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Iron adopted b/c of collapse: I think the bronze age collapse happened not long after iron started being adopted. Most of the places harmed by it relied on a bronze monopoly for security and trade, then iron disrupted it. It's like what would happen to Saudi Arabia if cold fusion were discovered.
Bronze precedes iron: Remember that the Aztecs and the Incas both worked gold, so it's not just any metal. I think they need to get used to working with high temperatures. Africa leaped from stone to iron in exactly the same way the Aztecs did, though for them it was Arab slavers.
Conquest can be temporary: There's another way that populous but militarily weak societies can fight back against tougher foes. The men don't conquer the barbarians, the women do. China did this a bunch of times, and Mexico (post-Aztec) did too. It's hard to convince an army of testosterone junkies not to enjoy their war booty. 😏
Malthusian trap: Ironically China fell prey to this in the later centuries, especially during and after the Ming dynasty. By then they were as advanced as any European nation, but they stopped progressing. As with most empires, scheming eunuchs and corrupt officials took over, and meritocracy was no longer the rule. Europe was too decentralized to suffer the same fate. Malthusian traps are a social issue, not a technological one. A planet filled with 6 billion welfare niggers would strip the planet bare and slowly starve. A planet filled with 6 billion high-IQ competitive humans would quickly develop all sorts of technologies that would easily enable us to feed everyone and live in luxury. This is why even if globalism succeeds it would still doom humanity, because why progress when entrenched interests can only be disrupted by it?
Maybe... I think the agricultural collapses had more to do with it. They hit a solar minimum and suddenly all those high-status city people didn't have enough to eat. People all over the world were working too hard trying to grow/steal food to ship tin around the place. Then they were desperately recycling their existing bronze trying to fight off the raiders, or conduct their own raids.
As for aztec metalworking... why did they never develop a chalcolithic? Even without tin copper is still abundant and useful. There might be a clue there but I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. As I said, at least some amerindians did work meteoric iron, but idk if the aztecs did.
In the case of China I think it wasn't so much that they were able to fight successful guerilla wars as other invaders were generally able to repeat the success of the originals. So the mongols got defeated by jurchens who got defeated by manchus etc. Sometimes the invaders were ethnic han, but usually not.
True about mexican revolts, but those weren't really aztecs anymore, they were mestizos and usually lead by europeans and using european military technology.
Yeah, I think high obedience is a long term death trap. The rulers have more incentives to preserve the technological status quo so they stagnate. It's not just high IQ, there also has to be high competition as you say.
solar minimum Plausible. Also possibly a volcano.
I hadn't heard the term chalcolithic, so I looked it up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcolithic
They place the oldest copper working in Serbia, though the fertile crescent is not far behind. Artifacts did show up in China thousands of years later, but long before it seemed to be produced there. So yeah, it strongly suggests copper working came from outside regions (and Wikipedia would tend to be the most biased towards local invention theories). It's also much older than I knew (7500 years ago) which would place it at the very dawn of cities, implying that it was very important but not totally necessary for early agriculture. Definitely a big factor.
As for America, it seems like they would use copper but only cold-forge it, which is also how they used gold. So they never made the leap to actual metallurgy.
>In the case of China I think it wasn't so much that they were able to fight successful guerilla wars as other invaders were generally able to repeat the success of the originals. So the mongols got defeated by jurchens who got defeated by manchus etc. Sometimes the invaders were ethnic han, but usually not.
You're mistaken. The Manchus and the Jurchen are the same, and they're outsiders similar to the Mongols. The order of dynasties goes Song (Han) -> Jin (Jurchen) / Southern Song -> Yuan (Mongol) -> Ming (Han) -> Qing (Jurchen later renamed to Manchu). So the pattern is repeatedly native rule leads to wealth but then degeneracy, followed by foreigners conquering them, which leads to suffering but then national resistance followed by chaos until a new native hegemon rises. So they've fought a number of guerilla campaigns against outsiders, but usually only after the outsiders got weakened by luxury and court intrigue. They could never beat the people who were born into the saddle, but they could beat their sons who were born in a harem.
They place the oldest copper working in Serbia, though the fertile crescent is not far behind
Oh that's interesting, I genuinely hadn't known that. Otzi the iceman was also found with a lot of arsenic on his skin, leading to speculation he might have been a copper worker. He also had a copper axe which would have been the ferrari of tools at the time.
As for America, it seems like they would use copper but only cold-forge it, which is also how they used gold. So they never made the leap to actual metallurgy.
Ah! Fair enough. I suspect pottery might have been the key preceeding technology which leads on to metallurgy. Amerindians did have pottery, but it was nowhere near as much a core technology as in the near east and eastern mediterranean.
You're mistaken. The Manchus and the Jurchen are the same, and they're outsiders similar to the Mongols. The order of dynasties goes Song (Han) -> Jin (Jurchen) / Southern Song -> Yuan (Mongol) -> Ming (Han) -> Qing (Jurchen later renamed to Manchu). So the pattern is repeatedly native rule leads to wealth but then degeneracy, followed by foreigners conquering them, which leads to suffering but then national resistance followed by chaos until a new native hegemon rises. So they've fought a number of guerilla campaigns against outsiders, but usually only after the outsiders got weakened by luxury and court intrigue. They could never beat the people who were born into the saddle, but they could beat their sons who were born in a harem.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was the correct order of dynasties. My point was more that any reigning chinese dynasty was subject to the same weaknesses as it's predecessors and tended to be conquered for the same reasons. I'd argue that's different to being inherently vulnerable to guerilla war.
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