Hi Rob,

Wow! Your explanation is very thorough in debunking that myth. You stated all the points that I knew plus more.

AND in spite of those obstacles that you have stated so very well, Native Americans were still able to ingeniously create cities and civilizations that were comparable to Europe and in the Fertile Crest. As we see with the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas.

What's sad was the myth of Western superiority started from day one when the first Europeans set foot on American soil. There is a Spanish diary that has survived that documented the very first time Spaniards had set eyes on the Aztec Empire. They were looking down from higher grounds onto the Capitol city of Tenatoclan (forgive me, for I know that I'm not spelling it right). Their first reaction to what they saw before them (almost verbatim) was it was simply incomprehensible that a heathen, godless group of people could be blessed with an engineering marvel of a city that rivaled the beauty of the cities back in Europe. Even though the Aztec city was larger than the cities in Europe, their paved roads were much better planned, no narrow crooked roads that were the mainstay of the European city, haphazardly planned through the years. They had a sanitation system, including a running water supply system, astronomy observatories, topped off with their own public zoo.

If I'm not mistaken, in one of the remains of the Inca cities, their water system still runs clean water through their lines that the locals still use to this day. I wonder if that will hold true with any of our modern American cities, five hundred years after they become vacant.

Ruben

The engineering genius [of the Maya] is clearer when compared to the region today. After its decline 14 centuries ago, El Pital was reclaimed by the rain forest until farmers and ranchers began clearing the forest to make way for cattle, banana, citrus and other crops in the 1940s.

In just a few decades, modern farming has ravaged the delicate environment that ancient people cultivated for centuries. The clear cutting appears to have exacerbated chronic flooding and contributed to last year's disaster.

The Aztecs, Incas and Mayas have long been recognized for the architectural skills that produced impressive cities, temples and pyramids of stone.

Residents of the Amazon lowlands, in contrast, left behind no massive monuments. As a result, researchers once assumed that those people never achieved the high level of social organization necessary for such public works projects. It is widely thought that they survived as relatively isolated hunters, gatherers and subsistence farmers.

But research over the last three decades has begun to paint a substantially different picture of people such as the Baures of the Bolivian Amazon. It has now become clear that they, too, were capable of massive construction projects requiring the sophisticated organization of large groups of people.

What they built didn't last, however, because they used mud, not stone.

Moving millions of tons of earth, the Baures constructed raised platforms for towns and cities and dug moats around them. They also built massive causeways between villages, elevated fields for intensive farming, canals and reservoirs.

Now a new study suggests that they also created levees and embankments that trapped water during seasonal flooding of the lowlands. This enabled them to increase their water supply and trap and hold large quantities of fish.