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Comment by AJMaxwell | Hacker News Reader

The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared.

IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.

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I never understand the “lack of animals to domesticate” angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama and alpaca.

More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…

Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.

Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden.

In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.

In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not suitable for domestication.

Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.

I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them.

I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.

Once you've worked out a good way to leach out the tannins, acorns actually become a really useful food. There are a variety of possible methods - boiling, prolonged immersion in running water, or repeated mashing and rinsing cycles.

The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability.

Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth.

They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.

The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations.

E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...

So a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower technology and a lack of farming.

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