Contrary to the titling this is not intended as some faggy dissertation. I am sick of using shit from Europe. Even shit from Asia, well depending on how you look at that.
Something I said (on 600 club) made me think about Indigenous North American tribes and why they differed from their southern brethren.
Northern tribes like; Inuit, Navajo, whatever the totem pole ones are called, Cherokee, Seminole, Iroquois, Algonquin, and the like all had beliefs centered around harmony with nature. A shade of deism in which nature and all its animals and spirits are acting as the divine. One of balance and minimizing impact. Nature as god.
As you venture south the same people (essentially) formed great societies, complete with pantheons. Maya, Aztec, Inca, Toltec, like their northern ancestoral kin share remarkably similar, yet brutal (by current standards) beliefs of Animal spirits, and also cutting heads off of people for one reason or another. The further into the desert you go the more about water that gets.
What about North vs South changes?
There is only one answer in my mind, amount of arable land/usable space and access to resources.
The working Idea here is:
Authoritative gods arise when an area exceeds empathetic limitations (Dunbar's Number) and/or environmental obstacles or geography funnels migration towards limited resources.
In the south you have less grasslands or room for a sparse distribution. You have a lot of jungle, less clear space, and a shit load more activity geologically.
Like how the first civilizations arose in the "cradle of civilization" because the savanna dried into the Sahara and Arabian Deserts. The need to be near water led to all those civilizations around the Tigres, Euphrates, and Nile river. Arable land existed in a really really confined area.
In response elaborate beliefs arise when things such as strangers become relevant. A self developed remedy of humans was to create pantheons, guidlines, or do what Hammurabi did.
Likewise I see a similar, albeit far wetter thing happening in Central and South America. A different set of reasons like the jungle, along with how the sadistic geography of Central America funneled their migratory advance and gave the world first The Olmec, then The Mayan, and then many other civilizations following suit as they spread into South America.
** Also worth noting are the several tribes that resisted civilization, usually going into the most inhospitable parts of the rainforest. Many remaining uncontacted to this day, and protected by law from ever being interfered with.
The overall crux being, pre-colonial civilizations failed to form in North America because it wasn't necessary and empathetic limitations were never exceeded.
Another boring topic from myself.
Thoughts?
** Contextual Definition of civilization - Society structured around a disambiguous ideology and centralized point of population or capital.
