re: Who had never Trumper, Rick Santorum for idiot comment of the day?

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They were not smart, not innovative, hunted animals to extinction, and left no meaningful footprint relative to contemporary America.

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First off, to make a blanket statement about the multitudes of cultures and peoples that inhabited North America before the arrival of Europeans is impossible since these indigenous cultures were not monolithic. And again, the primary argument here is that these cultures were not all “savages.”

As it pertains to the Mississippian Indian culture, the ability of these societies to produce sustained trade has long been a hallmark of advanced cultures. Such cultures have advanced beyond simple hunter-gathering and sustenance agriculture.

Sustained commerce indicates an ability of a culture to not only produce excess goods but to develop a systematic society that has the ability to store, transport and trade that excess production for some form of material profit. Such cultures require a relatively high degree of complex social structures and settlement hierarchies that are the hallmarks of civilization across cultures.

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They stacked a bunch of dirt, swapped pelts and hunted animals into extinction while people were building pyramids, discovering complex mathematics and establishing ideas of philosophy, democracy and theology that are drawn from TODAY.

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