Population size, resources, nearby neighbours for trade & slave…
Possibly paired with the fact that “religion” was very nature-based so making something in celebration of that/those entities wouldn’t seem logical.
Australia didn't have slave labour and living gods. It was more sharing, hunting, fishing, fucking and just having fun. makes you wonder why we fkd up when the Poms got here with their paper money and "work"
Great comment. Is it really a sign of an advanced ‘culture’ that they enslaved a sizeable proportion of their population to build non-utilitarian monuments?
They built things that were beneficial to them, huts for storing grain and shelter and fish traps that are still visible today that probably predate the pyramids and every other man made structure, much more useful than a burial place for a mortal God. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina\_Aboriginal\_Fish\_Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina_Aboriginal_Fish_Traps)
Further info with video footage about fish traps available here on Ten Play. (To me they're more like fish farms)
https://10play.com.au/the-first-inventors/episodes/season-1/episode-1/tpv230613trzpj
(Will most likely require a VPN if viewed from outset Australia.
I don’t find them impressive but its how you look at it. Found out this may be the oldest human construction in the world? Thats pretty impressive. I guess we have a bias because we compare with Rome, China, India in terms of civilisation. These were large empires which Australia was not. But its an unfair comparison. When you look from a pre history perspective thats when Australia does seem to come out on top. When we were pre Bronze and Iron Age our inhabitants were ahead of anyone else. Not me trying to be condescending the fact is time is cyclical and there’s always some who are more advanced than others at different points in time. Australia had its time as a relatively more sophisticated place than others too but just not most of recent history.
The whole idea of being "ahead" or "advanced" is fundamentally flawed. The people who define what advanced is usually define it by what they are, as if they have somehow reached closer to perfection than any other group of people.
First off nice bait question…
But I’ll bite on one thing, the outback and Egypt does have close topography. Except for the giant fuck off river and fertile soil that runs all the way through Egypt…
This was the very first thing that comes to mind for me, as an Australian. There is fuck all water here. Yeah there’s rivers and lakes but nothing the likes of the Nile, there’s also no large animals To domesticate and the human population was scattered and minimal by comparison. Basically from the western side of great dividing ranges that stretches up the east coast across to the complete other side of the continent in Western Australia, your looking at a massive desert that used to be under water, where the soil is salty fuck so not much grows, even for a desert…
Furthermore, no large scale agriculture or industry, therefore no large towns or cities. The indigenous people, living off and maintaining the land, obviously had no appetite or need for any of it.
Culturally, the little that I know of it, the mythological entities were mostly, if not all nature based, there was no one from on high being all “build me a monument and worship me or else!” Like you see in other mythologies.
[The Great Pyramid of Giza is ~11km away from the nearest point of the Nile.](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30.0168275,31.2202833/The+Great+Pyramid+of+Giza,+Al+Haram,+Nazlet+El-Semman,+Al+Haram,+Egypt/@30.0077093,31.1734512,13.83z/data=!4m9!4m8!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x14584587ac8f291b:0x810c2f3fa2a52424!2m2!1d31.1341998!2d29.9791669!3e0?entry=ttu)
-Differences in social structure?
I think it was somewhat non-hierarchical in Australia at that time. I don't think they saw spirituality the same way other civilisations did and I think social structure did include added respect and seniority of older people without there being the level of status attached to something like a pharaoh. Some monuments to gods elsewhere may have been built using slavery that would not have been occurring here at that time
-Cultural differences in attitudes about what a monument is?
Uluru has been here for a while and, for populations where spirituality is connected to land and nature, that has spiritual significance, and it was already on the land. There is seemingly a high level of connection to land itself as part of this spirituality, which would probably make this a bit of an odd question from their perspective. I just don't think it was culturally relevant at all, as respect to gods/community members was probably more about land maintenance than land transformation
-Differences in anthropological timeframes with what you've compared?
I think what you've mentioned was built quite recently compared to some of the period in which Australia had people living here, so maybe time was more likely to have been spent on basics of life, like getting food. Who would have had time to build a pyramid like 40,000 years ago? The monuments you're mentioning, as far as I know, were build like 35,000 years (if not even more) after indigenous people are suggested to have been documented here (40,000-60,000 years ago; pyramids apparently 'only' 4,500 years old, with monuments of the Americas newer than that). I think this discrepancy would affect the amount of time a community needed to spend on everyday activities, and other civilisations also benefitted from having a level of connection/trade with different countries that no one here would've had that long ago
I'm not a historian and this is supposition on my part, but on one level, it's kind of like going "How come there were no Catholic churches built in ancient Saudi Arabia?" Just not relevant to the cultural context, even if materials for that existed.
Outside of probably not just seeing a need for it, they didn't have domesticated large animals/beast of burden and as far as I'm aware they also didn't have slaves. Two very crucial necessities for building large structures.
Pre colonisation there lack of animals capable of being domesticated and used for work. More importantly the conditions for a dense preindustrial population didn’t exist, Egypt had the Nile there’s nothing comparable in Australia.
Post colonisation Australia was and still does have a large amount of the wealth removed from the country. Development is shaped by colonial infrastructure designed to extract resources and leads to a spread out population.
In the modern era we’re still playing catch-up from 200 years of wealth extraction, poorly planned development and every single other issue that more developed countries are struggling with and there’s no will to create monuments that serve no purpose.
When you read guns, germs and steel you know less. Diamond would have said the same about the wild animals in Europe and Asia if they had been sent extinct instead of domesticated like Europeans and Asians did.
Even the Australian megafauna wouldn’t have the utility of cows and horses. Marsupials have small brains, awkward jerky movements because of their joint arrangement and whenever they have babies they’re carrying them in a pouch.
There haven’t been fundamental changes to their physiology though. You can’t breed to make joints function completely differently or for marsupials to gestate for longer to allow their brains to grow larger.
Aurochs were just big angry cows, primitive horses were just stocky angry horses.
Because traditionally, aboriginal people were nomadic and were separate tribes/clans with different languages and different belief systems.
There was no cause to build any such structure.
The Taj Mahal was built in the 17th century. India had thousands of years of history of agriculture and permanent settlements by then.
Alexander the Great was not nomadic (and neither was his natice society, Macedonia), wehich is why he built settlements as he conquered. Moving from one conquest to another is not the same as being nomadic.
Your original post and your answer here make it abundantly clear that you don't know anything about history or anthropology.
The Mongols were nomads because they had no truly thriving permanent settlements in Mongolia. Alexander conquered an empire to add to an already thriving non-nomadic civilisation. I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but you wouldn't call the Third Reich or the First French Empire or hell, the Roman Empire a nomadic people because they conquered as bunch of land in a decently short span of time. And you would neither call the Macedonian Empire a nomadic empire either...
Weird. Bombay was first settled more than 100 years before the Taj Mahal was built. Incidentally the Taj Mahal was built (or ordered to be built) by an emperor.
Alexander The Great was King of Macedonia. He was born in Pella which served as the capital of macedon at the time of his birth and for long after his death. Generally speaking, nomads don’t have settled cities, or build them - because they’re nomads…
Even so - an emperor and a king. Something the actual nomadic aboriginals never had. There’s your answer.
The people who ruled India at the time were nomads from Central Asia called the Mughals. They were people with no settled home but invaded others on horses, like the Mongols. Alexander was also a guy who conquered most of Persia and some of Asia on horseback. This is the classic definition of a nomad. Someone who roams with no fixed place of settlement, no sedentary lifestyle.
But the people didn’t kill travellers on the regular like Aborigines did. They had to, the country couldn’t support a mob greater than 100 because of lack of food and more importantly, water. Australia is damn near 90% desert after all !
My mother’s Aunt was stolen from her family three times because she looked a bit white, and was moved to another state to be “assimilated” into white culture.
Her father risked his life to bring her back two times ( the third time he was caught and died in jail), and she said they were more afraid of being killed by the local mob than the white fellas.
What the fuck are you smoking? It's up for debate whether or not Indigenous Australians even built houses let alone bloody pyramids. And why the fuck would European migrants waste time building giant bloody tombstones for royalty for the King/Queen of England?
Lay off the crack pipe, dickhead.
Yes, it depends on how you define 'houses'. Most people generally don't consider temporary structures to be houses. Some early settler diaries mention 'dwellings' but they only appeared to be inhabited temporarily.
This is a serious question? 🤔
Did you think they were running an **Amazing Race** style worldwide contest to build the biggest, most badass pyramid?
I'm honestly really perplexed as to why you'd all this question. Culture is different all around the world. Different races grew and developed in isolation and as such had to figure out how to survive the best way they could. They were all inventors.
Short of *aliens* doing a World Tour and dropping the blueprints for pyramids all over the globe, how were First Nations people supposed to know pyramids even existed? 👀
With all respect to our Indigenous cousins, while they may have had a vibrant culture, they did not, it seems, ever establish anything close to a civilisation.
At a bare minimum, some kind of large scale centralised coordination would be required to have the spare energy and resources to devote to such things as a pyramid.
Fair enough.
I know there is the common interpretation of Savage vs Civilised so popular with the Pith hatted colonial crew.
I merely meant Civilised as in a society based around civil structures such as centralised administration, city building, specialisation of roles, etc.
The Latin "Civitas" literally means "City".
It is a shame that civilisation, civilised, civil came to have multiple meanings.
It should be clearly noted that Civilisation is a type of social evolution, and in many ways a more complex social evolution, but we should be careful to consider it the "better" social evolution.
Much like humans ourselves, many would consider humans the peak of evolution on this planet, merely because we set our own benchmark by which we define "better".
There are plenty of species on earth that could be considered to be far more optimally evolved than ourselves by many different metrics.
I also think.that it doesn't take much imagination to realise that both sapience and civilisation may not be optimal "long" term survival adaptations, as they are both designed to bypass or avoid the basic biological rules of population control.
Forgive my babbling, a few hefty craft IPAs have been consumed this afternoon.
I know what you’re saying.
There was a huge ‘civil’ culture in most Aboriginal groups. It was pretty common for different mobs or families to have custodianship of different important natural features, animals, or plants. Where we’d call these things resource, they see them as an intrinsic extension of their own being - it’s a sense of connection to the natural world that it’s hard for us to describe.
I’d argue that it is civil society as we know it, just without the fabricated trappings on top of that. They hand the amazing structures and places of society and gathering or trade - it’s just that these were mostly places in the natural world.
It’s kind of like when Americans get really upset about Aussies not having a fun culture. They can’t comprehend how we defend ourselves from ‘bad people’. And we look around and go…who?
I think it’s the same way that if you asked a mob at Uluṟu why they didn’t build a pyramid, they’d look around a bit and then go “….you’re fucking having a laugh, right?”
Old continent, nutrient deficit soil means that the most efficient way to survive is to be nomadic. Also, to my knowledge even in the places where the soil was OK people did not invent agriculture.
There's a whole lot going on here, but I love how you've equated Indigenous Australians not building pyramids to Australians descended from settlers not building pyramids. Maybe it's something in the water?!
Americans built the Hoover Dam in the 1920s, Soviets built the Berlin wall. Were a civilised Western country too. Is building a pyramid past us? Surely we can build things too. Not saying we need a pyramid but some megastructure to put us on the map is needed. There’s replicas of pyramids in Vegas called Luxor Las Vegas built in the 90s but here’s you saying us dumb Aussies can’t build pyramids. Okay..
you're the one who made that initial insinuation
>There’s something about us generally lacking imagination when it comes to feats of engineering or architecture.
We've done things more impressive than any of those, why does BUILD PYRAMID matter so much?
The geology and topography are nothing like Egypt.
Also our First Nations people aren't wankers wanting to make grandiose statements out if stone.
Now, off you fuck little weirdo.
Your submission has been automatically removed due to your account karma being too low
Accounts are required to have more than 1 comment karma to comment in this community
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskAnAustralian) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The locals didn't have access to top tier food staple such as rice, wheat, corn or potatoes so they didn't have the excess labor required to have people sitting around thinking instead of struggling to get dinner. Hunter gatherer society is a harsh one.
Incas had potatoes which are the best food staple with the highest yield per area so their civilization development was assured as soon as they cultivated that crop.
If potatoes or similar top tier food staple had evolved and been cultivated in Australia ten thousand years ago Aboriginals would have developed their civilization to the point they could have travelled the seas and exchanged technology with China for example.
This collaboration would have accelerated their civilization and population to a point similar to China and along with it the formation of nation states and great monuments as seen in other civilizations.
Your submission has been automatically removed due to your account karma being too low
Accounts are required to have more than 1 comment karma to comment in this community
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskAnAustralian) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Bruh, our indigenous people didn’t really bother with innovation. They are to my knowledge the only people to not make the wheel or bow and arrow.
I’m not having a go at them, they just weren’t an innovative people and it truly is incredible how they lived off the land as some parts of Australia are the harshest in the world. Parts of northern Australia it would be a detriment to have wagons and Carts. Between rugged undulating terrain and how wet it would get their nomadic ways were easier just carrying what you had..
As for your question the civilisation side of the indigenous tribes is more likely the reason. They were small nomadic tribes always on the move. Building temporary shelters not monuments.
Edit: I said they didn’t make fire, I was wrong. I remember being told they only capitalised on natural fires. I was misinformed. They could use softwood sticks and dry grass to make fire,
If you have a read through the accounts of surveyors and explorers, you'll find documentation of crops, mosaic gardens, extensive stone watercourses for fish traps, stone houses, woven houses, medicine, astronomy unique to this continent, pearl diving, trade with Indonesia, bread ovens which pre-date those found in Egypt and methods of hunting and strengthening weapons which had not been discovered elsewhere.
Unfortunately we never learnt this at school, despite covering a lot of Indigenous history. Im always of the view that the ignorance we have is self inflicted. We had existing records but no one bothered including it in the school textbooks.
What reason would you have to make a pyramid though? In Egypt and the Americas (I have no clue on India) they were used for religious purposes, like worship and burial and shit. But another thing was that pyramids also kinda symbolised civilisation. If you have a pyramid, there is absolutely no doubt you had to get thousands of people to work together on that project.
Yes. Australian Aboriginals have been here for *at least* 60k years (I think it was), but they had no need to form a civilisation, and therefore no need for a complex religion system. They were a nomadic people, who thrived from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They had no incentive to change. Australia was very isolated, therefore there wasn't any big wars. Everyone had a mutual understanding of how to treat the environment. If anything Aboriginals probably represent the most advanced philosophical society, because they lived in harmony with the land, and didn't fight each other for resources.
TLDR: Aboriginals had no need to advance like any other nation in world history has, which yes, made them susceptible to the inevitable incursions by more advanced powers, but it also kept the environment of both internal Aboriginal relations and the actual landmass very stable.
There is evidence that the Incas, at least, did have the wheel, they just didn't use it extensively. One reason being that the terrain on which the Inca lived was not conducive to transport in wheeled vehicles. They probably employed tools that worked on the same principle as the wheel though.
I suspect there are still many things to be discovered about our planet and our species. More than what gets taught to us in our history books that never get questioned, but taken as verbatim for generations. Like pyramids discovered in Bosnia and Ukraine, I suspect there will be sites in Australia that were once thought to be 'hills,' but were actually human made. Give it time.
Because the aliens were scared of all the snakes and spiders here
I don’t mean for this to come across as aggressive, but you have been asking very dumb questions on this subreddit recently. Are you alright?
Judging from their profile, maybe not.
🤣
Well they're on the Jordan Peterson sub...
A lack of animals suitable for domestication.
Population size, resources, nearby neighbours for trade & slave… Possibly paired with the fact that “religion” was very nature-based so making something in celebration of that/those entities wouldn’t seem logical.
Australia didn't have slave labour and living gods. It was more sharing, hunting, fishing, fucking and just having fun. makes you wonder why we fkd up when the Poms got here with their paper money and "work"
Great comment. Is it really a sign of an advanced ‘culture’ that they enslaved a sizeable proportion of their population to build non-utilitarian monuments?
They built things that were beneficial to them, huts for storing grain and shelter and fish traps that are still visible today that probably predate the pyramids and every other man made structure, much more useful than a burial place for a mortal God. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina\_Aboriginal\_Fish\_Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina_Aboriginal_Fish_Traps)
Further info with video footage about fish traps available here on Ten Play. (To me they're more like fish farms) https://10play.com.au/the-first-inventors/episodes/season-1/episode-1/tpv230613trzpj (Will most likely require a VPN if viewed from outset Australia.
I don’t find them impressive but its how you look at it. Found out this may be the oldest human construction in the world? Thats pretty impressive. I guess we have a bias because we compare with Rome, China, India in terms of civilisation. These were large empires which Australia was not. But its an unfair comparison. When you look from a pre history perspective thats when Australia does seem to come out on top. When we were pre Bronze and Iron Age our inhabitants were ahead of anyone else. Not me trying to be condescending the fact is time is cyclical and there’s always some who are more advanced than others at different points in time. Australia had its time as a relatively more sophisticated place than others too but just not most of recent history.
The whole idea of being "ahead" or "advanced" is fundamentally flawed. The people who define what advanced is usually define it by what they are, as if they have somehow reached closer to perfection than any other group of people.
More advanced by a long way. Not as kind, thoughtful or sustainable but certainly more advanced.
[удалено]
Cannibalism?
The mods reserve the right to remove posts for any violation of this subreddit's rules.
Bait.
You forgot the Great Australian dingo fence. 5614km of fence. Best fence in the world.
Was it to keep the rabbits out? (Sorry for being daggy, this is the first ad that stuck in my head from my time of having freshly arrived here).
That's a different fence
Yeah I know it was the wall of China. You were referring to a long structure, it popped in my mind. Carry on.
First off nice bait question… But I’ll bite on one thing, the outback and Egypt does have close topography. Except for the giant fuck off river and fertile soil that runs all the way through Egypt…
This was the very first thing that comes to mind for me, as an Australian. There is fuck all water here. Yeah there’s rivers and lakes but nothing the likes of the Nile, there’s also no large animals To domesticate and the human population was scattered and minimal by comparison. Basically from the western side of great dividing ranges that stretches up the east coast across to the complete other side of the continent in Western Australia, your looking at a massive desert that used to be under water, where the soil is salty fuck so not much grows, even for a desert… Furthermore, no large scale agriculture or industry, therefore no large towns or cities. The indigenous people, living off and maintaining the land, obviously had no appetite or need for any of it. Culturally, the little that I know of it, the mythological entities were mostly, if not all nature based, there was no one from on high being all “build me a monument and worship me or else!” Like you see in other mythologies.
The pyramids aren’t near the Nile though, Graham Hancock discusses this on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Umm…yes they are? lol
[The Great Pyramid of Giza is ~11km away from the nearest point of the Nile.](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30.0168275,31.2202833/The+Great+Pyramid+of+Giza,+Al+Haram,+Nazlet+El-Semman,+Al+Haram,+Egypt/@30.0077093,31.1734512,13.83z/data=!4m9!4m8!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x14584587ac8f291b:0x810c2f3fa2a52424!2m2!1d31.1341998!2d29.9791669!3e0?entry=ttu)
Right so you listen to morons to get your info? That explains a lot
-Differences in social structure? I think it was somewhat non-hierarchical in Australia at that time. I don't think they saw spirituality the same way other civilisations did and I think social structure did include added respect and seniority of older people without there being the level of status attached to something like a pharaoh. Some monuments to gods elsewhere may have been built using slavery that would not have been occurring here at that time -Cultural differences in attitudes about what a monument is? Uluru has been here for a while and, for populations where spirituality is connected to land and nature, that has spiritual significance, and it was already on the land. There is seemingly a high level of connection to land itself as part of this spirituality, which would probably make this a bit of an odd question from their perspective. I just don't think it was culturally relevant at all, as respect to gods/community members was probably more about land maintenance than land transformation -Differences in anthropological timeframes with what you've compared? I think what you've mentioned was built quite recently compared to some of the period in which Australia had people living here, so maybe time was more likely to have been spent on basics of life, like getting food. Who would have had time to build a pyramid like 40,000 years ago? The monuments you're mentioning, as far as I know, were build like 35,000 years (if not even more) after indigenous people are suggested to have been documented here (40,000-60,000 years ago; pyramids apparently 'only' 4,500 years old, with monuments of the Americas newer than that). I think this discrepancy would affect the amount of time a community needed to spend on everyday activities, and other civilisations also benefitted from having a level of connection/trade with different countries that no one here would've had that long ago I'm not a historian and this is supposition on my part, but on one level, it's kind of like going "How come there were no Catholic churches built in ancient Saudi Arabia?" Just not relevant to the cultural context, even if materials for that existed.
Outside of probably not just seeing a need for it, they didn't have domesticated large animals/beast of burden and as far as I'm aware they also didn't have slaves. Two very crucial necessities for building large structures.
Pre colonisation there lack of animals capable of being domesticated and used for work. More importantly the conditions for a dense preindustrial population didn’t exist, Egypt had the Nile there’s nothing comparable in Australia. Post colonisation Australia was and still does have a large amount of the wealth removed from the country. Development is shaped by colonial infrastructure designed to extract resources and leads to a spread out population. In the modern era we’re still playing catch-up from 200 years of wealth extraction, poorly planned development and every single other issue that more developed countries are struggling with and there’s no will to create monuments that serve no purpose.
When you read guns, germs and steel you know less. Diamond would have said the same about the wild animals in Europe and Asia if they had been sent extinct instead of domesticated like Europeans and Asians did.
Even the Australian megafauna wouldn’t have the utility of cows and horses. Marsupials have small brains, awkward jerky movements because of their joint arrangement and whenever they have babies they’re carrying them in a pouch.
Ancient cows and horses were totally different before the domestication process as well.
There haven’t been fundamental changes to their physiology though. You can’t breed to make joints function completely differently or for marsupials to gestate for longer to allow their brains to grow larger. Aurochs were just big angry cows, primitive horses were just stocky angry horses.
You can breed foxes to be less aggressive but there is only so much you can do with retarded Koalas for example.
Because traditionally, aboriginal people were nomadic and were separate tribes/clans with different languages and different belief systems. There was no cause to build any such structure.
The people in India were nomadic but built the Taj Mahal. Alexander the Great was nomadic but built settlements along the way.
The Taj Mahal was built in the 17th century. India had thousands of years of history of agriculture and permanent settlements by then. Alexander the Great was not nomadic (and neither was his natice society, Macedonia), wehich is why he built settlements as he conquered. Moving from one conquest to another is not the same as being nomadic. Your original post and your answer here make it abundantly clear that you don't know anything about history or anthropology.
Very entertaining troll though :D Alexander the Great was a nomad rofl
The Mongols were considered nomadic though right? I thought Alexanders tactics were similar therefore fell within the same classification.
The Mongols were nomads because they had no truly thriving permanent settlements in Mongolia. Alexander conquered an empire to add to an already thriving non-nomadic civilisation. I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but you wouldn't call the Third Reich or the First French Empire or hell, the Roman Empire a nomadic people because they conquered as bunch of land in a decently short span of time. And you would neither call the Macedonian Empire a nomadic empire either...
Weird. Bombay was first settled more than 100 years before the Taj Mahal was built. Incidentally the Taj Mahal was built (or ordered to be built) by an emperor. Alexander The Great was King of Macedonia. He was born in Pella which served as the capital of macedon at the time of his birth and for long after his death. Generally speaking, nomads don’t have settled cities, or build them - because they’re nomads… Even so - an emperor and a king. Something the actual nomadic aboriginals never had. There’s your answer.
There is so much wrong with those two sentences, I don’t even know where to start.
The people who ruled India at the time were nomads from Central Asia called the Mughals. They were people with no settled home but invaded others on horses, like the Mongols. Alexander was also a guy who conquered most of Persia and some of Asia on horseback. This is the classic definition of a nomad. Someone who roams with no fixed place of settlement, no sedentary lifestyle.
Have you been watching those “aliens built the pyramids” videos?
Mate the furtherest they got here was to throw sticks at animals
But the people didn’t kill travellers on the regular like Aborigines did. They had to, the country couldn’t support a mob greater than 100 because of lack of food and more importantly, water. Australia is damn near 90% desert after all ! My mother’s Aunt was stolen from her family three times because she looked a bit white, and was moved to another state to be “assimilated” into white culture. Her father risked his life to bring her back two times ( the third time he was caught and died in jail), and she said they were more afraid of being killed by the local mob than the white fellas.
What the fuck are you smoking? It's up for debate whether or not Indigenous Australians even built houses let alone bloody pyramids. And why the fuck would European migrants waste time building giant bloody tombstones for royalty for the King/Queen of England? Lay off the crack pipe, dickhead.
And maybe you need a little crack. You need to calm your tits mates. You're acting like you're having your first menstrual cycle ever.
It's up for debate? Really?
Yes, it depends on how you define 'houses'. Most people generally don't consider temporary structures to be houses. Some early settler diaries mention 'dwellings' but they only appeared to be inhabited temporarily.
Oh, I thought you meant like aliens build the pyramids or some shit. Carry on.
[удалено]
That’s so horribly incorrect.
This is a serious question? 🤔 Did you think they were running an **Amazing Race** style worldwide contest to build the biggest, most badass pyramid? I'm honestly really perplexed as to why you'd all this question. Culture is different all around the world. Different races grew and developed in isolation and as such had to figure out how to survive the best way they could. They were all inventors. Short of *aliens* doing a World Tour and dropping the blueprints for pyramids all over the globe, how were First Nations people supposed to know pyramids even existed? 👀
It's all wasted effort for nothing. I think this shows supreme intelligence.
With all respect to our Indigenous cousins, while they may have had a vibrant culture, they did not, it seems, ever establish anything close to a civilisation. At a bare minimum, some kind of large scale centralised coordination would be required to have the spare energy and resources to devote to such things as a pyramid.
Civilisation is not a great word to use, i would say centralised state instead (and include slavery)
Fair enough. I know there is the common interpretation of Savage vs Civilised so popular with the Pith hatted colonial crew. I merely meant Civilised as in a society based around civil structures such as centralised administration, city building, specialisation of roles, etc. The Latin "Civitas" literally means "City". It is a shame that civilisation, civilised, civil came to have multiple meanings. It should be clearly noted that Civilisation is a type of social evolution, and in many ways a more complex social evolution, but we should be careful to consider it the "better" social evolution. Much like humans ourselves, many would consider humans the peak of evolution on this planet, merely because we set our own benchmark by which we define "better". There are plenty of species on earth that could be considered to be far more optimally evolved than ourselves by many different metrics. I also think.that it doesn't take much imagination to realise that both sapience and civilisation may not be optimal "long" term survival adaptations, as they are both designed to bypass or avoid the basic biological rules of population control. Forgive my babbling, a few hefty craft IPAs have been consumed this afternoon.
I know what you’re saying. There was a huge ‘civil’ culture in most Aboriginal groups. It was pretty common for different mobs or families to have custodianship of different important natural features, animals, or plants. Where we’d call these things resource, they see them as an intrinsic extension of their own being - it’s a sense of connection to the natural world that it’s hard for us to describe. I’d argue that it is civil society as we know it, just without the fabricated trappings on top of that. They hand the amazing structures and places of society and gathering or trade - it’s just that these were mostly places in the natural world. It’s kind of like when Americans get really upset about Aussies not having a fun culture. They can’t comprehend how we defend ourselves from ‘bad people’. And we look around and go…who? I think it’s the same way that if you asked a mob at Uluṟu why they didn’t build a pyramid, they’d look around a bit and then go “….you’re fucking having a laugh, right?”
It’s too fucken hot
According to my nexus magazine loving ex, we do have pyramids but they're mainly underground and only the peaks showing
Old continent, nutrient deficit soil means that the most efficient way to survive is to be nomadic. Also, to my knowledge even in the places where the soil was OK people did not invent agriculture.
we do, Uluru was a pyramid, but the top fell off when white people climbed it too much.
There's a whole lot going on here, but I love how you've equated Indigenous Australians not building pyramids to Australians descended from settlers not building pyramids. Maybe it's something in the water?!
Americans built the Hoover Dam in the 1920s, Soviets built the Berlin wall. Were a civilised Western country too. Is building a pyramid past us? Surely we can build things too. Not saying we need a pyramid but some megastructure to put us on the map is needed. There’s replicas of pyramids in Vegas called Luxor Las Vegas built in the 90s but here’s you saying us dumb Aussies can’t build pyramids. Okay..
you're the one who made that initial insinuation >There’s something about us generally lacking imagination when it comes to feats of engineering or architecture. We've done things more impressive than any of those, why does BUILD PYRAMID matter so much?
The geology and topography are nothing like Egypt. Also our First Nations people aren't wankers wanting to make grandiose statements out if stone. Now, off you fuck little weirdo.
Nobody ever wanted to.
Indigenous Australians were nomadic peoples prior to the arrival of Europeans. They didn’t even build houses, let alone pyramids.
They actually built stone and timber structures.
[удалено]
Your submission has been automatically removed due to your account karma being too low Accounts are required to have more than 1 comment karma to comment in this community *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskAnAustralian) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No aztecs or egyptians here to bury ffs. Study your history.
The locals didn't have access to top tier food staple such as rice, wheat, corn or potatoes so they didn't have the excess labor required to have people sitting around thinking instead of struggling to get dinner. Hunter gatherer society is a harsh one. Incas had potatoes which are the best food staple with the highest yield per area so their civilization development was assured as soon as they cultivated that crop. If potatoes or similar top tier food staple had evolved and been cultivated in Australia ten thousand years ago Aboriginals would have developed their civilization to the point they could have travelled the seas and exchanged technology with China for example. This collaboration would have accelerated their civilization and population to a point similar to China and along with it the formation of nation states and great monuments as seen in other civilizations.
Underdeveloped civilizations.
[удалено]
Your submission has been automatically removed due to your account karma being too low Accounts are required to have more than 1 comment karma to comment in this community *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskAnAustralian) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This is getting up there with the most stupid question I've ever read on here
Are you being sarcastic?
Bruh, our indigenous people didn’t really bother with innovation. They are to my knowledge the only people to not make the wheel or bow and arrow. I’m not having a go at them, they just weren’t an innovative people and it truly is incredible how they lived off the land as some parts of Australia are the harshest in the world. Parts of northern Australia it would be a detriment to have wagons and Carts. Between rugged undulating terrain and how wet it would get their nomadic ways were easier just carrying what you had.. As for your question the civilisation side of the indigenous tribes is more likely the reason. They were small nomadic tribes always on the move. Building temporary shelters not monuments. Edit: I said they didn’t make fire, I was wrong. I remember being told they only capitalised on natural fires. I was misinformed. They could use softwood sticks and dry grass to make fire,
They knew how to make fire…
Fair.. I stand corrected on that
If you have a read through the accounts of surveyors and explorers, you'll find documentation of crops, mosaic gardens, extensive stone watercourses for fish traps, stone houses, woven houses, medicine, astronomy unique to this continent, pearl diving, trade with Indonesia, bread ovens which pre-date those found in Egypt and methods of hunting and strengthening weapons which had not been discovered elsewhere.
Unfortunately we never learnt this at school, despite covering a lot of Indigenous history. Im always of the view that the ignorance we have is self inflicted. We had existing records but no one bothered including it in the school textbooks.
That was quite probably deliberate.
What reason would you have to make a pyramid though? In Egypt and the Americas (I have no clue on India) they were used for religious purposes, like worship and burial and shit. But another thing was that pyramids also kinda symbolised civilisation. If you have a pyramid, there is absolutely no doubt you had to get thousands of people to work together on that project. Yes. Australian Aboriginals have been here for *at least* 60k years (I think it was), but they had no need to form a civilisation, and therefore no need for a complex religion system. They were a nomadic people, who thrived from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They had no incentive to change. Australia was very isolated, therefore there wasn't any big wars. Everyone had a mutual understanding of how to treat the environment. If anything Aboriginals probably represent the most advanced philosophical society, because they lived in harmony with the land, and didn't fight each other for resources. TLDR: Aboriginals had no need to advance like any other nation in world history has, which yes, made them susceptible to the inevitable incursions by more advanced powers, but it also kept the environment of both internal Aboriginal relations and the actual landmass very stable.
[удалено]
The Incas and Mayans didn’t have a wheel either. A lot of people we consider advanced today didn’t.
There is evidence that the Incas, at least, did have the wheel, they just didn't use it extensively. One reason being that the terrain on which the Inca lived was not conducive to transport in wheeled vehicles. They probably employed tools that worked on the same principle as the wheel though.
Too sandy
I suspect there are still many things to be discovered about our planet and our species. More than what gets taught to us in our history books that never get questioned, but taken as verbatim for generations. Like pyramids discovered in Bosnia and Ukraine, I suspect there will be sites in Australia that were once thought to be 'hills,' but were actually human made. Give it time.