ROFL:clap:

You may be onto something here.

The book Guns, Germs and Steel is really good (Pulitzer-winning good, actually) about explaining this. The short version is that it goes back to the diversity of plant and animal life in Europe/Asia/Africa, due to the shape of the continents; crops that were feasible in India could be transported to China and Turkey and Italy and Spain, and be feasible there as well because they were all at about the same latitude. In America, you didn't have this; a crop feasible in Peru could be transported to Panama or Argentina, but the latitude difference meant it likely wasn't as feasible in those new places. Hence, less diversity.

Diversity in crops meant better farming. Better farming meant fewer farmers were needed to feed a city. Fewer farmers meant more administrators, priests, artisans, and engineers. More of all of them meant more innovation. More innovation led to steel, firearms, ships, sextants, and advanced forms of government. All of that stuff led to the Europeans sending ships to America, rather than vice versa.

Diversity also lead to Europeans/Asians/Africans being exposed to a much, much wider variety of plant-born and animal-spread diseases, and therefore developing natural resistances to them. Native Americans, having a much narrower range of flora and fauna, didn't develop that. As someone else pointed out, these germs ran wild in America once they were introduced, and killed something like 95% of the Natives before the Europeans even landed in force. It was pretty brutal, but also unintentional - the follow-ups, however, were both brutal and very intentional.

If there were twenty or fifty times as many Natives as there were, I don't see the Plymouth colony surviving King Phillip's War, or the Pequot Uprising. The Iroquois Confederacy would rule for a long time. The best place for a continued European settlement would be Maryland or Virginia, which was mostly inter-tribal swampland.

The Europeans probably would never penetrate past the Appalachians, and if they did, they would never in a million years be able to maintain a supply line across the Great Plains. It would be *teeming* with Natives, and given the expertise the plains tribes developed with horses once they got them, the Europeans would be helpless against the lightning raids.

Thats all true... if it were some bucktoothed, subserviant looking charlie chan oriental with thick glasses, or a hooknosed jew holding a bag, a cow towing slave, gun toting latinos or arabs etc... it would be blasted and decried in the media throughout the ages.

Agreed on ALL of that, but please dont come after the Chiefs name :D... Together Is Powerful.

No, I have no more a problem with the Chiefs than I do with the Kings; the Braves is no worse than the Rangers; and the Seminoles and Blackhawks are no more problematic than the Vikings or Celtics. It's one thing to be sensitive to their plight, but it's another to try and pretend that they don't exist, or that they aren't a fundamental part of our nation.

The only ones that I know that cross the line are the Indians mascot and the Redskins name, and they cross waaaaay over it.

If there was a mascot called the "Fighting Germans" I guarantee you someone would be offended, but it wouldn't be germans...

Born and raised in Williamsburg. I understood exactly what you were saying.