WI: No Native American civilizations

[twovultures]

No American civilizations = hardly any Native Americans anywhere. At all. Period. The physical geography of Americas completely different. As I've been trying to beat into Tyr's head, even the Amazon rainforest and the Great American plains WON'T EXIST, they are human made constructions due to our thousands of years of intervention.

Pump your brakes there son, you are both being rude AND seem to be misunderstanding Mann. In 1491 he doesn't say that the Amazon was created by humans, just changed by them. While parts of the Amazon were made fertile through terra preta agriculture and burnings, there are still large parts of it which don't seem to have been altered this way. The Amazon Rainforest exists because of the huge river, not human interference.

IIRC he does claim that the Great Plains have been shaped by human activity, but it's more complicated than that. While human-made fires have effected the area, the Great Plains are semi-arid grasslands because of their inland location and the effects of weather, not human actions. As Workable Goblin points out, these environments are the result of millions of years of geologic change that started long before humans.

Your PoD would have to be to make the proto-potato and teosinte/proto-maize not exist

They can still exist, it's just that the domestication events that had them used as foodstuffs by humans wouldn't exist (or would be altered).

Without those crops you STILL would have those large civilizations and large cities in the Amazon.

Without manioc (or yucca, tapioca, cassava, arrowroot or whatever you call it) there will be a lot less calories to be gained from farming in the Amazon area. The wealth of food naturally in the region will probably allow for a relatively large population, but most of this food will be scattered and difficult to get without being nomadic. So we would see less people and less city-like structures.

This is ASB clearly.

Not in my opinion, though like I said it does kind of toe the line.

 

[Tyr]

You are in error by associating cities with monument building and complex civilizations. The Celts you mention had sophisticated culture and tribal politics and monuments were the standard versus the exception from Malta to Spain to Gaul to of course Stonehenge and more in Britain. You're simply erroneous about agriculture leading to little villages that don't band together. Yes villages can stay small, but so did the "cities" of Sumer which weren't much more than villages, but they still banded together and created empires. There is no place where just independent idealistic utopian agricultural villages spring up and don't incorporate into larger political and cultural areas. Agriculture hasn't even independently sprung up in more than 3 or 4 places around the world anyways! It isn't that these little villages are discovering agriculture on their own and then later being incorporated by a larger nearby civilization. The large civilization is exporting agriculture! It is not even known for sure that even the East Asians of all places did not simply learn agriculture through dissemination and use that knowledge to domestic their own locally found wild grains and animals instead of the common belief that they discovered it independently.

I think you need to read up on history a bit more. Agricultural villages are not idealist utopian places. Life is tough when your only concern is trying to grow enough food to survive through winter.

Of course they learn agriculture from somewhere and don't all come up with it independantly, that's so dumb as to be not worth stating, you're wrong however that it is all coming from some central civilization. Agriculture spread long before the first cities, from village to village, tribe to tribe, people learning it from neighbours and immigrants without needing to get together and make a big city first.
You seem to have a very unusual Sid Meier's Civilization view of history.

No American civilizations = hardly any Native Americans anywhere. At all.

Fewer certainly but hardly any? That just doesn't make sense at all. There were plenty of natives in the modern US and Canada when Europeans showed up without there being any civilizations.

The physical geography of Americas completely different. As I've been trying to beat into Tyr's head, even the Amazon rainforest and the Great American plains WON'T EXIST, they are human made constructions

The Amazon wouldn't exist? OK...that is just...conspiracy theorist stuff. Madness.
As to the plains - yes, humans played a huge role in crafting up landscape there. Why? They were hunter-gatherers who wanted better hunting lands. So getting rid of native american civilizations wouldn't affect that at all.

. Your PoD would have to be to make the proto-potato and teosinte/proto-maize not exist (teosinte actually isn't the undomesticated maize, it is simply a common undomesticated descendant of the now extinct undomesticated maize ancestor; saying teosinte is the ancestor is like saying Chimpanzees are Human ancestors, just as you can't domesticate a chimp and make a human, you can't now domesticate teosinte and get corn).

No it wouldn't. It is perfectly possible to have agriculture without civilization.

Without those crops you STILL would have those large civilizations and large cities in the Amazon.

No. You really wouldn't. Agriculture is a fundamental baseline necessity to even begin to move towards city building. Hunting and fishing couldn't bring in enough to support a city alone.

 

[bookmark95]

I think European colonization would actually be more difficult than OTL.

One of the most insulting myths is that Native Americans were hippies: people who learned to live in balance with the land. By the time Europeans put their toes on the continent, large areas of the Americas were already cultivated and cleared of forest by complex pre-Columbian societies. The Cahokia of what is now Illinois are believed to have wiped themselves out by deforestation (let that be a lesson to you developing third world countries, from a 20 year man who's never known hardship living in his parent's house.)

Without any developed cultures, colonizing the New World is going to be a challenge, since there would be a lot thicker forests to clear through.

 

[pa_dutch]

Fewer certainly but hardly any? That just doesn't make sense at all. There were plenty of natives in the modern US and Canada when Europeans showed up without there being any civilizations.

We need to clarify what constitutes "civilization," then. The Moundbuilders of the Southeast and the Anasazi and Hohokam of the Southwest certainly contributed to the population density of North America - I'd assume the OP would want to prevent that level of development as well, as he said no cities beyond small villages and no monumental architecture.

I'm assuming that cases like the Pacific Northwest, where large populations flourished without agriculture, are okay, but chiefdom-level agricultural societies like those in the Southeastern United States, the Caribbean, and Central America are too much.