I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel. I haven’t read Collapse.

There were only a few sample pages of Collapse in mhr’s link. In one of them Diamond points out the wave of extinctions that followed modern man as we moved into any new area of the world. Australia, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, New Zealand, Madagascar, the Pacific Islands…we met animals unequipped by evolution to deal with this new super predator, and we wiped them out. Not that that was news to me, but it does bear on this point.

I have no patience with all the scholars who insist that the entry of paleo-Siberian-Americans into North America only accidentally coincided with the extinction of all that mega-fauna. It must have been something else. Asteroids or new diseases or the same kind of periodic ice age warm swing that had left the big beasts unmolested the last dozen times it happened. Bull. Amerindians frequently destabilized their environments in one way or another. Slash and burn agriculture not the least of them.

I’m not trying to bash them. In a lot of ways I respect the American Indians. Were they good woodsmen? Hell yes. Their ten year olds could put any of us to shame when it came to primitive survival. Could they fight? Bet your arse. Did they take care of their own? Sure, as long as you understand that their own was limited to the local tribe and current allies.

But I see no point in foisting virtues upon them that history shows they lacked. For example, New Age wisdom has it that the Indians were far more spiritual than we fallen children of cities and machines. I suppose that may be so. But I’ll get my spiritual advice from cultures that don’t practice cannibalism, or make a sport and religious ritual out of slowly torturing captives to death.