in much of the rest of the metalworking world.

NORTH 02 on YouTube has some great videos about the metallurgy of the pre-Columbian Americas; I literally just watched the one on the Old Copper Culture today, and have his video on the larger metallurgical traditions of the Americas saved to watch.

The Old Copper Culture: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L0E0ueRnBLw

The Lost Metallurgy of the Ancient Americas: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tfwjM4e42cE

It's the problem of using an skewed system to make Europe the advanced civilization.

I read once that the first sign of civilization wasn't a weapon. It was a cured broken femur because that means someone took care of the person with the broken leg. So maybe that should be the guide to follow: medicine and healthcare.

These are the 3 main reasons I think native americans were considered primitives: lack of metal tools (some groups had access to copper and bronze, but none had iron), lack of any sort of writing (writing didn't extend much beyond central America) and, especially in the warmer places, wearing little to no clothing.

Still, no one in their right mind would ever look at the huge temples and cities built without animal traction and think "Yeah, only a group of primitives would do that". I mean, when you look at the megaliths of Sacsayhuaman, you immediately think "How the fuck did they do it?"

Indigenous Australians didn't farm animals by building a fence and bringing the animals food. That's too inefficient.

Indigenous Australians farmed animals by using cold fire to terraform the landscape into an ideal habitat for grazing and hunting, and then just waited for animals to show up and prosper.

Australian agriculture can't compete with European agriculture on volume, but volume wasn't the point. The point was efficiency and sustainability. Australians before colonisation were some of the least busy people in the world. They were on their way to fully automated luxury communism.

There was no Mayan empire. The Mayas were divided among city-states.

It's interesting reading Cabeza de Vaca's account of living in Texas for a decade. All the natives living on the Texas coast weren't even hunter-gatherers. They were just gatherers and lived in lean-tos. Meanwhile, 1000 miles south of them was Tenochtitlan, and a bunch of other cities that Bernal Castillo described as grander than those in Europe.

They did all of that, without steel or cattle.

Stone Age, my left ass cheek. They were more advanced than the Europeans, Europe just got a lucky spawn.

Overwhelming percentage of your modern diet is due to precolumbian agricultural science.

Where I live there are only two opinions about USA:

1. USA is shiny utopia where everyone is rich, and no hardship can be found.

2. USA is a dumpster fire no different from Russia or China.

American natives are just a funky idea from fantasy land for both sides.

The main thing that native Americans lacked that made their conquest inevitable was being able to handle European germs.

Imagine if 300 million Americans died just cause and the ones who didn’t insisted you should convert to Christianity to be saved (germ theory was not really common knowledge).

The great Hopewell road and the earthworks videos that Milo Rossi did were absolutely wild, I knew they had magnificent knowledge of astronomy (I can only ever dream of how good their night sky looked, living out on forested plains) but seeing the precision of the earthworks is insane

If iron is the thing that rules the advancement of a culture, sub-Saharian culture were more advanced that European ones. They used iron when Europe was still using copper.

all societies have been advancing. there are no advanced and non-advanced societies. there are only societies who have advanced differently. europeans expected when they headed out into the world to find other societies doing things the same as them. when they did not, they took this to be a failure in who they found, not in their perspective. Native Americans, Africans, and Asians who bore the brunt of European colonization had knowledge and technology the Europeans couldn't imagine. so when they encountered it they assumed the "savage brutes" were underutilizing the miraculous resources around them rather the originators and keepers of those resources.

this lack of imagination has continued to stymie a neo-colonial world's understanding of the possibilities that are available to us

I up you one on maya. The INKA

Native Americans were living in the Stone Age before Europeans arrived

Yeah, but at least they were living