>I'm a little baffled by the idea that native Americans were unable to develop
>mobile military units based on horses.
The establishment answer is that horses were "introduced" to the "new world" by the Spaniards. But what about the numerous fossils of horses (plus elephants, camels, "superbisons," and various giant predators)? The establishment answer is that they were all exterminated by bands of proto-Indians arriving across a "land bridge" over the Baring Strait. But horses and camels are easily domesticable (capture the young of a slain parent and raise them in captivity). The proto-Indians must have been incredibly stupid as well as incredibly powerful and vicious hunters....
The reasonable and obvious alternative is that all this fauna, with the lucky exception of a few bisons, were exterminated by a giant catastrophe some thirty centuries or so before the arrival of the Spaniards. Native American "legends" are replete with memories of such a catastrophe, whose causes were remembered, as was the case everywhere else in the world, as being of celestial (extraterrestrial) origin.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
Shane Mage
"immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living their deaths, dying their lives"
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 62
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64