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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

From what I remember reading up on it a while ago (and I'm probably wrong) a large part of the death was not intentional and was probably inevitable (like wise even for the black plague but a lesser degree.. it could have been avoided).

Compare this to the Nazis or various other genocides which were highly avoidable and huge faults of humanity.

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It doesn't matter Europeans destroyed indigenous cultures in America through the spread of disease. We should make sure that every child in the US knows this. We should also make sure that we remind people of it whenever people mention other tragedies like the Black Death. We're very bad people. We need to remember.

It is and was called imperialism and almost every nation and civilization has done it (not that it excuses it).

Even optimistic Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek future it continues on and is a topic (the prime directive).

What do you think happened to the neanderthals?

Survival instincts are just inherently nasty but we as humans should rise above these tendencies since we have the cognitive ability to do so.

I mean for god sake look how we treat and what we do to the animals that we eat. A hundred years from now it might be seen as a serious moral slip on our part. We might all be very bad people.

> Survival instincts are just inherently nasty but we as humans should rise above these tendencies since we have the cognitive ability to do so.

Human nature is what it is. It has not changed in millennia, it's only sublimated by culture. Football is a substitute for war. Social media and Reality TV are a substitute for the 'gossip fence.' Gene Roddenberry had a transparently unrealistic model of humanity, and thank goodness. For many people it would boring beyond belief.

The neanderthal genocid theory is a bit outdated. Actually they died because of an erruption below the phlegraean fields. Every human born in an area where neanderthals used to live is a far descendant of ybrids. Until today our dna is made of up to two percent of their dna. The mutations resulting in a low melanin levels and blue eyes are thought to be most likely inherited by neanderthals.

A recent YC thread had an alternative explanation: the male offspring of S/N interbreeding may have been sterile. The 2% of DNA you mention is all inherited through the female line.

you mean those folks who went away from europe/were kicked out for various reasons, and came to america and afterwards did those things? i agree with your outrage since it shows pure evil, but logically most descendants of those people should be US citizens for many generations.

> We're very bad people. We need to remember.

I understand the ancestral affinity you may feel to the perpetrators, but we aren't bad people because our ancestors made terrible decisions.

> but we aren't bad people because our ancestors made terrible decisions

True; we're bad people because we're still making terrible decisions today, but you can't run an empire without breaking a few countries.

> you can't run an empire without breaking a few countries.

I don't know. It hasn't been tried before.

Sounds like an awesome way to spend your life, enjoy!

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