• Wrench@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 months ago

    Sure, but the context was that one person asserted that Pheonix was a terrible place to place to have a permanent settlement because of heat and drought, and someone else refuted with an “Ackchyually” style response.

    If the native people relocated regularly to avoid heat and drought, then that strengthens the first assertion that it’s a bad place to support a permanent population.

    But again, I don’t know the actual habits of these specific natives. Maybe they weren’t nomadic and found ways to survive where Pheonix now stands. I asked because I’m curious to the history.

    • w2tpmf@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      They survived by digging a canal system to bring water from rivers far away. Those same canals are what feeds Phoenix it’s water a milenia later. We just added cement to them.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          That level of agriculture is nothing compared to what civilizations like the Aztecs, who figured out how to grow crops in the middle of a lake, and the Inca, who figured out how to freeze-dry crops they grew on landscaped, terraced mountainsides.

          The Maya were also really excellent at hydraulic engineering out of necessity because there were no lakes or rivers in much of their domain.

          And then there’s the plant we call corn or maize today. This is what it started as (teosinte) before people in Mexico started selectively breeding it over thousands of years:

          People really need to understand that ‘stone age’ (or bronze age in the case of the Inca) does not actually mean they were unable to understand how to do really complicated things. People look at an expertly-knapped mesolithic hand axe and think they could do it themselves in 20 minutes with any rock they picked up.