Recent content by Oba

Have a look at fire-stick farming; not true agriculture, but rather close.

Perhaps New Guinea is a good place to a start? It's tropical, mountainous and it's population goes back at least 60,000 years ago; even the then rather colder Highlands may well have been populated by 50,000 years ago. Furthermore, Australia was connected by land at the time, and it was...

Here's a source: And here's another source.

Islam could have easily been stopped by the Axumites conquering Mecca in the Year of the Elephant. Also, its size be significantly reduced if the Sassanids &/or Byzantines succeed in stopping the Arab armies. Confucianism could be ruined by a more successful Burning of Books and Burying of...

Bitterness of oak acorns is not the problem IMO actually: After all, they were a staple throughout the Californian Cultural Area. All acorns really need is water leaching to get out the tannins and cooking them; besides, potatoes, all but one species of yam, manioc, fonio, taro and arguably...

Living in California myself, if faster growing varieties of oaks could be domesticated, a Californian civilization based around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Valley seems completely plausible. If you want to write a TL on the subject, I have a good amount of knowledge on the subject of...

What about the New Guinean Sepik and Fly Rivers? New Guinea had very early agriculture, perhaps even the earliest agriculture in the world, predating even Mesopotamia; see Kuk Swamp. As for Amazonia, it does seem a bit odd that civilization thrived so much in the relatively inhospitable Andes...

Let's say they get all of Greece, which is quite plausible, given that the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest empire in the Ancient World. And even if Sparta keeps fighting, if Athens is raised it would be too late and completely futile, IMO.

The title says it all: What would be the world look like if the Persians under Darius I had successfully conquered the Greek city-states and made Greece into a satrapy? Could this mean that the West (or what arises in Europe in its place) become overall and customarily more open to new ideas and...

Exactly what I was going to say: By the 19th century, it was pretty much inevitable that the cotton gin was going to be improved by someone, even if no credit was going to be given to the East Indians who invented it.

Actually, copper sulfide smelting dates all the way back to the Chavín in the Andes. And the Inka worked precious metals and smelted not only copper, tin, arsenic, lead and alloys such as tin and arsenical bronze or electrum and tumbaga but they were even the first civilization in the world to...

@zoomar: I would like to point out that the Mesoamericans were sociopolitically quite decentralized compared to the Andeans: At the time of OTL contact, only the Tarascans really had what could be called an empire. The Maya, Nahua, Mixtecs and others were really just small kingdoms or...

Firstly, I have to say that, IMHO, the Inka and the Aztecs are not really a fair match, with the Inka having many decisive advantages in both hard and soft power: The Aztecs had a loose hegemony ruled by fear, with only three cities, if extremely advanced cities, certainly superior overall to...

A derivative of the Fiat G.91 might be a good, low-cost light fighter, especially for small and/or poor countries in the Western Block: Columbia, Duvalier's Haïti (assuming the arms embargoes on Latin American states could be relaxed or abolished) and Mbobutu's Zaïre spring to mind.

I would dispute that planned economies are less innovative than market economies, at least when one factors in the use-value of their inventions. For example, in a planned economy - which, as Killer300 pointed out, need not use a command system like the OTL USSR did (by contrast, the...