网帖翻译

Claire Jordan
No easy access to iron, and no horses or oxen. The people of South and Central America managed a lot, in some cases with the aid of llamas, and they built great cities, but the north didn’t even have llamas, just dogs. And without a beast of burden stronger than a human, hauling blocks of stone around is usually more trouble than its worth. As with evolution, each stage in the development of an urban civilisation has to be beneficial - people don’t put in generations of work to build something which will suddenly be useful in 1500 years.

不容易获得铁，也没有马或牛。南美洲和中美洲的人们在某些情况下借助大羊驼管理了很多事情，他们建造了伟大的城市，但北方甚至没有大羊驼，只有狗。如果没有比人类更强壮的牲畜，搬运石块通常会带来更多的麻烦。就像进化一样，城市文明发展的每个阶段都必须是有益的——人们不会花几代人的时间去建造一些1500年后突然有用的东西。

They also didn’t have writing, aside from some very laborious systems in the south. This is not through any kind of failure. White people didn’t invent a fluent form of writing either, or Africans, or anybody except small groups in the Middle East and the Far East, who then taught everybody else with whom they had trade connections.

他们也没有文字，除了南方一些非常费力的系统。这并不是失败的原因。白人也没有发明流利的书写方式，非洲人也没有，除了中东和远东的一些小团体，然后他们教授与他们有贸易联系的其他人。

Also, many of the nations lived spread out thinly in a landscape rich with resources, so they didn’t have the thousands of years of all-out warfare which forced the pace of development in much of the world. It’s noticeable that in areas where there *was* organised warfare, mainly in South and Central America, there were stone cities.

此外，许多民族分散地生活在资源丰富的地区，所以他们没有数千年的全面战争，迫使世界上大部分地区的发展步伐加快。值得注意的是，在那些有组织的战争的地区，主要是在南美和中美洲，有石头建造的城市。

Nevertheless there were also cities in North America, built of wood and mud and hides and basketwork - things a human can carry without four-legged help - but they were perishable and only the mud ones left much in the way of ruins.

尽管如此，北美也有城市，它们由木材、泥土、兽皮和编织物建造而成，这些都是人类可以在没有四腿动物帮助的情况下携带的东西，但它们易于腐烂，只有泥土建筑留下了一些废墟。

Also, it somewhat depends on what you mean by technology. The peoples of South American may not have had much in the way of machines but they had stone masonry at least as good as Europe’s, and mathematics and astronomy better than Europe’s. Native American societies in general seem to have had a genius for botany, and an extraordinarily high proportion of our modern crops were first domesticated in pre-Columbian America.

另外，这在很大程度上取决于你对技术的定义。南美的土著人可能没有多少机器，但他们的石工技术至少和欧洲一样好，数学和天文学比欧洲更好。总的来说，美洲土著社会似乎对植物学有着天赋，我们现代农作物中的很大一部分最早是在哥伦布前的美洲驯化的。

John Kelly
Miss Jordan has made several cogent observations. I would also point out that your assumption is not exactly on target. Their technology was a developed as it needed to be for their purposes. Humans arrived in Europe about 50,000 years ago, and a little earlier in the Middle East and Eurasia. Their populations grew to a point where there were far more of them in Europe by the time agriculture arose than there were in the Americas at that time. The sequence of the settlement of the Americas is in a good deal of dispute right now, but it probably only took place about 15,000 years ago. So they didn’t have the population density of Europe. Large cities arise because of population density

乔丹小姐提出了几个有说服力的观点。同时我也想指出，你的假设并不完全正确。人类大约在50000年前到达欧洲，稍早些时候到达中东和欧亚大陆。他们的人口量增长到一定程度，到农业兴起时在欧洲的人口数量要比当时的美洲要多得多。美洲的定居顺序目前存在很大争议，但可能只发生在大约15000年前。因此，他们没有欧洲那样的人口密度。大城市的产生是由于人口密度

the cities of central and South America are testimony to the success of agriculture in those areas. Agriculture spread north as well as south, so the tribal civilizations of North America had not developed as much as those in central and South America. The city which is now called Cahokia, on the east bank of the Mississippi River, opposite the present-day location of St. Louis, thrived for 2000 years, and only went into decline about a century before Europeans arrived. It may have had a population of 40,000, including the exurban villages. That’s a respectable performance for what we might call a primitive civilization. In the southeastern part of what is now the United States, there were no real cities, but a great man large towns. Long, long after Cahokia was founded, the Mississippian culture took over, and that was what was responsible for the dramatic expansion of the city about a thousand years ago.
Mississippian culture - Wikipedia

中南美洲的城市就是农业成功的证明。农业向北扩散，所以北美的部落文明没有像中南美洲那样发展。现在被称为卡霍基亚的城市位于密西西比河东岸，与现今圣路易斯的位置相对。它繁荣了2000年，在欧洲人到来前的一个世纪才开始衰落。它可能有4万人口，包括郊区村庄。对于我们可以称之为原始文明的城市来说，这是一个可尊敬的表现。在现在美国东南部，没有真正的城市，但有很多大城镇。很久很久以后，密西西比文化接管了这个地区，这就是大约1000年前这座城市发生巨大扩张的原因。

Unmolested, that civilization would likely have developed in much the same way that middle eastern and European cultures had developed, thousands of years earlier. Basically, Europeans had had a head start in comparison to the American civilizations. Even so, it is not necessarily reasonable to assume that they weren’t technologically advanced. Their technologies served their ends. Agriculture fed them more reliably than hunting and foraging, and so their populations increased just as dramatically as had those of Europe and Asia

如果这个文明没有受到干扰，它可能会像中东和欧洲文明一样发展，早在几千年之前就已经发展了。基本上，欧洲人比美洲文明有了一个先发优势。即便如此，我们不一定可以认为他们在技术上并不先进。他们的技术满足了他们的需求。农业比打猎和采集更可靠地养活了他们，所以他们的人口增长就像欧洲和亚洲一样戏剧性地增加了

it just happened earlier in the “old world.” Population densities lead to cities, cities lead to the concept of city states which wish to dominate their locales, and that leads to war. There is nothing more stimulating to technological development than war. The aboriginal Americans fought one another, but large scale wars were largely restricted to the city states of central America, and the Pacific coast of northwest South America. The technology of the Spaniards did not impress the Nahua peoples of what we now call Mexico. Cortés was only able to conquer Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) because he was able to enlist the other city states of the central plateau to join him in the effort.

只是早在“旧世界”就发生了。人口密度导致城市的产生，城市导致城邦的概念，这些城邦希望统治自己的地区，这就导致了战争。没有什么比战争更能刺激技术发展了。土著美洲人互相战斗，但大规模的战争在中美洲的城市国家和南美洲的太平洋沿岸地区大部分局限于这些地区。西班牙人的技术并没有使现在所称的墨西哥纳瓦人感到震惊。科尔特斯之所以能够征服特诺奇蒂兰（现在的墨西哥城），是因为他能够让中央高原的其他城邦加入他的行列。

Technology follows need. People invent new tools as they perceive a need. The Mississippian civilization and the civilizations of the central and South America differed from the European civilizations only in that they lacked metallurgy. When Cortés landed where Veracruz in Mexico is now located, and the marched inland, his little force (a few more than 400) was attacked by the Tlaxcalans, the people of a city state in the mountains who had never submitted to the Aztecs. They attacked ferociously for three days. According to Bernal Diaz. who was there, every Spaniard (apart from those who had been killed) had been wounded.

技术是根据需求发展的。人们发明新工具是因为他们感到需要。密西西比文明和中南美洲的文明与欧洲文明的不同之处仅在于它们缺乏冶金。当科尔特斯降落在如今位于墨西哥港口城市维拉克鲁斯的地方，并向内陆行进时，他的小队（400多人）被攻击了。据当时在场的伯纳尔·迪亚兹（Bernal Diaz）称，每个西班牙人（除了被杀死的人）都受了伤。

The Tlaxcalans were not frightened by the Spanish firearms. When Cortés had landed at Tabasco, he had a Spanish priest who had been shipwrecked on the Yucatan, and had escaped and joined his expedition. At Tabasco, he met La Malinche, a Nahua woman also called Doña Marina—who spoke Nahatl. Using the priest and Doña Marina to translate, he told the Tlaxcalans that he had come to conquer Tenochtitlan for his king. They provided soldiers and porters to carry supplies. Cortés succeeded because of his diplomatic skills, and he could not have done it without the aid of the Nahua city states. The other city states had more than enough soldiers and the logistics to have ended the Aztec empire—what they lacked was the alliances necessary to accomplish that end. The European advantage in conquering the Americas was social organization, not technology.

特拉斯卡兰人并没有被西班牙火器吓倒。当科尔特斯在塔巴斯科登陆时，他遇到了一位在尤卡坦岛上遇难并逃脱并加入他的探险队的西班牙神父。在塔巴斯科，他遇到了玛琳奇（Malinche），一位讲纳瓦特尔语的纳瓦女性。他利用这位牧师和玛琳奇来翻译，告诉特拉斯卡兰人，他来征服特诺奇蒂兰为他的国王。他们提供士兵和搬运工来运送补给。科尔特斯成功是因为他的外交技巧，如果没有纳瓦城邦的帮助，他无法做到这一点。欧洲在征服美洲方面的优势是社会组织，而不是技术。

There is one marvelous example of technological development which the Europeans were not able to match, quite literally for centuries. That was the birch-bark canoe. Light-weight, sturdy and made from available resources, this invention of the Algonquians made it possible to travel from Québec to what is now northern Minnesota in a matter of weeks, or from the Great Lakes to Hudson’s Bay. BOth the Northwest Company, a fur-trading company based in Montréal, and the Hudson’s Bay Company found them indispensable. White boys didn’t come up with anything as good until they invented fiberglass in the 1930s

有一个奇妙的例子是技术发展，欧洲人在几个世纪之内甚至无法达到。这就是白桦树皮独木舟。这种由阿尔冈昆人发明的轻便、坚固且使用可用资源制作而成的发明，使得从魁北克到现今的明尼苏达州北部只需要几周，或从五大湖到哈德逊湾。北西公司，一个总部位于蒙特利尔的毛皮贸易公司和哈德逊湾公司都认为它们是不可或缺的。直到20世纪30年代，白人发明了玻璃纤维，才有了更好的替代品

more than 300 years after the French landed in what we now call Canada. Light enough to be carried, they could be used to transport people an goods over very long distances, and they be unloaded, carried to a new watershed, and then travel more long distances. These canoes met a need, and the aboriginal Americans didn’t need anything from Europeans to fill the need—for three centuries, the Europeans had nothing better to offer.

——这比法国人在现在所谓的加拿大登陆时晚了300多年。它们足够轻便，可以用来运送人和货物，可以在很长的距离上卸下，搬到新的流域，然后再行驶更长的距离。这些独木舟满足了一项需求，美洲土著人不需要欧洲人的任何东西来满足这个需求——在三个世纪内，欧洲人没有更好的东西可以提供。

French voyageurs and aboriginal Americans carrying the fur trade deep into North America.

法国航海家和美洲原住民将毛皮贸易带入了北美洲深处。

James Krog
The disparity in technological levels between native Americans and Europeans stems from several issues. Some have been pointed out well in other answers, but I would like to try to pull them all together in one place.

美洲土著人和欧洲人技术水平差距的根源有几个问题。其他答案中已经指出了一些问题，但我想试着把它们都集中在一起。

One chronic problem which the native Americans could not escape, through no fault of their own was the lack of draft animals to help with heavy labor. When you have to haul, carry, drag and tote on your own back with your own arms everything you do is a lot harder, takes longer and is less efficient then having it done with help. Read “Energy through world history” by Vaclav Smil. Dogs were used to drag stuff, but compared to horses they just are not much help. LLamas and alpacas were available in south America, but never exported to other regions. So many more man hours were spent by native Americans on hard labor less efficiently then by Europeans with the help of draft animals. This meant those people were not free to work at other pursuits.

一个长期存在的问题是，美洲土著人无法摆脱的，且并非他们自己的错，就是缺乏用于辅助重体力劳动的牲畜。当你不得不亲自背负、拖拉和搬运一切，所有工作就会变得更加艰难、耗时更长，效率也会降低。请阅读瓦茨拉夫·斯米尔（Vaclav Smil）的《能源通过世界史》（Energy through world history）。狗被用来拉东西，但与马相比，它们帮助不大。南美洲有羊驼和驴马，但从未被输出到其他地区。因此，美洲土著人花费了更多的人力在辛苦劳作上，效率不如欧洲人依靠牲畜助力那么高。这意味着这些人没有空闲去从事其他活动。

Another side affect of lack of domestic animals is limited travel. This limits communication, trade, exchange of ideas and resources. In Europe from early periods due to trade with horse and oxen people were able to make use of resources from mies, hundreds of miles or even the other side of the continent and do so in quantity. North American trade was heavily limited to the rivers and of much lower volume.

缺乏驯化动物的另一个副作用是旅行受限。这限制了沟通、贸易、思想和资源交流。在欧洲，由于早期与马和牛的贸易，人们能够大量利用来自数百英里甚至整个大陆另一边的资源。北美的贸易严重受限于河流，而且规模也较小。

City size and permanence was a limiting factor in America. Due to the lack of draft animals towns and cities in America were generally limited in the size they could reach and keep for the long term. There is a limit to how far you can expand your fields when you have to walk out to harvest, harvest by hand and carry the harvest back on your back in your arms after harvesting. The further you push your fields out from town the farther away the woods are. That matters when almost all of your meat comes from hunting. It matters also when it is time to cook the meat you hiked to hunt. The more people you cram in a town to build a city the more wood you cut for firewood, tools, building material, until the woods are gone and too far to bring back for use. This happened at Cahokia, where at the end the people were suffering malnutrition due to lack of firewood to cook their food. And so cities were infrequent and ended up abandoned when the logistical bottle neck was hit. Native Americans were not stupid and so most of them adopted a more dispersed smaller town culture as opposed to the civilization cultural model. But it comes at a price of loss of the ability to concentrate all that energy and the mental resources together where they can work together in cooperation in ways that would never happen in isolation.

城市规模和永久性在美国是一个限制因素。由于缺乏牲畜，美国的城镇和城市一般受到了大小和长期保持方面的限制。当你不得不亲自走出去收割、徒手收割并背负收成回来时，你扩展田地的距离就受到了限制。当你将田地推向城镇以外时，树林就越来越远。这对几乎所有的肉类都来自狩猎的情况有影响。当是时候烹饪你远道而来狩猎的肉时，这就显得更为重要。你将更多的人挤进一个城镇来建造一个城市，你就会砍更多的木材做为柴火、工具、建筑材料，直到树林被砍光，而且也太远无法搬回来使用。这在卡霍基亚发生过，在那里人们由于缺乏柴火烹饪食物而遭受营养不良。因此，城市是罕见的，并最终在遇到后勤瓶颈时被废弃。美洲土著人并不愚蠢，所以他们中的大多数人采纳了更分散的小型城镇文化，而不是文明文化模式。但这付出了集中所有能量和心智资源的代价，在这种方式下，人们可以在合作中一起工作，这在孤立中是永远不可能发生的。

As has been pointed out the Americas were settled later then the Eurasian landmass and so Europe simply had a head start and this helps. Also cropwise Europe had a head start as agriculture was much older in Eurasia then in the western hemisphere. Here we get to the north/south vs east/west axis issue. It isn’t a big deal for simple human travel. It is a big deal for animals and a huge one for plants. It has to do with climate zones. Corn is old in central America it’s homeland. It is much newer , even recent in parts of North America. Corn was a tropical plant and it took ages to develop cultivars that could handle colder climates. Each move north took it to a new climate zone and meant time to develop a strain that was worth growing for the locals. Going south to north from southern Mexico to New England there are a lot of climate zones to adapt to.

正如已经指出的那样，美洲的定居时间比欧亚大陆晚，所以欧洲就会有了一个先发优势，这对他们有帮助。此外，在农作物方面，欧洲也领先，因为农业在欧亚大陆比在西半球更古老。这里涉及到南北和东西轴线问题。对于简单的人类旅行而言，这并不是什么大问题。但对于动物和植物来说，这是一个很大的问题，对于植物来说更是如此。这与气候带有关。玉米在中美洲是古老的，是它的故乡。而在北美的一些地区，玉米则要新得多，甚至是最近的。玉米是一种热带植物，需要很长时间才能培育出适应寒冷气候的品种。每一次向北移动都意味着进入一个新的气候带，需要时间培育出适合当地种植的品种。从墨西哥南部到新英格兰向北移动，需要适应许多不同的气候带。
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In Eurasia with its east west axis, climate zones make long bands that allow travel for long distances and fewer zones going north south making less time to adapt from south to north. Europe may not have developed many of its own crops but it was in a position to receive and utilize many of the ones from other regions and the people were smart enough to jump on every good idea they saw.

在欧亚大陆的东西向轴线上，气候带形成了长条，使得长距离旅行变得容易，而南北方向上的气候带变少，从南到北的适应时间也较短。欧洲可能没有发展出许多自己的作物，但它处于接收和利用其他地区许多作物的位置，并且人们足够聪明，以接受他们看到的每一个好主意。

One stumbling block in native American culture was the poor quality of tools they had. They were stone and wood. In Eurasia they had developed metal early on and it makes everything easier. Oddly enough the metal problem seems to stem from their approach to pottery. They never developed the kiln. Native Americans made their pots and fired them in a pit with a terrible loss rate. This was horribly wasteful in clay, firewood and man hours. It also meant that they never found metal accidentally smelted in the ores they used as was the way the Egyptians found metal in the Sinai. Apparently art gave birth to metal working when the ores used for colorful dyes on pottery left metal nuggets behind as clixer in the Egyptian kilns. Metal use allows for more efficient farm implements, axes and carpentry tools for wood working, weapons and many other human works. Without the high temperatures of kilns the metal resources of the Americas remained out of reach. Without metals work was far harder and the ability to harness other resources was limited.

美洲土著文化的一个障碍是他们所拥有的工具质量很差。它们是由石头和木材制成的。在欧亚大陆，他们早期发展了金属，这使一切变得更容易。奇怪的是，金属问题似乎源于他们对陶器的处理方式。他们从未开发窑。美洲土著人制造他们的陶器并在坑里烧制，损失率很高。这不仅在粘土、柴火和人力上浪费，而且意味着他们从未像埃及人在西奈半岛上那样偶然地在使用的矿石中发现金属。显然，艺术诞生了金属加工，当埃及窑炉中用于彩色染料的矿石在烧制过程中留下金属块时。金属使用可以为更高效的农具、斧头和木工工具、武器和许多其他人类作品提供条件。没有窑炉的高温，美洲的金属资源仍然无法触及。没有金属，工作就会更加艰难，利用其他资源的能力也有限。

The lack of domestic animals applied not only to draft animals, but to food animals as well. Europe had a wealth of animals to hunt, but also had chickens, geese, sheep, goats, pigs, cows, rabbits, doves, pigeons, and other animals for food stuffs. They also had those animals for hides, fur, feathers, bones, dung for fertilizer and other ingenious uses.

缺乏家畜不仅适用于耕作动物，还适用于食用动物。欧洲有大量的狩猎动物，但也有鸡、鹅、羊、山羊、猪、牛、兔子、鸽子、鸽子和其他动物可用于食品。它们还有这些动物的皮革、毛皮、羽毛、骨头、肥料和其他巧妙的用途。

The climate of Europe combined with some of the crops they had made food storage easier then in much of the Americas. This is important not only for surviving the winter and bad times, but for embarking on large scale projects requiring mass and/or protracted labor.

欧洲的气候结合一些作物使得食品储存比美洲的大部分地区更容易。这不仅对于度过冬天和困难时期很重要，而且对于进行需要大规模、长期劳动的大型项目也很重要。

The Europeans were also close to the development center of writing and had reached a cultural development to benefit from it. It took root early and enhanced the ability to organize, exchange ideas and preserve them.

欧洲人也靠近书写的发展中心，并达到了受益于它的文化发展。它早期扎根并增强了组织、交换思想和保护它们的能力。

So the Europeans had the right combination of resources in foodstuffs, raw materials in metals, building stone, timber, livestock, and were at a good point on trade routes to receive and embrace new ideas, plants and animals. Once you have basic tools, a food supply, and concentration of people, energy, and resources to create a trade class of craftsmen and merchants you can get anywhere barring cultural barriers to change being imposed.

因此，欧洲人拥有食品、金属原材料、建筑石材、木材、家畜等方面的正确资源，并处于接收和接受新思想、植物和动物的贸易路线上的良好位置。一旦你拥有基本的工具、食品供应和人口集中、能源和资源来创建一个工匠和商人阶级，你就可以到达任何地方，除非强加文化障碍。

The Americas lacked many of the necessary components in terms of resources, and energy to build the self sustaining towns and cities to bootstrap up to the European level of technology. Without the importation of those items they were not going to make it. So they adapted to the environment they lived in and developed cultures to make the most out of it and did it well.

在资源和能量方面，美洲缺乏许多必要的组成部分，无法建立起自给自足的城镇和城市，以达到欧洲技术水平。如果没有这些物品的进口，他们将无法生存。因此，他们适应了他们生活的环境，并发展了文化来最大限度地利用它，并且做得很好。

Joseph Boyle
The best summary is still Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
Mesoamerican and Andean cultures were populous, urbanized, and advanced in many ways. Their quick conquest was due to mounted warfare (developed by central Eurasians who lived near wild horses, who then ravaged the rest of Eurasia for millenia), deadly diseases (developed because Eurasia and Africa had more animal hosts supplying pathogens to evolve, then suffered for millenia), and metal weapons and armor (not quite as geographically determined, though of course access to ores varied).

目前最好的总结仍然是贾里德·戴蒙德的《枪炮、病菌和钢铁》。美洲中美洲和安第斯文化在许多方面都非常发达，人口众多、城市化程度高。他们迅速被征服是由于骑兵战争（由居住在野马附近的中亚人发展而来，然后在几千年间蹂躏了欧亚大陆其他地区）、致命疾病（由于欧亚大陆和非洲有更多提供病原体进化所需宿主的动物，因此遭受了数千年的痛苦）和金属武器和盔甲（并非完全受地理因素制约，尽管当然矿石的获取存在差异）。

The wheel was not used because those areas were mountainous and draft animals were not available.
Would they have advised their ancestors entering the New World 10000 years ago not to hunt all the large animals unused to humans, but domesticate some of them? Eurasians' use of animals made them tougher and made some things easier, but at the cost of much suffering over thousands of years.

轮子没有被使用，因为这些地区多山，没有牲畜可用。
他们是否会建议他们的祖先在一万年前进入新世界时不要猎杀所有对人类不习惯的大型动物，而是驯养其中的一些？欧亚人对动物的利用使他们变得更强壮，使一些事情变得更容易，但代价是经历了几千年的许多苦难。