Why did the Mayans never make it past the Stone Ages? They had advanced math and astronomy...

Why did the Mayans never make it past the Stone Ages? They had advanced math and astronomy, but they never got that whole metallurgy thing down. Were all the nearby Zinc and Copper deposits just shit?
Or was Obsidian too good to give up? Gotta admit, the macuahuitl seems pretty badass.

>the macuahuitl seems pretty badass
Macuahuitl is not too durable. But it blow is more dangerous than any sword.

Macuahitl is mexica
Besides obsidian can be sharper than any steel blade

Daily reminder that metallurgy reached mesoamerica via Western Mexico, which received it from Northwestern South America which received it from CHILE

It was a powerful weapon.
Pedro de Morón was a very good horseman, and as he charged with three other horsemen into the ranks of the enemy the Indians seized hold of his lance and he was not able to drag it away, and others gave him cuts with their broadswords, and wounded him badly, and then they slashed at the mare, and cut her head off at the neck so that it hung by the skin, and she fell dead.[15]

They have swords of this kind — of wood made like a two-handed sword, but with the hilt not so long; about three fingers in breadth. The edges are grooved, and in the grooves they insert stone knives, that cut like a Toledo blade. I saw one day an Indian fighting with a mounted man, and the Indian gave the horse of his antagonist such a blow in the breast that he opened it to the entrails, and it fell dead on the spot. And the same day I saw another Indian give another horse a blow in the neck, that stretched it dead at his feet.

DAS RITE

All Indian cultures originate from Peru

...

Ok, so looks like they had Bronze, but why did they never develop it passed that? Just bad geography?

>unironically believing the horsechop meme
Bhahahahahhahaha, whiter than you Pedro

Nigga, the Mayans had mines of obsidian, which is a glass that is sharp on the molecular level thanks to the way it fractures. It cutting off a horse's head isn't really a big shock.

Mayans were more advanced than england in the 1500s.

If you mean pre iberian mayans then idk.

It never did that you moron, also nice of you to fraise your reply so weasely.

dude, why do you keep posting your face?

Mayans didn't have metal weapons horses and guns

Mayans had metal horses and weapons in the 1500s.

They didn't need metallurgy, they had already crushed most of the other tribes and controlled their immediate territory.
Most technological advances are made thanks to war and the need to be more advanced than your enemy.

and your mother

DING DING DING

He already said horses

>metal horses
What?

SUPERIOR MAPUCHE METALLURGY

This.

>being lucky enough to end up on the same continent as horses is technological advancement

So, were they just too advance for their own good, that it ironically halted further advancement or something?

>Mapuche
>metallurgy

Are you retarded?

ancient metal was only good for either killing or being shiny. obviously they didn't need it for killing and they had so much gold that they didn't need it for shinies

that macahuitl is shit, the blades need to be small like razor blades so you can replace them.

The americas had horses too, but they were hunted to extinction.

Americas has horses and has had tgem since 1493.

Yeah, I noticed that actual macuahitl weren't as elaborate; the filename even points out this one is a ceremonial one, so it's not meant to be practical.
Real ones apparently looked more like this.

The horses the Americas had were too small to be ridden on anyways.

>While the extinctions around the late Pleistocene saw the end to mammoths, giant sloths, horses and the like in the Americas, the extinction rate of North American mammals actually reached its highest level some six million years ago, resulting in the demise of about 60 genera. Several species of horses were driven to extinction at that time. Not so long ago, there was no evidence of an overlap between North American horse extinction and the arrival of humans, let alone evidence of their hunting horses. There is now clear evidence that mankind hunted North American horses but were they doing so in numbers that made a difference? It is a question that may never be answered. Evidence also suggests horses were originally domesticated, not just for riding, but also to provide food, including milk. “It’s hard to see this as one of those things where a single piece of evidence will make it obvious what happened,” Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, told National Geographic. “The phenomenon that people are trying to explain is not something that happened in one place at one time. It happened across the globe, at different times on different continents. I think that there are clearly multiple factors involved.”

also more fragile

just in case you're not trolling or maybe because i'm very bored:
there isn't such a thing as "technological progression ages" like in your vidjagayms. many "civilizations" were in one age while the neighbor was in a more "advanced" age: the resulting trade/stealing of knowledge made them advance together and the arms race made them push the limits of their wits further
american people didn't have that sort of competition. that's how you find the wheel (such a great technological improvement in the east) used as a mere toy among their tombs, because they couldn't find a better use for it and there was no arms race pressuring them to do so
so while anglos and jutes would use cow piss and prayers on their head wounds the mayans did open brain surgery, and while the mayans used strongwood plows that took lots of work to till the land, the anglos and jutes would use nice steel scythes and hoes to create gigantic farm fields. it's just how it is

I hope that you are just shitposting

Sup Forums discusses the development of the ancient noble maya and azteca peoples:
>their horses were too small to ride
>they had no need of metallurgy
>Conquistadors targeted the warriors with the macuahitl first because their killing power was feared and respected- they could slice through any iberian steel with a simple verticle slash\
>elongated foreheads were a sign of nobility, they represented the mayan peoples' long history as kings

Sup Forums discusses the development of various horrid negro savages:
>y they smel so bad eww
>they strech lip ??
>roman empire: prduced steel africans: no steel only steal hahahahaha
>too stupid to invent horse haha nigger

hmmm really gets this old mutt's noggin goin hmm

I wonder why......

nig

what are you trying to accomplish with this comment

Because here are a lot of latin americans who know about the natives, while the amount of Africans here is low, so all the threads about them is a bunch of Europeans saying Sup Forums garbage

divide and conquer?
we never discuss african cultures, there's no actual african poster to troll him with

>being this ignorant

please, don't reply to my comments

Enlighten me then instead of using the flechita implicadora

uh ok sure buddy

Their methods never really developed like it did in the Eurasian and African continents.
And without contact via the silk road they were sort of left to figure it out themselves. It's not a very inherent art.
So obsidian was just their preferred.

The Americas had their people wiped out by disease, and battles with the Europeans.
Meanwhile Africa just sold us their dumbest and weakest slaves.

Strangely enough, despite the Americans getting a shittier end of the stick, Europeans at least put more stock in their value as people.

but africans wuz kaingz, everybody knows this

it's all YAKUB fault

Mapuches were not the indians that were working on metal. Metallurgy in the araucania wasnt a thing before the spaniards, the metal they had they got from trade.

I see, I didn't know when the mapuches started working with metal, my bad, thanks

not him, you can reply to me whenever you want

>american people didn't have that sort of competition. that's how you find the wheel (such a great technological improvement in the east) used as a mere toy among their tombs, because they couldn't find a better use for it and there was no arms race pressuring them to do so

You know that's cuz roads can't really be done in a lot of places there at the time?
Arms race is a total meme. It's frequent trade with other entity that spreads innovation.

it's half one and half another
most innovations didn't come out from creativity alone: they usually came around via trade (or stealing). i already mentioned that
arms race however is a thing, even if it's not necessarily tools of war what they invent (for example the space race had the threat of weaponizing space and the Moon)

...

They had metal, but they never developed them beyond some toys.

what you see on the pic is jewelry though

Which are effectively toys. They never made any kind of weapons or armor out of it.
Being ignorant to history, I wanna know why the Europeans didn't use Obsidian too, seeing how sharp it is. It's brittle, sure, but against peasants, it's gotta be worth something, right?

i believe the ones near the ore used it, but i'm too lazy to check "cro-magnon obsidian tools tomb location"
it really depended what was nearby. some say the first iron ores were "star stones" or the lodes found in bogs, nobody broke the earth to get them until they were desperate to get more raw material

>They never made any kind of weapons or armor out of it
they did tho

>As soon as the inhabitants of Guacasualco (Present-day Gulf of Mexico) and the neighbouring districts had learnt that we offered our goods for barter, they brought us all their golden ornaments, and took in exchange green glass beads, on which they set a high value. Besides ornaments of gold, every Indian had with him a bronze axe, which was very highly polished, with the handle curiously carved, as if to serve equally for an ornament as for the field of battle.
- Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Chapter XVI

>Cortes issued orders to all the townships which lay in the vicinity of Texcoco, and were in alliance with us, for each of them to furnish him with 8000 bronze points for our arrows, to be made after the model of our Spanish ones, of which some were sent them for that purpose.
>He allowed them eight days for the making and delivery of these; and indeed both the arrows and the bronze points arrived at Tezcuco in the time specified. Our stock of these now consisted of 50,000 pieces, and the arrow points made by these people were even better than those we brought from Spain.
- Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Chapter CXLVII

>The Lords wear over everything garments like short jackets, which with us are of chain mail, but theirs are of gold and silver gilt. These feather garments are in proportion to their weapons, for neither arrows nor darts pierce them, but are thrown back without making any wound, and even with [22] swords it is difficult to penetrate through them.
- Chronicle of the The Anonymous Conquistador, Chapter IV

hard to say, people used to think it was because of low population but there's now evidence to suggest there were way more natives than we thought, maybe because there was less organized warfare? steel isnt really necessary to grow corn and smoke crack

...

This, connections with other civilizations goes a long way, simply because you have larger numbers of potential innovators and access to a wider variety of resources and environments to facilitate innovation. It’s the same reason why the most primitive African societies were all in the deep interior of the continent while all the most advanced were on the coasts.

The Maya did use obsidian swords

THIS Aztecs often used bronze axes as tools and they were commonly found in most households of their era. As for Mayas specifically their access to bronze probably wasn't as plentiful as that of the Aztecs in the post-classic who received it as tribute from the Huastecs and sometimes traded with the Tarascans. The Maya did have bronze tools in some amount available at their peak, in the Classic period, before the collapse of their civilization.

This.

The Mayans and central americans definetely knew how to mold metals. The spanish spoke very enthusiastically about their jewelry gold and other metal jewerly.

Metals never made it to warfare, for reason.

>Romans didn't need steam machines they already crushed most of the other tribes and controlled their immeadiate territory.

>Why did the Mayans never make it past the Stone Ages?
For the same reason Romans didn't have make it to space era despite being capable of many remarkable feats. You'd need Greek Science, Hindu-arabic numerals, Newtonian mechanics and a long etc. of contributions of a world with cultural exchange. Amerindians had to develop maths, philosophy, laws, engineering, architecture, writting, metallurgy, etc. all by themselves. Romans for example got steel from Mesopotamians, writting from Phoenicians, philosophy from Greeks, ships from Egyptians, etc.

>Romans didn't need steam machines they already crushed most of the other tribes and controlled their immeadiate territory.
to be fucking honest ancient greeks already had rudimentary steam engines that used for research only
the whole steam engine thingie wouldn't take off until much later when better furnaces were invented
it's like how there were electric cars in 1867 already but never took off until now that we have better batteries